This Is Love

Let’s talk about dogs and cats for a few minutes as we begin this morning.

Many of you know that we have a cat named Luna at home. This is not what I would have wished for, although Annette would say I was the one who decided to give Luna a home.

She’d been turned over to an animal rescue group for reasons we didn’t fully understand at the time. Now that she’s peed on most of the living room furniture, though, the situation’s a little more clear.

But on the day Annette’s daughter, Desiree, brought Luna to meet us, we didn’t know any of that. What I knew at that time was that Luna was beautiful, that she was silky-soft, and that she took an immediate liking to Annette.

I’ve wanted another dog since not long after our beloved Inky died more than 15 years ago, but I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that we’re not getting a dog.

So, we keep getting defective cats. Cats with special needs. Or simply cats that ARE special and they know it — like Luna.

She’s complicated. And that’s very frustrating for me, because, until I met Annette, I’d only ever had dogs, and loving a dog is about as UNcomplicated as anything can be.

I’ve never once, for instance, had a dog turn down scratches. I’ve never had to go looking for a dog when I got home from work. And I’ve never had a dog come to me for attention, only to turn and hiss at me when I tried to give it.

But all that pretty well describes my relationship with this cat, in particular.

And I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as I try to figure out how to get this Luna to allow me to love her.

I’ve long thought that God gave us dogs as pets so we could see what unconditional love looks like. But recently I’ve come to conclude that He gave us cats as pets to teach us something about love, too.

Here’s my conclusion: God gave us dogs to show us how He wants us to love him. Dogs trust their people. Dogs want to be around their people. And they long to show their people how much they love them.

This is how God wants us to love Him — unconditionally, without regard to circumstances, in good times and bad times, and with complete trust.

But cats are a different story. Cats want to love and be loved on their OWN terms and in their OWN time.

Luna clearly wants my attention, but she’s often not willing to trust me enough to let me give it to her. She likes to be petted — unless she doesn’t.

When we get home after being gone for a few hours, she might be waiting on the stairs for us. Or she might be pretending she didn’t hear the Ring notification or the front door opening. “Oh, they’re home. Big deal. Maybe I’ll pee on the couch later.”

Dogs give us an illustration of how God wants us to love Him. Cats show us how WE so often want to love God — on our own terms, in our own timing, and only to the point that it doesn’t make us feel uncomfortable.

Our theme for this fourth week of Advent is, of course, love. And on Wednesday, Christmas Day, we’ll celebrate the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

We’ll celebrate the day in human history when love Himself came down, wrapped in the flesh of a helpless child, born to a young virgin in the town of Bethlehem.

So, let’s talk about love this morning.

It’s interesting that the first time the word love appears in the Bible is in Genesis, chapter 22.

This is Moses’ account of the time when God called on Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, “your only son, whom you love,” as God described Isaac to his father.

Now, I’m sure this wasn’t the first time in history that someone felt love for another person. Abraham clearly loved his wife, Sarah, and lots of other people surely had loved each other, even before Abraham’s time.

But for some reason, Moses, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit refrains from using this word, “love,” in the thousands of years of history he covered in the first 21 chapters of Genesis.

And I think one of the reasons is that we’re intended to make a connection between love and sacrifice.

Of course, God provided a last-minute ram in the thicket to take Isaac’s place as the sacrifice.

But I think we’re intended to see the connection between what Abraham was saved FROM doing and what God DID when Jesus went to the cross to pay the debt each one of us owes for our sins against Him.

You all know what Jesus said in the third chapter of John: “For God SO LOVED the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”

God gave us His Son. Certainly, that phrase looks back to the day of Jesus’ birth, when He who has eternally been the Son of God also became the Son of Man.

But I think Jesus was also looking forward in this conversation with the Pharisee, Nicodemus. I think He was looking into His near future, knowing the cross and its shame and suffering lay ahead.

I think what He’s saying here is that God loved the world so much that He did what He would not allow Abraham to do. He gave us Jesus, His unique and eternal Son, to be a sacrifice for us and in our place.

And Jesus is also the ram-in-the-thicket for us. Just as the ram took the place of Isaac on the sacrificial altar, so did Jesus give His life so that we might be saved through faith in Him. He took our place in punishment for sin.

And here’s something interesting that I realized just this week. Since the Apostle John tells us in 1 John, chapter 4, that “God is love,” the words “God and “love” in John 3:16 are, in some ways, interchangeable.

Switching them out results in some unusual grammar, but it also helps us to see a significant theological truth.

“God so Godded the world.” Or maybe this is better: “Love so loved the world that He gave us His only begotten son….”

Yes, it’s a weird grammatical construction, either way. But look at what it helps us to understand about God.

Love so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. Sending Jesus and allowing Him to give Himself as a sacrifice for our sins at the cross was simply God doing what God does, real, sacrificial love doing what love does.

From the moment Adam and Eve took that first bite from the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, God has been working to redeem fallen mankind and erase the curse of sin that we brought onto the earth.

Not because He needs us, but because He loves us. And because He made US to be people who love Him.

Not like cats love their people — on their own terms and in their own timing and with whatever amount of trust they feel like showing at any given moment.

