God's Presence Brings Love

Pastoral Prayer

Read together

- We pray for those who feel forgotten and unseen, may they know that they are remembered and seen by you God.

Search our hearts to reveal those we hide our faces from, the outcast, the stranger or the homeless. Change our hearts, that we may turn our faces towards these people and see them as your beloved children

Search our hearts to reveal those we hide our faces from, the outcast, the stranger or the homeless. Change our hearts, that we may turn our faces towards these people and see them as your beloved children

Forgive us where we have been distributors of shame and insult to each other.

- We pray for those we know who struggle with mental illnesses, anxiety and depression. Help us to be a friend and a listening ear to those who suffer. Fill us with compassion and wisdom.

Search our heart, and reveal to us the places we have ignored those who suffer in their minds. Change our hearts, and call us to love unconditionally, and to see them as your children who need the church to care and labor for their healing

Ultimately, we pray for those who wrestle with sorrow, that they may know your victory over those dark thoughts which currently seem to triumph.

- We pray for those who might be considered fallen by those around them: may they know your restoration and grace. Help us to not judge or exclude your beloved children, but instead lift them up in prayer, and embrace them with the grace we know in Christ.

Search our hearts, and reveal to us places where we have judged ourselves as unable to sin in the ways others have. Change our hearts, that we may acknowledge our total dependence on you for our forgiveness,and allow us to extend that forgiveness and grace to those around us.

- We pray for those among us who are suffering loss.......

Help us to be the body of Christ to them, to bear them up, and display the love to them that you have shown to each of us.

- We pray for each of us as we work to bring the kingdom of God to bear in our work and homes. Help us to not live apart from you, but by reading scripture, and continual prayer may we invite you to enter our lives, and sit at our table.

We pray for each of us as we work to bring the kingdom of God to bear in our work and homes. Help us to not live apart from you, but by reading scripture, and continual prayer may we invite you to enter our lives, and sit at our table.

Search our hearts, and reveal to us where we have trusted in our own abilities as our place of success and reliance. Change our hearts, and equip us to work as unto you.

- We pray for our governments local, statewide, and nationally. We recognize they are your minister working under your hand, and we pray they would exercise their power under your character of righteousness and justice.

Search our hearts, and reveal to us where we have placed our trust and reliance in government, and even in particular political movements. Change our hearts, and may our trust not be in man, but in you who are sovereignly in control of the world.

- We pray for those among us, and those abroad who are working to spread the good news of the gospel. May you be their strength, and their sustenance. Grant them success, that new peoples may come to trust in your gospel.

Search our hearts, and reveal to us where we have refused to be wiling declarers of your good news. Forgive us where we have shrunk back from declaring our reliance on your. Change our hearts, and help us to see those unbelieving persons in our social circles as in desperate need of your truth, and make us willing declarers of that good news.

Thank you, loving Father , for hearing our prayer. May you do this good work in our hearts for the glory of our savior, Jesus Christ. It is in his worthy name we present this prayer to you. AMEN

Salvation produces love.....Always.

A Passage written to the body - notice the use of we, our, and brothers - it is the language of brotherhood. The first and most important reality in the life of the brotherhood is love.

Summary statement: Salvation produces love…Always

Read the text

1 John 3:11–18 ESV

For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous. Do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you. We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. But if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.

Now, love is a word that is tossed around in our world with reckless abandon. And often, it is a description of what I find valuable, or enjoyable. I love sweet and salty popcorn. I love to go hunting. I love how you make me feel. I love Beethoven’s 7th.

What we are saying in that use of love, is when I experience those things, or people, I feel good, satisfied, fulfilled and happy. So, I love them.

Too often, this is the idea we bring into the brotherhood. I need to sing certain songs, or have certain opportunities in the worship service, or it will not make me feel the way I want to. I need to be cared for by the brotherhood in particular ways so I can feel a part of them. I need to have a certain person pursue friendship with me, so I can be welcomed and fulfilled. I need to have opportunities to serve in the ways I wish to, or I will feel unused and unwanted.

Our passage gives us guidance on how to think about love in the brotherhood. It gives us two specific directions. What love is not, and what love is. And in normal John language, he uses extreme and harsh examples to make his case. First we consider what love is not, and then we consider what love should be.

Love is not...

Murderous - Hating - despising

Anything that brings about the death, or tearing down of our brother

Probably the most devastating way we do this in our time is gossip, and faulty assumptions

Is it our nature to believe evil about a brother without inspection.

In love, we must slay these brotherhood killing habits.

If someone whispers in your ear the misdeeds of another, the response of love is to go directly to with that person to the brother in question

First to get the story straight, and if false to relieve him of the shadow of guilt

And second, if he is in the wrong, to lovingly, and shamelessly help him to make things right

Love removes shame, hate piles it on

Love bears another burden for his good, hate piles on another bundle

Love fights injustice, hate denies, and inflames injustice

Self-Exalting

Cain was focused on his own reputation, and his brother spoke against it with his actions.....

Isn’t the reason we are willing to tear down a brother always to lift up, or exonerate ourselves? If I can make him out to be this bad, I can prove I am not quite that bad.

not merely the absence of hate

Love is not just controlling behaviors of death

It is not just to stop gossiping or faultfinding

Vs 14

The nature of Christian brotherly love - Salvation produces love....Always

Christian Love displays the pattern shown by Christ’s love for us - Love is a duplicate of Jesus love for us. V16

They love like Jesus loved

We have several examples of Jesus loving

He served 5000+ hungry followers lunch in the wilderness…he used the riches of heaven to declare his generosity

He took a moment to recognize the plight of the woman with the issue of blood, and he healed her.

He lovingly served and shaped his disciples

He wept at the pain of his friends at the death of Lazarus

Primarily, though, he loved by giving his perfect righteous life for rebels like you an I.

A son bears the pattern of his father - in his talk, in his walk, and many other areas

Christian love has a primary focus on the brotherhood vs 11,16,17

Lenski “The plainest activity of the spiritual life is that of loving those who are one with us, (those who) are our spiritual brothers” (and sisters).

In truth, we are to love all people, but clearly here and elsewhere, there is a preference for loving the brotherhood

Jesus says, that the primary language that proves to the world that we are his children is not our lofty ideals, not our faultless behavior, not our perfect statements of truth, but in the way we love each other. That is how they will know that Jesus is the Messiah. “By this they will know you are my disciples, because you love each other”

This does not preclude doctrine, study, and obedience to all of scripture, but it simply places them in their right order. Salvation produces love....Always

What is the shape of this love? Active and effective - By this we know “the Love”,

Willingly sacrifices self

Shares of its earthly wealth

Flows forth from a redeemed heart who has received generous and undeserved love - Luke 7:47

Luke 7:47 ESV

Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven—for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little.”

Rightly ordered love sees two things

A knowledge of our sin, and unloveliness

A knowledge of the grace of God towards us in that state.

The one who is not loving dwells in death

The warning

Conclusion:

Consider this phrase in vs 17 “yet closes his heart to him”

Why does it say this instead of close it’s refrigerator, or close it’s bank account? Why does it say close our heart?

Could it be that the center of our behavior is governed by our heart? That is why the emphasis here, and in chapter 4 is to love.