Love
Notes
Transcript
Love
Love
1st week we discussed “Hope”
What do we hope for?
Perfected Fellowship with God
What do we hope in?
the person of Jesus Christ
What do we base our hope on?
the 1st Advent culminating in the resurrection
What is the result of our hope?
Sanctification
2 Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is. 3 And everyone who has this hope fixed on Him purifies himself, just as He is pure.
Peace
Where the basis of the concept of peace is restored relationship provided in the first advent that reaches perfection in the second advent. Hence the pronouncement of Luke 2:14 provided:
14 “Glory to God in the highest, And on earth peace among men with whom He is pleased.”
and the title provided in Isa 9.6:
6 For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; And the government will rest on His shoulders; And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.
The Prince of Restored Relationship. Peace provided for us now in restored relationship through the forgiveness of sins and in the future in perfected fellowship under the reign of the king, Jesus the Messiah.
Today we look at Love. Love is the word that we use to try and explain why all of this happened.
16 We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.
Let’s pray.
Few terms are as familiar to the world as love, yet few terms are used in such a broad manner of expression.
Websters gives 17 definitions of the word love, and that is only as a noun.
What are things you love?
Love God
Love Spouse
Love Kids
Love Parents
But you can also
Love pie
Love a team
Love a book
Love a movie
Love Fall
So how do we define love as an aspect of celebrating advent?
Before we go farther I’d like to begin with the end in mind and give you a concluding thought for today:
Love is a measure of value, significance
It is a statement of worth
With that lets follow our prior studies and turn to some familiar passages and a study of the words.
5 “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
18 ‘You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself; I am the Lord.
12 Hatred stirs up strife, But love covers all transgressions.
29 Jesus answered, “The foremost is, ‘Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is one Lord; 30 and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ 31 “The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
13 But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.
16 We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.
Before we go too far with all of the verses we know about love, lets pause and look at the words used in both testaments. We cannot possibly fit a comprehensive word study of “love” into a single sermon. There are over 500 occurrences of the English rendering “love” in Scripture. If you include all of the lemmas used for love and all of their variations, there are nearly 1,000 uses. So let’s take a look at some high level items and see what can we learn about love without getting lost in the nuance.
Two predominant words in Greek
Lazarus
36 So the Jews were saying, “See how He loved him!”
Upper Room
27 for the Father Himself loves you, because you have loved Me and have believed that I came forth from the Father.
Jesus’ words to the church of Laodicea
19 ‘Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline; therefore be zealous and repent.
Sermon on the Mount
44 “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
Lazarus
5 Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.
On Unity in Christ
4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved),
Primarily 2 Hebrew words:
ahav - love, friend, beloved
Abraham and Isaac
2 He said, “Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you.”
First occurrence of the word ‘love’ in Scripture
So it is first used as a description by God of a father’s love for his son
God calls Abraham to take the thing that he “loves” as an offering of worship to God
dod - beloved, lover
It is often translated Uncle and the root is used in the word for Aunt
Predominantly used in Song of Solomon - 39 times in 8 chapters
Give an indication as to what the book is about
2 “May he kiss me with the kisses of his mouth! For your love is better than wine.
Leads to a Woe Passage similar to what we went through in Habakkuk
1 Let me sing now for my well-beloved A song of my beloved concerning His vineyard. My well-beloved had a vineyard on a fertile hill.
Both of these words are translated as φιλεω and αγαπαω in the LXX (along with some other phrases)
This means all of these words have a range of meaning, that is not particularly corollary to our New Testament understanding
Given the breadth of the term love, we cannot possible cover all of the differences and nuances in the words mentioned. In fact, most studies of the word love are given to the differences between the terms used. But before we look at the differences, we need to look at the similarities and understand the overlap. That is the focus of our study today.
Lets begin by recognizing that authors use multiple terms
Choice Implies Meaning
I ______ bacon.
- love
- like
We already looked at Solomon’s use of ‘dod’ in Song of Solomon 1:2. In the very next verse, we find ‘ahav’
3 “Your oils have a pleasing fragrance, Your name is like purified oil; Therefore the maidens love you.
Isaiah does the same, we saw in 5.1 earlier the use of dod in “beloved”
8 For I, the Lord, love justice, I hate robbery in the burnt offering; And I will faithfully give them their recompense And make an everlasting covenant with them.
We see the same thing in that Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Proverbs, Esther, Samuel, Deuteronomy and others use both terms. So it is clear in the Old Testament that we see an overlap of usage.
If we go to the New Testament we see the same thing.
We’ve looked at 1 Corinthians 13, the chapter on love, using ‘αγαπαω’
22 If anyone does not love the Lord, he is to be accursed. Maranatha.
We looked at Jesus’ words to the church in Laodicea in Rev 3.19 seeing φιλεω
To the church at Philadelphia
9 ‘Behold, I will cause those of the synagogue of Satan, who say that they are Jews and are not, but lie—I will make them come and bow down at your feet, and make them know that I have loved you.
