Experiential Love
Notes
Transcript
We are continuing this morning to look at Romans 8:28,
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.
And we have been looking in particular at what Paul meant when he wrote “those who love God”. It’s actually a rather interesting phrase – typically, when we think about Paul with tend to see the logic, the theological argument, the progression of thought that is highly ordered and at times profound – there is a reason why Peter in his second epistle acknowledges that Paul’s writings contain some things hard to understand!
But usually when we think about the subject of love in believers, it is typically John’s writings we turn to.
And I think that this relative rare-ness of Paul to touch on the love of men toward God makes this statement rather distinctive and worthy of our utmost consideration.
And we’ve been slowly peeling back the layers to this in order that we may do just that. First, we realized that Paul is not giving us some sort of prescriptive condition for entering into God’s blessings, but rather to realize that this is a description of the tone and tenor of a particular people. We don’t need to try to work up a feeling of love for God in ourselves, and then fear that if we can’t hold on to that feeling we may lose our salvation. No, in fact we realized that the natural man or woman does not actually love God, but they actually hate Him; it takes a supernatural act by God to remove the unloving heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh – a heart now able to affectionately love God in truth.
And that love Paul is speaking of is an affection of the soul, Paul isn’t referring to some passing emotion, or an intellectual acceptance here, no! Neither is love for God something that can be simply reduced to a behavior – Isaiah 29 exposed that obedience without true affection is detestable to God. In fact, we would be right to say that one of the central problems of each and every human being is that in Adam we are appointed sinners – we love, but the object of our love is the wrong thing, we are in fact hateful and rebellious toward God as He declares Himself to be in His word; we would far prefer to make a god in our own image, and take the parts of Scripture we like - you know, the benefits for us and the curses for our enemies, and just set the other stuff aside, especially any idea that we owe Him anything.
We love what we perceive as being good in our innermost souls – not what we claim is good, but what we really think. And so, in our fallen, sinful estate we desire not God, but the benefits He gives to us; despite our claim to love God, the highest good we seek is our own benefit, our own elevation. The highest good our soul perceives is we ourselves.
But, when God supernaturally interferes, when He opens our eyes to the truth, opens our soul to His word and effectually calls a person to Him, they turn to Him in faith, and their love is fixed on its proper object, namely God Himself. Rather than seeing our own self as the presiding good in our lives, we see God as good.
But there’s still a tension here, though are hearts have been profoundly changed, our mortal bodies still have lusts and desires and cravings, vestiges of sin’s former dominion. We are instructed to restrain the body in Romans 6 not because it is benign or harmless, but because it presents competing loves to our souls, objects vying for our affectionate love, things that oppose God and continually seek to draw our hearts away from Him as our chief good and highest love!
We who are in Christ Jesus are both commanded and enabled to restrain the body in Romans 6, and to crucify its lusts in Galatians 5 – this isn’t primarily about behavior but about our affections; the choice we are constantly faced with is “what do we prize most of all?” We are continually pressed on every side to declare by our choices what do we trust the most, love the most, value the most?
And God Himself helps us along in this process by demonstrating to our souls that He is infinitely more worthy of our love than any other thing that could ever be thrown up in opposition to Him, that there is no true rival to Him, “I am Yahweh, and there is no other; beside Me there is no god” he declared in Isaiah 45.
And so, God is not satisfied with being one of many objects of our love, and it’s not even sufficient for Him to demonstrate His supreme worthiness in comparison, no! That may leave us to think that we could have God and Belial both, just keep them in different pockets. But, no! “What harmony has Christ with Belial” was the question Paul posed in 2 Corinthians 6 – the answer is none at all. Amos 5 records the indictment against Israel for presenting Him with sacrifices and grain offerings in the wilderness for 40 years while still keeping their idol gods, and so God exiled them from the land.
