The Love of God
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THE LOVE OF GOD BY JOEL BUBNA “And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.” —1 John 4:16
INTRODUCTION: Speaking to a group of university students, Brennan Manning asked the question: “What if, when we see Jesus face-to-face, the only question He asks is, ‘Did you truly believe that I love you?’” It’s a simple but profound question. The question is not doctrinal or theological—it’s personal.
But what is this love that he is talking about?
Love is faithful and benevolent self-giving to a person. In the Bible, love is the central attribute of God, the primary fruit of the followers of God, and the defining characteristic of the kingdom of God announced in Jesus.
But our English word love, doesn’t do much to explain all of the different feelings that people have for others and stuff. Let’s take a quick look at eight different emotions that have individual words in the Greek or Latin but are all translated into love in English.
Agape - Fatherly love of God for humans as well as the human reciprocal love for God. This is a self-less, unconditional and sacrificial love.
Philia - Brotherly love. The love that ties friends together for life.
Eros - Erotic, passionate and romantic love.
Pragma - A long enduring love characterized by commitment that endures all things. In Hebrew this is called Hesed. It is based on duty, obligation and commitment not emotion.
Storge - Familial love. The love which ties together parents, children and other family members.
Mania - Obsessive love, the kind that a stalker feels toward their victim.
Ludus - Which is actually a Latin word meaning playful. Ludus is an uncommitted love like flirting and seduction.
Philautia - Self-love. It refers to how a person views themselves and how they feel about their own body and mind.
Knowing that there are differences in types of love will help to understand the love referred to in our passage for today.
12 No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us.
13 By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit.
14 We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world.
15 Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.
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.
17 By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world.
18 There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.
19 We love, because He first loved us.
The word Love is used 11 times in these eight verses and verse 16 even states that “God is Love.”
But what kind of love is this passage referring to?
This passage is referring to Agape Love. All 11 instances of the word love in this passage is Agape the Fatherly love of God for humans.
A. Agape Love is Hardwired into God’s story and shows up in many ways.
1. One central way it appears in the Christian faith is the Trinity. God is one but He exists in three Persons. There is this beautiful relationship that exists in the Trinity. There are not three manifestations of God, there are three distinct persons of God. They love and delight in one another. The love these three persons, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit have for each other overcomes all things. The Son loved the Father so much that He followed the Father’s will and went to the cross and the Spirit loves them so much that He is willing to dwell here on earth in each one of us so that we might have confidence that God really loves us.
Just as the three persons of the God-head love and delight in each other they love and delight in their creation.
2. Genesis 1:26 says:
26 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
God’s intention was that Adam and his offspring would abide in Him. To share in the Agape love that He, God the Father shared with the Son and the Holy Spirit. But sin changed everything. Adam’s sin brought fear into the relationship. Fear of punishment, fear that wasn’t there to begin with and doesn’t need to be there, even now. But, we must abide in the Son so that our love may be made perfect. The perfect love that casts out all fear and gives us confidence in Him.
B. Dwelling in Him allows us to share in the Delight.
1. The relationship that exists in God’s person is a delightful, self-sacrificing relationship. God is self-sufficient and needs nothing more than what He already has. He did not create humans to complete something missing in Himself. He created us to share in the delight of His love. He created us that He might delight in us and we in Him.
Genesis 3:8 says:
8 They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
The Lord God walked in the garden. He wanted to spend time with His creation, His children. How many of you that have children want to spend time with them? How many of you want to delight in their presence with you? How does it make you feel when you get to spend time with them? That’s the feeling of the Father. But that got all messed up somewhere at the beginning of the story.
2. But, at the center of the universe and this whole story there is love. Throughout scripture love jumps off of the page. God’s unfailing love is seen in the history and lives of His children. His holiness, sovereignty and power are ever present in this love story. From the time God created Adam to the day He will make all things new.
This ever present unfailing love of God is Hesed Love.
A. Hesed Love Manifests Itself in All that He Is and Does
1. In the Old Testament, the Psalms talk about the hesed or “unfailing love” of God.
Psalm 136:1-3 says:
1 Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good, For His lovingkindness is everlasting.
2 Give thanks to the God of gods, For His lovingkindness is everlasting.
3 Give thanks to the Lord of lords, For His lovingkindness is everlasting.
For 26 verses Psalm 136 extols the truth that God’s Hesed love is everlasting. God does not change, nor does His love. No matter what goes on in our lives He is the same. He is good and His lovingkindness is everlasting. We are not good and our lovingkindness is often attached to requirements that must be met by the object of the love. I will love you if...
2. A. W. Tozer points out that we often wrongly think that God acts at times out of His love and grace and other times out of His justice and judgement. He says in the Knowledge of the Holy; “Justice embodies the idea of moral equity, and iniquity is the exact opposite; it is in-equity, the absence of equality from human thoughts and acts. Judgment is the application of equity to moral situations and may be favorable or unfavorable according to whether the one under examination has been equitable or in-equitable in heart and conduct.”
So you see, it all depends upon which side of the fence God is being viewed from. If the one under examination is in-equitable in heart and conduct, meaning that they are an outright sinner then it will appear to that person that God acts out of His justice and judgement. But those on the equitable side of the fence will see Him acting in love and grace. Either way He will act according to His lovingkindness. He will act in His lovingkindness because He cannot act in any other way.
He can not act in any other way because He is immutable.