The gospel of Matthew holds the same parallels:
αγαπαω:
24 “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.
φιλεω:
5 “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.
We see this in Mark, Luke, and John as well.
So beyond the overlap of uses, let’s zero in on an author and see if there is overlap of meaning.
John uses the word love more than any other in Scripture:
All Lemmas we’ve looked at today
The English word “love”
Taking the English, the author John accounts for roughly 20% of the uses of “love” in the Bible.
So let’s zero in on John and see if we can find some overlap of meaning:
αγαπαω
35 “The Father loves the Son and has given all things into His hand.
φιλεω
20 “For the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that He Himself is doing; and the Father will show Him greater works than these, so that you will marvel.
So we see the Father both φιλεω and αγαπαω loves the Son.
αγαπαω
5 Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus.
φιλεω
3 So the sisters sent word to Him, saying, “Lord, behold, he whom You love is sick.”
We see that Jesus expresses love of others
αγαπαω
23 Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him.
φιλεω
27 for the Father Himself loves you, because you have loved Me and have believed that I came forth from the Father.
We see that Jesus expresses love from God and love for Jesus as both φιλεω and αγαπαω
So we’ve seen that John uses both of these terms, φιλεω and αγαπαω for relationships of the Father and the Son, the Father to people, the Son to people, and people to the Son and thereby the Father. In essence, for John, every direction of relationship shares an aspect with these two terms used for love.
So what does this mean?
All of the uses we have looked at have been verbs. As such, they all have a subject and an object.
Someone that loves, and then someone or something that is the recipient of that.
This seems a fairly simple observation, something you knew walking in here today, but it holds significant value in interpreting the text.
There is a subject
There is an object
The object can be a person or a thing
Reception doesn’t matter
Whether the love is accepted or not is inconsequential to the definition of love
39 “The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
The neighbor’s response to that, holds no bearing on our commandment to love.
As such, the only excuse to not love your neighbor, begins and ends with you. It’s not a “them” problem.
Now I want to circle back to what I said at the beginning, because I think it helps.
Love is a measure of value, significance
What does this mean? It means we recognize a spectrum of love and interpret where it fits on the spectrum by context.
We deal with this all the time in English. We understand the range of meaning in English, even though they are the same word “love”.
When someone says they love bacon, we know that’s not the same thing as someone who loves their pet pig.
When someone says they love their mother or father, we know that is not the same thing as how they love their favorite t-shirt
When someone loves their spouse, we recognize this as different than their love of their home.
So in English, how do we understand the range of meaning, when we use the word love?
We recognize and assign value
The truth is, we love things that hold high value to us.
Value is a measure of significance
We love things that we deem significant, things we deem worthy
So what does that say about things we do not love?
What does that say about Jesus’ death on the cross?
16 We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.
Why would Jesus do this?
31 but so that the world may know that I love the Father, I do exactly as the Father commanded Me. Get up, let us go from here.
3 This is good and acceptable in the sight of God our Savior, 4 who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.
1 Jesus spoke these things; and lifting up His eyes to heaven, He said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify Your Son, that the Son may glorify You,
13 In Him, you also, after listening to the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation—having also believed, you were sealed in Him with the Holy Spirit of promise, 14 who is given as a pledge of our inheritance, with a view to the redemption of God’s own possession, to the praise of His glory.
Jesus did this as a demonstration of His love in order to glorify the Father. And in this the Father has glorified the Son.
Love is the nature, the character of the Trinity
27 God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.
God created us, valuable. God created us purposely. He has inscribed His love on us in the death and resurrection of His Son, Jesus.
Jesus, in love, sought to glorify the Father through obedience, by offering salvation to the world.
So what are we to do?
If I asked you what was the chapter on love in the Bible you would probably say 1 Cor 13, the common wedding passage. Note, that chapter is in the context of spiritual gifts and Christian living. Regardless, that is not the supreme chapter on love in Scripture.
1 Jn 4 uses “love” 27 times. That’s significantly more than any other chapter of the Bible.
7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9 By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him.
10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
Skipping down a ways
19 We love, because He first loved us. 20 If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.
21 And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also.
You see, love is challenging. It calls us to recognize value that is not always apparent. You see we don’t always reflect God’s image well; we don’t always show His significance, the value that He has placed on us. As such it can be hard love when we don’t recognize value. Relationships and people are messy and hurtful.
19 We love, because He first loved us.
But don’t miss what we just read in 1 John 4:19, that our love of others comes from our love of God. If you are struggling to love someone, if you are struggling to recognize someone’s value, run into loving God. You’re not going to will yourself into loving someone. In loving God, you will begin to see God’s significance, God’s value in others. And you will not be able to help but love them.
Let’s Pray
21 And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also.
