Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

God is love.

I think there are times in our lives when that statement feels more true than at other times.

There are times when we would easily agree with that statement, and there are times when our mouth may state the words but our minds and hearts have a difficult time justifying the statement with the events we see and experience around us.

ESV

7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.

10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

God’s Love is the Evidence of the Believer.

(7-8)

(7) Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.

(8) Anyone who does not love does not know God,

We show we belong to God when we love like God. (7-8a)

common love vs. uncommon love

Common love (kind we see in the world) is love that gains you something.

Uncommon love

• Loving others when you gain nothing.

• Loving others at great expense.

• Loving people who don’t love you back.

(8b) because God is love.

God loves because he IS love.

(8b)

• The statement is not “God does love” - it is God IS love

• It is not a statement of doing - it is a statement of being

You do flows from what you are.

• i.e., I’m a pastor - at some time we going to talk about Jesus!

• Why is that significant?

• because it means that God cannot do anything that is NOT loving.

Theologian A.W. Tozer once stated,

“Nothing God ever does, or ever did, or ever will do, is separate from the love of God.”

That may be a hard statement to swallow for you right now, but it is the truth.

‘God is love’ is not to the exclusion of his other attributes:

God is spirit:

ESV

24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

God is light:

ESV

5 This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.

*Notice: Because God’s nature is light, there is no darkness in him at all.

› *God (and his people) love because it is in their nature.

God, because it is who he is as God, and his people because the Holy Spirit lives and works through them.

God is love.

I think there are times in our lives when that statement feels more true than at other times.

There are times when we would easily agree with that statement, and there are times when our mouth may state the words but our minds and hearts have a difficult time justifying the statement with the events we see and experience around us.

God’s Love is the Gift of the Believer.

(9-10)

(9) In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.

God showed the world his love by sending Jesus.

(9)

3 ways sending Jesus showed God’s love:

1. God SENT Jesus

it is easy to love from a picture - it is something completely different to enter into their mess.

2. God sent Jesus to the WORLD

While in our rebellion against him, God sent his Son.

3. God sent Jesus to DISPLAY love

Jesus showed by example what God’s love really looks like.

• healing the sick

• touching the leper

• feeding the hungry

• honoring women

• loving those called unlovable

• eating with sinners

Jesus shared God’s love by satisfying God’s wrath.

(10)

(10) In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

Propitiation = atone = kippur

Atoning for what?

our sin.

Atoning from what? God’s wrath.

While God is indeed love we must never forget that he is also a God of wrath.

J.I. Packer summarizes: “God’s wrath in the Bible is never the capricious, self-indulgent, irritable, morally ignoble thing that human anger so often is.

It is, instead, a right and necessary reaction to objective moral evil” (Knowing God, 151).

Four truths about God’s wrath:

1) God’s Wrath Is Serious (fearful)

God’s wrath is not popular, but it is biblical

God is not a warm sugar cookie or a big plush teddy bear - He is a consuming fire.

God is love, spirit, light, and also a consuming fire:

ESV

29 for our God is a consuming fire.

Jesus is the Lion of Judah - not the Cowardly Lion of the Wizard of Oz

ESV

31 It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

2) God’s Wrath Is Just

ESV

5 But because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.

A willful rebellion against an eternal God deserves and eternal punishment.

The wrath of God is not in contradiction to the love of God.

In fact, it is because God is by nature love, that God’s wrath exists.

They are two sides of the same coin.

How do the two work together?

We call it - justice.

Theologian Miroslav Wolf used to call the idea of an angry God ‘barbaric,’ but then his country of Croatia experienced a war.

He writes,

“My last resistance to the idea of God's wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come.

According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced.

My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry.

Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God's wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn't wrathful at the sight of the world's evil.

God isn't wrathful in spite of being love.

God is wrathful because God is love.”

ILLUST - the ‘loving’ but unloving judge.

• Because God does all things for his own glory (and that is right and good) he must punish (justly) any attempt to steal his glory.

Sin on our part is stealing God’s glory - sin against an eternal God has eternal consequences.