He made us to be people who love Him in some ways the same as dogs love their people — unconditionally, regardless of circumstances, and with complete trust.

So, how can we show God that we love Him? Well, Jesus was pretty clear about it.

“If you love Me, you will keep my commandments,” He told His disciples at the Last Supper. And what were His commandments? Love God, and love one another.

And as He’d also said at the Last Supper, the disciples’ love for one another would be would be their defining characteristic. Essentially, he said, “This is how people will know you follow Me, that you love Me — by your love for others.”

We like to SAY we love our neighbors as ourselves, but love is about actions. Do our actions really testify to love? What does it LOOK like to love your neighbor, anyway?

Well, the Apostle Paul answered that question in the well-known 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians.

I know we’ve talked about this before, but bear with me, and I hope we’ll find something new and wonderful as we look at five verses there in the rest of our time today.

Now, you need to understand up front that the Corinthian church had more than its share of problems.

Their worship was chaotic, there were deep divisions within the fellowship, pride and egotism were rampant, and their disputes within the fellowship spilled over into the community of non-believers that surrounded them.

But the biggest problem for that church — indeed, what seems to have been at the root of ALL the other problems — was a lack of love for one another.

So, Paul, after addressing some of the other matters that needed his attention, turns in Chapter 13 to the core issue: love.

Without love, he writes, everything the people of Corinth tried to do for God was without value. It’s LOVE that makes these things significant on an eternal scale.

But we’re not cats OR dogs. If I tried to show y’all how much I love you by licking your face, you’d probably call the cops.

So, how is love is supposed to look for followers of Jesus? Let’s read verses 4 through 8 to find out.

1 Corinthians 13:4–8 NASB95

4 Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, 5 does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, 6 does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away.

Considering that the Corinthians were failing to love one another, we might expect Paul to define and analyze love for them. Instead, he shows us how love ACTS and how it DOESN’T act.

And it’s appropriate that he’d begin by talking about patience and kindness, since they, along with love itself, are among the fruits of the Holy Spirit we find in Galatians, chapter 5.

Without these fruits in your life, I don’t think it’s possible to love the way Paul describes in this passage.

But to the extent that believers nourish the growth of these fruits by abiding in the Spirit through a close walk with Jesus, we are empowered to do what we couldn’t otherwise do. We’re empowered to love others the way that God loves US.

After all, God has been patient with US, hasn’t He? If He weren’t patient, He’d have wiped out mankind long ago.

If He weren’t patient, many of us would never have come to faith in Jesus, because He’d not have allowed us to live long enough to do so.

We are great sinners — every one of us. And our sin is an affront to God, our Creator and rightful king. And yet He forestalls bringing His judgment upon this world of sin. He is patient with mankind.

In fact, Paul, in his letter to the Roman church, says God’s patience and kindness are intended to lead sinners to repent. Peter writes that His patience is salvation.

So, just as God is patient and kind in His love for us, WE are to be patient and kind in our love to one another. How can we ever justify NOT being patient and kind?

And then, Paul lists a bunch of things that love is NOT, starting with jealous.

Now, this is a tricky concept, because in modern English, jealousy is a negative emotion. But in Greek and Hebrew, jealousy could be negative OR positive.

In fact, God describes Himself in various places as “a jealous God.” So, if He’s jealous, why shouldn’t WE be jealous?

It comes down to the fact that “jealous” can have positive connotations in Greek and Hebrew. The Greek word that’s translated as “jealous” in verse 4 can mean “positively and intensely interested in something,” which is exactly the meaning intended in passages that describe God’s jealousy.

He’s positively and intensely interested in the lives of we who were created in His image, and especially in our spiritual condition.

But the Greek word translated as “jealous” here can also refer to having intensely negative feelings toward another’s achievements or success, which is the meaning Paul intends here, based on the context of the rest of the book.

God is never jealous of our success or even our love, except in the sense where our success or our love draws our attention away from Him.

And even then, His jealousy is a manifestation of His desire for us to have the BEST love — the love of Jesus Christ — and not the poor substitutes that we so often settle for, instead.

So, love is patient and kind, and love is not jealous. Or as we might say, GOD is patient and kind, and GOD is not jealous, at least not in the negative way.

God doesn’t brag, and He’s not arrogant.

Look, if anyone ever had reason to brag, it would be God. When’s the last time YOU created a universe?

God has every right to be arrogant. And yet when He came to us in the flesh, He chose to be born of a poor virgin girl in a backwater town of Israel, where He slept His first night a feeding trough for animals. He came to us in the most humble way imaginable.

And following Jesus means walking in the footsteps of humility. Loving one another as He loves us means perpetually approaching one another in true humility.

God also doesn’t act unbecomingly. He treats us with dignity, just as we are called to treat OTHERS with dignity. He doesn’t seek His own; in other words, He doesn’t demand His own way.

He will allow you to believe what you wish to believe and do what you wish to do, even when it’s outside of His will for you, even when it means that some will go to their graves without salvation.

If He treats us with such dignity and respect, how can we ever justify treating others in any other way?

God is also not provoked. He doesn’t fly off the handle the way we do. He’s appointed a day of judgment and a day of salvation.

