The Delight of God’s Love
1 John 4:7-12 The Delight of God’s Love
Dear Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, family, friends, and especially Hebron & Deanna,
It is no understatement to say that love is what has brought you to this day!
Cherish this day, few days like it, all those who have loved and nurtured you at home are gathered around! Pretty soon Deanna you’ll be dancing you’re your father to the song I loved you first.
It’s the love of mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters, that has molded & supported you!
Already you’ve gotten a flavour of what that looks like in all the Ethiopian and Dutch flavour. That’s family love!
Childhood friends, but those friends in your university days, been with you through thick and thin. Incredible to think of how they are here to support you, how love in friendship has molded and made you! In the bible that’s called philos –Philadelphia – brotherely love, that faithful companionship – this two friends walking down same road together, comfortable with silence, open to talk about anything.
It’s a real gift. Know by the way you communicate you too enjoy that as well!
And then there is what the bible calls that wonderful attraction, that oneness on every level, between a man and a woman – eros – erotic love. And we know that you have received that passionate warm love from God as a gift and have treasured & protected it appropriately!
Yes, Deanna and Hebron, today we celebrate with you the wonder of all this love, family love, friendship love, erotic love that has brought you together, and knit you together. It’s the way God designed life, it’s the only hope of community – whether in your marriage, or at large!
All this love that God has orchestrated to bring you this day, we celebrate it is good!
Some put it well that Life minus love is zero.
But Deanna and Hebron, your wedding text tells us that just experiencing all that kind of love, isn’t enough. Consistent with your passion in every other part of your life, You both are striving to live in a deeper and kinder and more powerful love, that will be the bedrock of your marriage.
And that’s the love of God. Agape love! The part you said made this wedding text dance !
v.12 God lives in us and his love is made complete in us!
I know this about your characters, you long for that completeness.
Deanna is studying social work, she works giving care to the elderly. But its not just enough to kind of like them, Deanna wants to hear their story - more completely know and care for them!
Hebron you’ve finished training to be an engineer. But you’re not just looking for a job to make money! – (Although 2 u students getting married, have debts to pay.) But Hebron, you long to more completely use His skills of engineering so somehow building a part in God’s Kingdom in this world!
You both long for this great completeness!
And it’s the same for your marriage. Marriage is a good and wonderful gift in creation,
but because of sin, all our love isn’t enough to reach the goal for what God intended for it!
So Deanna and Hebron, as Christians you say, God is alive in us, we’ve been born of God,
so in our marriage, we enter into a covenant where God says He and His new self-giving love will show up. And living in this agape love will make our marriage our lives more complete!
And so on the 1st day of your life of covenant marriage, I challenge you let God make His love complete in you! I do that in three ways. First, you need to delight in God’s love together.
A. You must make God’s Love the source in your marriage!
V.8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love! Our own love is not enough!
You need to know God & experience Him as the very source of love, if you want this completeness!
One of the best things you’ll do for each other in this marriage, is remind each other of how deeply God loves, cares, cherishes, and is loving shaping each of you.
In a song, I loved her first, Deanna will dance with her father tonight!
Hebron you’ll understand how much Deanna’s dad love Deanna.
But do you understand how much God loves her, protects, her, forgives her, makes her shine?
Deanna, do you know, how forgiven, treasured, Hebron is a child and brother & co-heir of Christ?
This is the greater love you must experience together! You need to be wow-ed by it day by day!
How do you do this? How do you make God’s love the source of your love?
You need to remind each other of how God loves you, who he’s made you in Christ Jesus,
by worshipping, by daily bible reading, devotions,
n prayers of praise & sturggle, bringing each other before God’s love!
You must speak words of gospel encouragement when partner feels a failure, depressed, dirty.
Even when one of you starts letting pride or selfishness get the upper hand.
You need to come back to the great love of God, as the foundation of who you are,
Only by making this great love of God in Christ your source, will your love become complete!
Hymn writer Fredrick Lehman put it this way: The love of God is greater far. Than tongue or pen can ever tell. It goes beyond the highest star, and reaches to the lowest hell. The guilty pair bowed down with care God gave His Son to win….He goes on Could we with ink the ocean fill and were the skies of parchment made, were every stalk on earth a quill and every man a scribe by trade, to write the love of God above, would drain the ocean dry. Nor could the scroll contain the whole, tho’ stretched from sky to sky!
