Sermon Tone Analysis

Good afternoon!

I hope that everyone is doing well today.

Today we begin a new series that I am calling Love Well Love Right.

It is going to be a six part series, beginning today with a look at the nature and source of love.

My hope through this series is that when we are done we have not only a better understanding of what true, and righteous, and good love looks like.

But my hope is that we all become better lovers.

Lovers of God and Lovers of one another.

Why is a series on love so important or even needed.

Unfortunately our world, I believe, has caused love to become something that it was never meant to be.

In fact today love has been so twisted by humanity that it often times does more harm than actual good.

But before we can get to defining what love is I think it is necessary to first understand how things went so terribly wrong.

Then we can begin to see the solution to the love problem that our world faces today.

So, let’s begin with a contrast between the love of God and the love of humanity.

You see I believe that I can make a very strong argument that all love that is experienced within this world flows from God and God alone.

Now, I understand that that is a very strong statement to make.

And I suspect some of you here today are not quite certain I am right on this one.

So let’s start with the argument I am assuming some of you might make at this moment in order to prove me wrong on this one.

Well, we see people all over this world even unbelievers, in fact even professing Satanists perform acts of love.

And you would be completely correct in making that statement.

Yet, again I would state that the source of that love is God and God alone.

Now, some of this flows from my view of humanity.

In the book of Genesis God created all things and when he had finished creating he stepped back looked upon His handiwork and said “it is good.”

All of creation including mankind was good at that single moment in time.

But then this unfortunate incident occured just a couple of chapters later in the book of Genesis, and in Genesis chapter three Satan sneaks into the garden of Eden and tempts Eve to take and eat of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Well, unfortunately Eve takes the fruit and convinces Adam to join her and they both eat of the one thing that God had told them not to eat.

But, even prior to this God had given a command to Adam to guard the garden and by extension Eve.

By failing to guard and protect the garden from Satan and then eating of the tree of the knowledge of both good and evil all of mankind, all of humanity, that means each and every human that has ever breathed the breath of air fell into what we today call sin.

And the curse of sin, ever since, has tainted all of creation.

But, particularly mankind.

Prior to this moment that we call the fall not a single human had known neither death nor sin.

Now through the sin of Adam all of mankind will now know both sin and death.

And it is the fall of humanity that informs my view of mankind.

You see at that moment our very nature changed.

And we went from righteous loving humans to humans cursed with what is called a sin nature.

Our very nature changed and now our first inclination is not righteousness, it is not love.

Rather our first inclination is to sin, and it is towards hatred.

Just look around and you can see the hate filled acts that so many perform and even at times in the very name of love.

You see I don’t believe that mankind since the fall is truly capable of love in the manner that God originally intended.

You see each one of us has been touched by the curse of sin and that includes our ability to actually love well and to love right.

And so I would argue that when true love is truly seen within this world.

The source of that love is God and God alone.

The source of love is God

I fully believe that part from the Father who is in heaven love would not exist within this fallen and broken world.

But it does.

In fact I would argue that the love that we do see and that we do experience daily is proof that there is a God.

And that our God, our Father who is in heaven, loves us His children very much.

And so when we see someone who does not believe in God or worships someone or something other than the one true God act in a loving manner.

What we are actually seeing is the grace and mercy of our God expressed through that person as love.

We call this God’s common grace, because it is a grace that is shown to and through all of God’s creation.

It is common to all of mankind.

And we are so blessed with these moments because in those moments we are given a glimpse of the very character of God.

His attributes.

That which makes up and defines God.

It is Gods character to love that which he has created.

It is a part of what defines who He is in relation to His creation.

In relation to each one of us here today.

The character of God is love

Not much different than the love that parents instantly have for a new born child.

It is a moment that is unfortunately impossible to understand until one experiences the joy and overwhelming love that one has the moment they look into the face of their new born child.

The pure love of God that was placed within each of us at our creation is experienced in that moment perfectly.

It is in that moment I believe that we come closest to knowing the heart of God towards us His children.

It is in moments like this that we begin to see who God truly is.

It is not that God IS LOVE.

Right, but rather it is that God loves.

That’s what is meant by the statement God is love.

All that is within him loves perfectly all the time.

This is who our God is.

This is who Jesus is.

In 1 John 4 verses seven through eight we read.

Right here right now in this verse is everything that I have been stating summed up in only thirty-five words.

It took me fifteen minutes to lay a foundation though so that we might fully understand what John meant when he wrote these words.

We might say that God is the first lover.

He loved so much that He chose to create each and every single one of us so that we might have a special relationship with Him.

So that we might know His love.

And when we come to know His love, His unfailing love.

We will in an instant be born again by the love of of God.

And in that moment and many more we will come to know God.

Because God loves us His children and so He wants us to know the love of our Father who is in heaven.

One of the difficulties that we particularly have in the english speaking world is that we only have one word for Love that describes so many different realities.

From emotions, to actions, to understandings that we have, to various relationships that we experience.

All of these can be described with the singular word love.

And often times not with the same meaning.

For instance the love that I have for the following people is all similar and at the same time all different.

Autumn my wife, Alyssa and Gabe my children, Shirley and Garey my parents, and all of you who are here that I call my friends.

I love all.

But the word means different things for each relationship.

This is only one aspect of the word love that makes this difficult.

One of these difficulties is that we use this one word to describe both emotions as well as actions.

How can the two be the same thing.

It is because our acts of love are born out of our emotional love towards one another.

And God the Father understood this perfectly.

Why?

Because he is love.

And so he loves perfectly.

And Gods ultimate act of love towards us his children was revealed through what we call “The Cross.”

God’s Love is Revealed through the Cross

If you remember I started todays sermon not actually describing love.

But rather I began by discussing a problem that we all carry.

And that problem is sin.

All of us fell into a nature towards sin that day that Adam fell.