Immutability is one of His attributes, quite simply He is unchanging.
3. Along with His immutability God’s other attributes fully manifest in all that God is and does. It is impossible for Him to do anything that is not loving. Even His judgments are loving just as His blessings. His judgments are meant as discipline. Hebrews 12:6 says:
6 For those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, And He scourges every son whom He receives.”
Judgment brings about discipline from the Father because we are all sons and daughters. Your outlook about the situation makes all the difference. Is it accepted as judgment and punishment or is it accepted as discipline meant to help in the process of spiritual growth and drawing closer to Him? Accept it as discipline and draw closer to Him.
B. Besides what we can learn from His immutability God’s other Attributes will Teach us other things about His Love. Attributes such as His self-existence;
1. Because God is self-existent, His love has no beginning. It has always been. I guess that means God has a pretty good track record. He doesn’t need our love, He has all that He needs within the God Head. The Father the Son and the Holy Spirit.
2. Because He is eternal, His love has no end. His love will never run out. He keeps giving us more. The more we need the more He gives. The more we give to others the more He gives to us. His love is a well that never runs dry.
3. Because He is infinite, His love has no limit. Can you imagine limitless love? Our love for others is finite. Often there is a limit to how much love we can give or show to others simply because our love has limits. Each of us has a certain capacity for how much we can love and that capacity can vary widely from person to person. But with God, His love is the same for all and has no limit for all.
4. And because He is holy, His love is always pure. What about you? Is your love always pure? Or do you have expectations attached to your love? If you don’t gain weight and don’t get sick... I will love you always. If you keep working and earn lots of money... I will love you always. If you don’t try to get me to stop going out with the boys on Saturday nights... I will love you always. We can’t do enough to gain His love and we can’t do enough to cause Him to stop loving us.
This should lead us to wonder about just how incomprehensible God’s Love is.
A. The Incomprehensible Love of God will take a Lifetime to Comprehend.
1. Ephesians 3:16–19 says:
16 that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man,
17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love,
18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth,
19 and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.
Verse 18 of this passage tells us that Paul wants the saints to comprehend the breadth, length, height and depth of God’s love. The Greek word is katalambano. It means to intellectually grasp something, to know and believe that something deep down inside. Paul wants us to strive to understand just how big God’s love is. The grasping of this is part of knowing God, the striving should come from a desire to know Him, a desire driven by the Spirit within you.
2. Striving to know God and learning to live as the beloved of God takes a lifetime. The prayer that Paul prayed for his brothers and sisters in Ephesus are cries to God that He would give them and us power by His Spirit. However, the power was not to do something—it was to believe something. It was to believe that God’s love was far bigger and far greater than anything else that we can possibly imagine. There is nothing bigger and there is nothing more important. If your idea of God’s love is too small your view of God will be too small. (Get a couple boxes and talk about them and God’s love - compare it to the room.)
Just as God’s love is incomprehensible, God’s love is Unchanging.
A. And the Unchanging Love of God is Life Changing for us.
1. Ephesians 3:19 says:
19 and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.
When the unchanging love of God fills someone to the fullness of Christ Jesus that person will be changed. How could they not be changed. A person going from a broken sinner saved by grace through faith to a saint who is filled with the Holy Spirit and all the fullness of God. Now that’s change. Verse 18 talked about the breadth, width, height and depth of God’s love. Well being filled to the fullness of God is like taking a kiddie pool and dumping the Pacific Ocean into it. There is going to be change. Change in behavior, attitudes, actions, love and most of all the size of the faith the person will live by.
2. A. W. Tozer, in this poignant prayer from the Knowledge of the Holy, expresses well the transformative power of believing His love: “Thy love is uncaused and undeserved. Thou art Thyself the reason for the love wherewith we are loved. Help us to believe the intensity, the eternity of the love that has found us. Then love will cast out fear; our troubled hearts will be at peace, trusting not in what we are but in what Thou has declared Thyself to be. Amen”.
This brings us back around to our passage for this morning. 1 John 4:16 says:
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.
God is Love. Believing this truth enables each person who believes in Him to abide in that Love and those who abide in that love abide in God.
In love there is no fear. Those who love someone should have no reason to fear them. The relationship based on hesed love is one that brings peace. There is peace in that relationship because the individual will have only the best intentions for the partner. When we abide in God’s hesed love He will have only the best intentions for us and we can dwell in Him with peace. The peace removes fear, the fear of condemnation, the fear of retribution or punishment, and most of all the fear of death.
CONCLUSION: The love of God is deeper and wider and far greater than we can even imagine. Out of His love, we are able to experience Him. Out of His love, we can love too. Remember there are eight kinds of love that humans can display towards one another and things. But Agape love, God’s love for us is pragmatic; or hesed in Hebrew. This is the love that God shows toward us. His everlasting, unchanging and incomprehensible love for all those who call upon His name and dwell in Him. This is love. When we come to understand just how much God loves us and how big His love really is we can begin to understand the pleasure He feels when we dwell within Him. So feel His pleasure, know that God is Love.
What is the Lord speaking to you about His love, about His character? Spend some time in reflection and prayer. Comprehend the true breadth, length, height and depth of God’s love and be changed.
Prayer: Heavenly Father, thank You so much for Your infinite love. We are so incredibly blessed to have a relationship with You—draw us even closer, and allow us to experience even more of Your love so that we may in turn love others well. Amen.