Its only as you’re experiencing & standing in awe of God love like that,
that you’ll long for the best for each other, and face the problems, and forgive the weakness,
and encourage all the dreams God has given each of you!
But when you understand this action of God’s love, hold it before each other, it won’t just be an example or source of love for you! Look at v.9-10. This is the 2nd way God challenges you:
B. You must make the sacrifical love of Christ the great motive in marriage!
See Christ’s sacrifice must rearrange things down here. Change the priority of your heart!
In Christian marriage the love of Christ becomes the great motive of why you choose to love each other.
Motives are important. Every murder mystery, you’re always searching for the motive.
Every marriage the question is what is the motive of my love. Will I only love when the person is loveable when I get something out of this? When the romance is there? When there’s out beauty, inner beauty? Good to apprecite this. But will I love
when my partner struggles? When long days of work, busy seasons come. Love’s not convient?
Jesus Christ shows us that the motive of agape love is a consuming passion for the wellbeing of others! When we were still sinners, he laid down His life for us. We were undeserving, yet he chose to sacrifice himself for us & our salv that we might be forgiven find true, abundant, and eternal life!
God could have just watched human race sink in our own sin, but He chooses to Send His out of pure love. When you know the immensity of this love it changes your motivation!
You no longer just love only what already lovely, you’ll love like God!
Your love will bring beauty out of what’s ugly and hurting and broken! It won’t be a 50/50 deal, But both giving 100%. Neither waiting for the other to love first. Both eagerly making the first move!
That’s the great new motivation
V.11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
In a small indeginious tribe in Mexcio they ran into a problem when translating the Bible. They didn’t have a word for love. And finally what they arrived at was: I have pain in my heart for you!
That’s the motivation of agape love, to care for each other so deeply, put others needs before yours. Someone once said marriage is like doing a home renovation: in costs way more than you thought, in takes more time than you thought, and it’s a lot more messy than imagine.
But this agape love of God says its all worthy it:
Christian love says, I’ll absorb the hurt, its worth going through the differences,
because God’s love is working something better for you and me here!
As you live with little irritants, and are given opportunity after opportunity to really serve each other – you must say, my motivation is to love, the way Jesus so loves me!
That’s what it means to submit to each other out of reverence for Christ!
But we all know that you have the great source of love in the ocean of God the Father’s love, and the great motivation in experiencing Christ sacrificial love. And that all sounds nice, but what will that really look like? Its kind of like, the musical My Fair Lady. Eliza is being courted by Freddie. And Freddie writers to her every day of all the way he loves her. But then Eliza cries out to him in frustration: “Words! Words! I’m so sick of words! Don’t talk of stars burning above, if you’re in love show me. Don’t talk of love lasting through time. Make me no undying vow. Love me now.”
C. You must make God’s Love Practical (not just God’s love as your source, motive, daily pattern)
As you start your marriage, hear: v.12 No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another He lives in us!
See you’ve got a promising start to marriage because, the love of God is in you. That’s potential!
Itt will only be perfected, come to completion, as you respond to each other in daily agape love! And you’ll now when you’re not living in this love.
Practically, you can’t really live in marriage for more than an hour or two, without knowing it. Puritans, said, a husband and wife living in agape love, is like a ball and socket joint,
And if you stop living in love even an hour, its like it pops out of joint:
you can’t do anything, you hobble in pain. You can’t accomplish why God put you together!
But do those loving actions, and gradually, over time, one loving action after another,
your text, says God’s love will be made complete in you!
You’ll have a matured love like it’s a delight to see in your parents!
Your wedding text says that No one has ever seen God, so God sent his Son in our likness, to show what true love is. And on that moment on the Cross when God’s Son is dying for us,
God becomes most believeable in a world full of such pain.