No, our God is a righteously jealous God, and He will brook no rival, so He providentially, systematically works not only to put on display His own supremacy, but also to reveal the hollow, empty worth of all else that would stand against Him in our hearts. He exposes the insufficiency of every other support, while demonstrating again and again that He alone – even more than the benefits He bestows – is worthy of our highest and only love.
When God declares that He causes all things to work together for our good, for we who love Him, He’s progressively teaching us to see Him more clearly as our chief and highest good just as He did with Job, helping re-order our affections of love and hate so they are ever more firmly fixed upon their proper objects, loving God Himself more dearly, hating sin more sincerely, steadily tearing down every rival claimant to the throne of our love until Christ Jesus Himself is the only one remaining, standing as soul’s one, supreme delight.
We have peeled back layer after layer, moving from the outward statement of Romans 8:28 into the inner workings of the heart—through providence, perception, and affection. But there is still a critical, deeper layer to uncover: how does this love actually reveal itself in lived experience, in the realm of our everyday life?
And though necessary, this one is rather difficult to address rightly without someone taking and reducing the answer to a simple checklist, just as by the time of Christ’s ministry the Pharisees had heaped traditions of the elders up so high they stood as whitewashed tombs – beautiful and shiny on the outside, but decayed and dead within.
In other words, when we’re asking the question “what does this kind of love look like”, we are not looking for a list of things by which a man may earn God's favor, but to help us see the evidences ordinarily produced within a man or woman who has already been united to Christ Jesus. These are not things that a person can pick up in order to become a Christian, but rather we want to be able to recognize them, on account of the fact that the man or woman in Christ Jesus will already possess them, perhaps in varying degree, some large, some small, but they will be present.
The ultimate question is not what we know about love, or even what we profess about our love, but rather we’re getting at how the love that is within us reveals itself.
In fact, the Puritans would have phrased that, “how the love that is within us reveals itself experimentally”, I think that this is the crux of our question today, even though it will take some explanation - the word “experimental” had a much different meaning for them than it does for us, and I think it will help deepen our own understanding of what it means to “love God”. It was for this reason that I nearly entitled this sermon “experimental love” in the first place, but didn’t because of the modern connotations of the word.
Today when we hear the word “experimental”, we think of scientists in their white lab coats, but the Puritans and their successors meant religion as it is experienced in the soul, the religion that is lived out in life rather than simply confessed with our lips; to go back to one of our earlier images, it is the difference between knowing that honey is sweet, and experiencing of the sweet taste of honey on our lips, and remembering it fondly afterward.
When Paul says that these great, monumental promise – “all things working together for good” – the first qualification to that is not doctrinal agreement or religious activity, but whether or not our love is centered on God Himself.
What we love, we place the highest value on, we hold it in high esteem, we prize it and think it precious. So the very first evidence to consider is how we think of God Himself – and we ought to be able to recognize in ourselves, even if through distant memory from years gone by, that our thoughts of God are now different than they once were, that even if we may not be able to put a finger on a particular date, we can see in ourselves a distinct change in our attitudes, in that though we may have once thought ourselves “okay” with God, now we find that our delight is in Him particularly - above heaven or blessings or even answered prayers.
Asaph declares in Psalm 73,
Whom have I in heaven but You? And besides You, I desire nothing on earth. My flesh and my heart fail, But God is the rock of my heart and my portion forever.
This is not to mean we don’t enjoy and treasure when God bestows His blessings upon us, but that when we do receive such things, our hearts immediately reach out to the God who gave us such sweet succor – that when we think or reminisce on those gifts, our heart is immediately and profoundly drawn to worshiping and exalting God.
We certainly enjoy the blessings themselves, but our enjoyment does not end there, no! Rather, every gift becomes a pathway leading our hearts back to the Giver. The blessing reminds us of His kindness, he provision of His faithfulness, the comfort of His tenderness. The gift itself becomes a testimony to the goodness of the God who gave it.
