The Character of Christ Part 5 (Jesus the Lover)
Notes
Transcript
1 John 4:7-10
The Character of Christ
Jesus the Lover
Introduction: If it is your first time joining us - Welcome! We have
dedicated this year to Biblical Literacy; meaning we as a church are
reading the Bible for ourselves to know first hand what it teaches and in
order to be shaped by the story of God. And along with that we are
teaching through the Bible on Sunday mornings - the main themes,
message and characters. Today we are closing out a 5 week series on the
Character of Christ.
We’ve considered Jesus the Teacher - Our Rabbi - who calls us to be his
disciples - To be with him, to become like him, to do what he did.
We considered Jesus the Healer. Looking at how Jesus didn’t just heal
people from their sicknesses and disease, he came to do a deeper work of
healing and restoration - from the destruction that sin has brought into our
lives and into the world.
We looked at Jesus the savior. We saw how Jesus is the true and greater
older brother who went out looking for us and gladly spent his inheritance,
not just risking his life, but giving his life, in order to to bring us into the
incredible, generous and gracious love of the Father. Jesus is the only true
Savior who came to seek and save what is lost.
We looked at Jesus the Servant. We saw how Jesus’ act of foot washing is
symbolic of his sacrificial death for us - we must be cleansed by Jesus.
We also saw how it is an example to us - serving, proactively going low, is
to be the continual posture of God’s people. We are to make ourselves the
servant of all because Jesus our king made himself the servant of all.
Today we come to our last character study - The Character of Love.
1. The Love of God
1. The Bible has so much to say about the Love of God - Psalm 107
calls all people, everywhere, to tell their story of how they have
experienced God’s great salvation and grace - as the Psalm closes
it says, “Whoever is wise, let him attend to these things; let
them consider the steadfast love of the Lord.” Psalm 136 is a call
and response Psalm and for 25 stanzas of proclaiming God’s great
works - calls for the response - “For his love endures forever!”
Psalm 33 and 119 tell us that “The earth is filled with the
steadfast love of the Lord.”
2. We’ve talked about this Love of God many times. It is the Hebrew
word Hesed and it means steadfast faithfulness - It is such a far cry
from our modern definitions of love, based usually upon how we feel
at a certain moment in time. Sally Lloyd-Jones in the Jesus Story
Book Bible defines it as, “God’s Never stopping, Never giving up,
Un-breaking, Always and Forever love.
3. John the Apostle who describes himself as “the disciple whom
Jesus loved,” tells us that, “God is Love” - Meaning God doesn’t
just love, he isn’t just kind, or nice - Love is part of his being, person
and nature, it is one of his divine attributes…
1. Love flows from or out of God and has God as its spring or
source. When you think about that it means then - that giving
what is good and serving the benefit of others - is closer to the
essence of God than getting and being served - God eternally
lives to lavish his love upon his creation. God loves, because it is
who he is. Christianity teaches that God is himself a community
the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and that this community of God
has existed for all eternity in a state of love, praise, and
deference to each other. (the uniqueness of the this doctrine
compared to other religions)..
1. “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; His erring child He reconciled, And pardoned from his sin.
2. When years of time time shall pass away, and earthly thrones
and kingdoms fall. When men who here refuse to pray, On rocks
and hills and mountains call, God’s love so sure, shall still
endure, All measureless and strong; Redeeming grace to
Adam’s race—The saints’ and angels’ song.
3. 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,
Though stretched from sky to sky.”
2. A Walk through the great Love of God
1. The whole creation story is full of God's gifts of love. Life is given
to creatures. Earth is given to humanity. Woman is given to Man.
Children are given to woman. God gives humans dominion over all
creation: Mountain ranges and waterfalls, deserts and jungles,
leopards, glaciers, sequoias, oranges, peacocks. He gives rain. He
gives light. He gets fragrances and flavors, even though, as a
spiritual being himself, has neither a nose nor a tongue. He gives
colors. He covers the earth with food giving plants or life-giving
water. He creates orgasms and oxygen. None of these things are
needed by God or deserved by his creatures, but he gives them
anyway. creation is a gift of grace and love.
1. Gods gifts are unequivocally good. Creation according to
Genesis 1 is good, good, good, good, good, good, and very
good. The garden is a paradise work is good. Sex is good.
Marriage is good.
2. Even after the Fall of humanity - the world is still filled with grace.
The rainbow guarantees goodness forever; the covenant of
Abraham concerns the blessing of the entire world. The Law is
good, reviving the soul. The land is good, with grape clusters the
size of a wine barrel. The temple is good, the joy of the whole
earth. There is no Trojan horses, beautiful evils, or jars of death
here, no secret misery is hidden in the small print. When God
gives, it is for the blessing of everybody.
3. But none of this compares with God’s inexpressible gift of his Son
- what can be compared with God himself? The incarnation is the
most extravagant gift in all history or literature, and the nativity
story draws out this point in a variety of ways from the subtle
greetings of, “O, highly favored one, the Lord is with you!” to the
blatant, "from his fullness we have all received grace upon
grace." God‘s gift of himself is the most outlandish demonstration
of love that God could possibly offer.
4. Everything he gives to the crowds that follow him is good - good
news, sight, speech, ritual cleansing, hearing, bread, teaching,
peace, social inclusion, forgiveness, table fellowship, life - all of this
is in someway a precursor to his gift of himself, of his own accord,
as a ransom for many.
1. His parables, strikingly, reinforced the picture of God as the
irrepressible giver, even when they are not mainly about God.