But Jesus is heaven now. And now people see God, primarily in the loving action of His people. Deanna & Hebron, in Christian marriage you have the great privilege of making God visible to each other! You make the love of God known in every little and big action of self giving love. Understanding more than understood, listening more than being heard, giving more than taking,
As you do this, God’s love will be made complete in you, and you and your friends and family, and neighbours will see the face of God in your marriage.
And you and they will know that God is love, and that you live in God love! That this is what not just marriage is all about, but that delight in God’s love is what life is all about!
“We are not perfect…things about us that irritate others… God forgive us for it.
Shouldn’t belong to us but do, they are there. THIS calls for patience in others, it calls for sympathy, it calls for understanding; do all you can to help one another, don’t be antagonistic, don’t become irritated… see sin… be patient, pray for, try to help, be sorry for, see thing that is robbing joy of other, not as hurting you!
Love = detach yourself from the problem, not think in terms of how hurt me, but look upon it as Christ did and have compassion for the person, love him out of it!
BIG Q = in this world how can God be love; believe in God, but…
But if this is fundamental statement of gospel, stake life on… what is going to be true about us, about this marriage?
A.God = love, teaches us Trinity = Augustine…. In his nature = the link between F,S, HS,
- works itself out = Love is of God, its from God, it flows from God…we ought to clutch at the great privilege of being like God …not return ill for ill, not to be so absorbed in our hurt…don’t give self to other… withdraw and hide.
= v.12 = marriage will make you bett Christian’s = essence of Christian not defend faith, intellectual, how good you are, but are you a partaker in the divine nature = born of this self-giving agape love of God
= precisely in those moments that naturally dislike, grow irritated, withdraw in hurt;
Say no, a sense of compassion, pray for that person however feeble, really feel for that person!
Start out know a little about God, but then know God ..more and more of love, more and more knowledge of a person…all that matters, less I’m not getting my fair share, deal…
1 Cor 13 …knowledge and love become one at some point… know as fully known = Amos 3:2 you only have I known of all the families of the earth - God know says that to all nations, all who follow; But you also say that to each other… know to love… even as I’m fully known…
Baxter – duty to love like a ball and socket joint = when give up even for an hour, pain, ineffective, can’t do anything = out of joint!
A) 7-8; simple instruction = love one another…puritan’s if not sure can love rest of life…passionately… then don’t marry…but Song of Songs love… love born of God…
Delight = not just outer and surface, but inner qualities – soul mates….
Now delight by common grace in all marriage, even in all attraction; but not fullness, not security…of covenant love …
B) For that must look to how God showed his love!
v.9-10 = no one ever says, problem is he thinking about me too much… problem is always in the other person = if can’t love in some moments because want to = because God says so, this is way union works = if not loving, hurting your self, dangerous to win an argument, yet hurt your marriage!
Practically this means = weaknesses not serious sin = talk on phone, bad table manners, Jesus whole teaching on the speck and the block…yes must deal with; but can’t fixate…can’t stop seeing admirable, encourage…
Can’t change true, but God is at work changing you as you love, dying to selfishness, sin in you….expect…
“People often let their marriage happen, hope they get along, and utterly ignore the necessity to grow as a person and a couple for the enhancement of the marriage!
(beyond a few minutes on prayer, bible reading; few actually take the time to talk about their relationship, dreams, desires, baggage, personal diff, gender diff, with curiosity, a heart of openness, kindness!
COMMON COUNSEL = “Learn to accept each other as you are without trying to change each other. Grain of truth… but in fact often means “Get along, kill your desire and don’t struggle, loose who God’s uniquely making, calling you! “ If the isn’t true, good as it gets” Develop as individual enhances you as person, a God loving person, neighbour serving person!
But if the gospel is true – then heart and relational transformation is what God willb continually working in your marriage!.
BUT Something can’t do… but if you’re busy doing your part, sure God will do his!
v.10 atoning sacrifice …bring past guilt, weaknesses, to Cross…forgive each other, yes but total forgiveness in Christ = Grace makes beauty out of ugly things,…what once was friction…
C) So Loved, love one another = can’t see God, but will find him live in us, as love like this = commitment to covenant = HIS LOVE IS MADE COMPLETE IN US
= sometimes running on empty… acknowledge JESUS, God lives in you and me;
Then we’ll know and rely on the love God has for us