And in our suffering, too, we find ourselves reaching instinctively toward God, knowing that His sufficiency is enough – “my grace is sufficient for you”, our Lord said to Paul. Though the trial may be bitter, though the burden may be heavy, though our hearts may ache under the weight of it, yet there remains within us a settled conviction that God Himself has not ceased to be good, and so in our hearts, even suffering becomes a pathway leading our hearts straight to God.
Even the imposing awesomeness of heaven itself would be but an empty shell were it not for the presence of God there. He Himself is the supreme attractiveness of even heaven. And that’s quite a loaded statement, for Scripture’s descriptions of heaven are rather profound - no more death, no more sorrow, no more pain, perfect joy and peace…
And yet, if all of those things could somehow be possessed apart from God Himself, heaven would cease to be heaven. For what makes heaven glorious is the presence of God, what makes heaven desirable is not merely what is absent from there, but God Himself who dwells there.
And through it all, in His providence He arranges all things to work together for our good, things in themselves both good and bad, through them teaching our hearts ever more fully the same lesson: that He Himself is our portion forever.
This is why Asaph could say, "Whom have I in heaven but You?" and why Job could say, "Though He slay me, I will hope in Him." In both blessing and suffering, the heart that loves God ultimately finds its rest increasingly in God Himself.
And so, our first question really becomes more of whether our heart runs toward God in both blessing and suffering, in times of respite and times of temptation, in times bad and good – do I esteem God most highly that I can, when the moment is upon me, declare both “Yahweh gave” and “Yahweh has taken away”, and then fully in my heart declare “Blessed be the name of Yahweh”, even if that may be perhaps trembling and weak.
In other words, does God hold my highest esteem.
Now, that does not mean there are no competing affections within us. In fact, we have already seen the opposite to be true, this is the reason that God is still conforming us to the image of His dear Son. Though our hearts have been renewed, our mortal bodies still present rival loves to our souls. There are still lusts to be crucified, idols to be exposed, false securities to be torn down. The question, then, is not whether competing loves exist; they most assuredly do so long as we remain until the Lord comes and we will see Him as He is and be like Him, the question is what God is doing with them. Do I see a pattern in my life where competing loves are being continually weakened and exposed, am I becoming more sensitive in what I see as sin, more ashamed at having offended God in such a way.
In this, I like the line of thought John MacArthur often expressed, that as we are increasingly sanctified, the more holy we become, the more sensitive we become to the remaining sin within us.
For this is precisely what Romans 8:28 has been teaching us!
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.
God is not passively observing the affections of His people, but is actively working all things together to teach us the hollow insufficiency of every rival love and the infinite worth of Christ.
So, this struggle itself is a further evidence of our love of God. The very grief we feel over our sin reveals that our hearts have become fixed on God, and ache when we realize we have offended Him.
We may stumble when God is displaced, but it cannot remain content there.
And so the question is not, "Do I love God perfectly", no! Rather, the question we need to ask ourselves is, "Is He the One to whom my heart continually returns?"
And in these is the genesis of the next great characteristic of a true love for God:
Not only does my soul increasingly judge Him to be more worthy, more desirable, more satisfying than anything else when I love God in this way; not only does the soul who loves God truly increasingly see each and every rival for our affections as empty and vain, not only does my heart increasingly turn back to God when it wanders…
If God has truly become precious to us, if He has increasingly become our chief good and chosen portion, this will then profoundly alter our affections; our loves themselves begin to be reordered around Him, with God Himself firmly at the center.
God does not simply become one more object added to the list of things we love, even if placed at the top of that list, no! Instead, He becomes the very center by which every other love is measured, governed, and rightly ordered.
And this ordering of our affections is not something we accomplish merely by force of will or by sheer religious discipline. Rather, God Himself, through His providential dealings with us, actively teaches and trains our hearts where each and every affection rightly belongs.
Before we came to be in Christ Jesus, self sat upon the throne of our affections, and every other love was arranged around our own self – we prized self-interest, self-preservation, self-exaltation, self-gratification.