Once there was a farmer who scattered seeds so liberally that
most of it didn’t take root. Once there was a king who forgave a
debt of 10,000 talents. Once there was a vineyard owner who
gave people far more than their work was worth. Once there was
a father who gave away half his estate to his rebellious son and
then gave him a feast when he came crawling back home, having
wasted it all. Once there was a noble man who gave three
months wages to his employees, and then went on a foreign trip.
Once there was a landowner who gave his vineyard over to
tenets. Once there was a king who gave wedding invitations to
every undesirable in the country. In fact, it’s hard to think of a
parable in which a God figure features and he is not
characterized by giving away far more than he should.
2. There’s also a certain extravagance, verging on wastefulness to
Jesus' miracles. How many weddings have you been to where
they need 150 gallons of fine wine? Can a person who can
miraculously multiply bread and fish also count, so as to not end
up over catering by 12 baskets? If you could heal someone with
a word why would you wait until they’ve been dead for three days
before raising them, putrid grave clothes and all, in front of the
whole village? What is the point of walking on water rather than
swimming, or calming a storm rather than looking at the clouds
and muttering something about it being better to go sailing
tomorrow? Why does a death need to be accompanied not just
by earthquakes, dark skies, and torn curtains but also by the
coming to life from the dead for dozens of random people? Who
produces 153 fish out of nowhere, to the point where your friends
boats are nearly sinking? - As Psalm 107 says, “Whoever is
wise, let him attend to these things; let them consider the
steadfast love of the Lord.”
3. The Love of Jesus
1. And yet, these miracles, generous and gracious as they are, are so
eclipsed by the gift of Jesus Christ himself. Every act, every deed,
every sign, every word of Jesus drips with Love - he is the love of
God incarnate and all of this culminates in his life giving sacrifice
for the world on the cross..
1. Love is so associated with the career of Jesus, his life death and
resurrection, that Paul refers to it as the New Law for God’s
people - the Law of Christ is to love others in the same self
sacrificial way that Jesus has loved us… The Love of God
displayed in Jesus' self sacrificial death for the world becomes
the greatest display of love the world has ever known 2. John, the Apostle, defines love by the sacrificial life and death of
Jesus - "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from
God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows
God. Anyone who does not love does not know God,
because God is love. 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. 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. - 1 John 4:7-10
3. I think sometimes we can think of the love of God in General
sense - God so loved the world - That it almost becomes
impersonal but that is not how the apostles and writers of the NT
saw it. Yes God does love the whole world enough to give his
only begotten son, Jesus loves the world enough to lay down his
life for it’s life. But there is a radical personablness to God’s love
as well 4. John of course calls himself - the Disciple whom Jesus loved. We
are told, by John, that Jesus loved Mary and Martha and their
brother Lazarus.
5. We are told in the Gospel of Mark that when Jesus spoke with
the Rich Young Ruler that - He loved him. And yet, we know
Jesus saw right through him, he knew him…And He loved him.
6. Paul In Galatians 2:20 Makes this incredible statement - "I have
been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but
Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live
by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for
me.”
7. This is an incredible personalizing of the loving act of Jesus Paul says, (Looking at the cross) Jesus great act of love wasn’t
just general, it wasn’t just that God so loved the world in a
general, impersonal way, (I Just love everyone) - but that the
cross is proof that Jesus himself loves me, loves you, loves Paul and gave himself for me, for you…. It was my sin, my
brokenness, my healing, my salvation that was purchased at the
cross.
1. Can we say that with absolute confidence? I’m not asking if
you feel that you have earned the love of Jesus - I am asking if
you know that you are dearly loved by God in spite of yourself that he loves you simply because he loves you. Do you know
that; can you say that?
4. Closing: “There is tremendous relief in knowing that his love to me is
utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst
about me, so that no discovery now can disillusion him about me, in
the way I am so often disillusioned about myself, and quench his
determination to bless me. There is, certainly, great cause for humility
in the thought that He (God) sees all the twisted things about me that
my fellow humans do not see, and that he sees more corruption in
me than that which I see in myself. There is, however, equally great
incentive to worship and love God in the thought that, for some
unfathomable reason, he wants me as his friend, and desires to be
my friend, and has given his Son to die for me in order to realize this
purpose…. - J.I. Packer, Knowing God”
1. “Do you believe that the God of Jesus loves you beyond
worthiness and unworthiness, beyond fidelity and infidelity that he loves you in the morning sun and the evening rain - that
he loves you when your intellect denies it, your emotions refuse
it, your whole being rejects it. Do you believe that God loves
without condition or reservation and loves you this moment as
you are and not as you should be.” - Brennan Manning, All is
Grace
2. This is the amazing truth of God’s love displayed for us in Jesus
- we are fully known and simultaneously fully loved. That
combination brings a radical security - there is nothing hidden
from God - he knows it all - and he loves me - This has
incredible power to transform us into people who want to love
God in return, to obey him, to please him and also to be like
him - to love others in the same way that he loves us - May this
knowledge of God’s great love for us - grow in us - as Paul said
that we may be able to comprehend - what is the height, depth,
width and length - to know (By experience) the love of God
which surpasses knowledge…May this self sacrificial love of
Jesus, grow in us - that all people will see that we are his
disciples, that his life, his character is at work in us
1. “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in
my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in
my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments
and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to
you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be
full.“This is my commandment, that you love one another
as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than
this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You
are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer
do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what
his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all
that I have heard from my Father I have made known to
you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and
appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that
your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the
Father in my name, he may give it to you. These things I
command you, so that you will love one another.” - John
15:9-17