We who rejoice in righteousness, as God does — and as love does in verse 6 — will rejoice on the day of judgment for the victory of righteousness over evil.

But for now, we rejoice in the day of salvation, thankful for God’s patience and kindness, which led US to repentance and which CONTINUE to lead sinners to repentance and faith in Jesus.

And as we await God’s appointed time of judgment, we also can rejoice that the God who IS love doesn’t take into account the wrongs He has suffered from us.

We who’ve turned to Jesus in faith have had ALL our sins forgiven — past, present, and future. Our wrongs against God have been righted by Jesus, who took upon Himself at the cross our sins and their just punishment.

So, if you’re a follower of Jesus — loving the way He loves — how could you ever justify holding onto unforgiveness?

Why do we hold onto the little hurts other people cause us — or even the big ones — when God has forgiven us the very sins that drove His beloved Son to the cross?

In love, He bore the shame and isolation caused by the disgrace and depravity of our sins. If Jesus was willing to bear the separation from fellowship with God that took place during the hours of darkness at the cross, how can we not bear with one another’s faults?

Love believes all things. Listen, if you’ve turned to Jesus in faith, then God has declared you righteous, even though everyone — including God — knows you’re not.

But He chooses to COUNT your faith AS righteousness. Now, when He looks at you, He sees Jesus.

It’s not that He’s fooled or even fooling Himself. He’s made a conscious and sovereign decision to treat believers as righteous, even when all the evidence proves we’re not.

So, how can we ever justify always thinking the worst of people? Love, Paul is saying in verse 7, looks for reasons to think the best of people, to give them the benefit of the doubt, to, as one commentator puts it, “throw a kindly mantle over all their faults.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), 1 Co 13:7, quoting Erdman.]

Love hopes all things, Paul says in verse 7. God hopes in all things. That probably sounds strange. But if you remember that the definition for this Greek word that’s translated as “hope,” it makes sense.

To hope for something in the sense it’s used in Scripture is to look forward to it with anticipation and confidence that it’s going to take place.

Our God is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the One who KNOWS the end from the beginning. He has hope, because He knows His perfect plan and that it will come to fruition, just as He wills.

So should we who strive to love the way Jesus loves us put our hope in Him and His sovereignty.

He endured the cross, scorning its shame, and now sits at the right hand of the throne of God. His righteousness endures forever, and He will right all your wrongs in His perfect timing.

You see, as Paul says at the beginning of verse 8, love never fails. God never fails.

And because that’s true, we can have hope. We can endure. We can be patient and kind. We can rejoice with the truth.

Because the God who is love is ALSO the Son who called Himself the Way, the TRUTH, and the Life.

He IS the Way. He IS the Truth. He IS the Life. And He IS Love.

And on Wednesday, we’re going to celebrate the day that He also became one of us, the day He came wearing not the robes of heavenly royalty, but the flesh of a newborn human baby.

THIS, my friends, is love.

Now, today is Lord’s Supper Sunday. This observance is important to the fellowship of the church. It brings us together in a unique way and reminds us that we belong to one another in Christ Jesus.

It reminds us of the love He has for us and the love we’re called to have for one another.

Jesus commanded us to observe the Lord’s Supper as an act of obedience to Him, as a way of proclaiming that we who follow Him in faith belong to Him, and as a way of reminding us what He did for us.

The Lord’s Supper reminds us that our hope for salvation rests only and completely on the sacrifice He made for us and in our place at the cross. It reminds us that our life is in Him.

And the fact that we share bread from one loaf reminds us that we are, together, the one body of Christ. It reminds us that we’re called to unity of faith, unity of purpose, and unity of love. That there’s no longer Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, Republican or Democrat, for we are all one in Christ Jesus.

It reminds us that, just as He gave up the glory He had in heaven, we who’ve followed Him in faith are called to give up any claims we might think we have to our own lives as we follow Him.

Finally, it reminds us that, as we’ve been given the testimony of the Holy Spirit within us, we are to share OUR testimony of salvation by grace through faith. We’re not to be lukewarm Christians, but people who are on fire for the Lord.

If you’re a baptized believer walking in obedience to Christ, I’d like to invite you to join us today as we celebrate the Lord’s Supper.

Now, this sacred meal dates all the way back to when Jesus shared it with His disciples at the Last Supper on the night before He was crucified.

The conditions during the Last Supper were different than the conditions we have here today. But the significance was the same as it is today.

Jesus told His disciples that the bread represented His body, which would be broken for our transgressions.

Let us pray.

Matthew 26:26 NASB95

26 While they were eating, Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, He broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is My body.”

As Jesus suffered and died on that cross, his blood poured out with His life. This was always God’s plan to reconcile mankind to Himself.

“In [Jesus] we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us.”

Let us pray.

Matthew 26:27–28 NASB95

27 And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, He gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you; 28 for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins.

Take and drink.

“Now, as often as we eat this bread and drink the cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”

Maranatha! Lord, come!

Here at Liberty Spring, we have a tradition following our commemoration of the Lord’s Supper.

Please gather around in a circle, and let us sing together “Blest Be the Tie that Binds.”