But in regeneration, God dethrones “self”, He strips it of its usurped position and takes His rightful place at the center, and then proceeds immediately to reorient every other love in relation to Him.
Some of what we loved needs to be torn down and destroyed entirely, and displaced by holy affections centered on God.
Paul wrote in Galatians 5,
Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these, of which I forewarn you, just as I have forewarned you, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
These things, he wrote down in verse 24 of that chapter, must be crucified, these passions and desires that compete for God’s rightful place on the throne of our hearts.
These are not merely isolated behaviors Paul is describing, as though the problem were merely external actions. No, they are the visible fruits of disordered loves, affections of the flesh that oppose God and compete for His rightful place upon the throne of our hearts. For example, sexual immorality is not merely an act, but love directed toward unlawful pleasure. Or, jealousy is not merely an emotion, but love of self threatened by another’s good. And the theme continues for each of these deeds of the flesh!
These things, Paul says in verse 24, must be crucified. These passions and desires, these rival loves that continually seek to usurp God’s rightful place in our affections, cannot be negotiated with, domesticated, or merely restrained outwardly—they must be nailed to the cross.
Other things we love must be demoted. Our Lord said in Luke 14:26
“If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.
…yet still, the importance of these family relationships permeates Scripture – Husbands are to love their lives sacrificially in Ephesians 5, children are to obey their parents by honoring father and mother in the same passage, children are an inheritance from God and a reward in Psalm 127, actual hatred toward your brother rather than love for Him is impossible for a person who truly loves God in 1 John 4.
Good things wrongly elevated offend God, and so must be demoted to restore their proper placement in our affections in relation to God.
However, sanctification is not simply a subtraction by removal and demotion, God isn’t merely content to empty the heart of competing loves, rather He actively cultivates loves and fills us with holy affections, increasing captivating the soul with superior loves.
In other words, sinful affections are not conquered merely by force, but by displacement.
This is why the apostle can say in Galatians 5 not merely that the flesh must be crucified, but immediately speaks of living by the Spirit rather than the flesh, for the fruit of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control – are holy affections to be cherished on account of their close relationship with God Himself.
And, incidentally, it brings us right back to what the Puritans meant by “experimental religion”, a religion that is experienced in the soul rather than intellectually affirmed or tentative and unproven.
These Godly people were formed in the crucible of a religion bent on forms, on rites, on outward conformity to a religion acceptable to the elites, and knew all too well the false, empty hollowness of such a religion in which leaves the deep affections of the heart untouched.
So when we start thinking of experimental love, we’re not talking the language of modern scientists, but rather a love that has been tested, proven, felt, and manifested in the actual experience of life – in other words, the things we’ve been looking at this morning.
Do we experience God progressively reordering the affections of our soul, exposing and tearing down any rivals?
Do we feel the grief of discovering sinful affections within us and opposing them – not because they appear on a list of sins, but because we recognize they threaten communion with the God we love?
Do we experience God, through His providence, teaching us again and again the stark contrast in the emptiness of every false support, and the infinite sufficiency of Christ.?
It is discovering in the actual moments of life—through blessing, through suffering, through temptation, through failure, through repentance – that our hearts are being progressively sanctified, progressively conformed to the image of Christ Jesus.
This progressive sanctification is the lived reality for all in Christ Jesus, it is God taking a soul that was once centered upon self, and progressively reordering it until Christ Himself becomes its supreme delight.
So when Paul writes, “for those who love God,” he is not describing a people who have attained perfect love, but a people in whom God has supernaturally created a real love for Himself—a love He is actively deepening, purifying, and refining through every providence.
This, then, is the great limitation and comfort of Romans 8:28;
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to His purpose.
The promise that all things work together for good belongs specifically to those whose hearts God is progressively reclaiming from every rival love, teaching them through all of life to treasure Christ above all.
In other words, “those who love God” are those in whom God is making Himself the soul’s supreme delight.
Let us pray!
