“3D Love”

The magazine Vanity Fair recently (December 2015) published an article on the actress Jessica Alba, which had the following paragraph on Alba's faith and views on God:

Alba's childhood was marked by two things: illnesses … that landed her in the hospital often, and a burning desire to leave a mark on the world, which at the age of 12 meant becoming a devout born-again Christian. "I was seeking a purpose," Alba says of her years as a member of a conservative Christian youth group. "I wanted to exist for a reason." This lasted until she was 17, when, she says, she was turned off by the boundaries and labels set by fellow churchgoers. That year, she attended an acting workshop in Vermont and "fell crazy in love with a cross-dressing ballet dancer who had a baby and was bisexual. I was like, 'There's just no way he's going to hell!'" Acting opened her to a new world of creative people and a community where she belonged. "I felt like, at the end of the day, God is love and everyone is human."

I found this article interesting because it illustrates something very stark today. Even in the church, we just don’t have a clear understanding of the concept of love. We are not sure of the definition of love and therefore, we call things that are biblically loving, not loving, and things that are not biblical loving, loving. When we look for love in all the wrong places, it is because we don’t know what love is, not that we don’t know where to find it. Our confusion causes us to lose sight of genuine love and fall for the notorious tainted love.

1 John 4:7–8 NLT

Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

The grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of our God stands forever.

Love Defined

Love Divine

Love Displayed

The first thing we will look at today is getting a hold of a good definition of love. Second, we should see how this definition helps us to understand John in our passage today. Finally, we will see how love is a wonderful thing displayed by those who are empowered by the Spirit having faith in the Son of the living God.

Thesis: Though sin, the pattern of this world, and the false teachers all work to confuse our understanding of love to the point that we call loving things unloving and unloving things loving, it is the scriptures and the power of the Holy Spirit that will cause us to see clearly the content of a characteristic of God for love is not God… God is love.

I. Love Defined

- Love is a choice and a feeling.

A. Many of us will define “love” as an intense feeling of deep affection (Webster’s Dictionary). This is the most basic, obvious, and most common understanding of this thing called love. The problem with this definition we face today comes from the times, and oh we know the times, we do not feel feelings of affection for another. Do we stop loving? No. Not yet, anyway. Therefore, love cannot just be a feeling.

B. Think about it from our very experience, many of us still love a person even when we don’t feel like it. If this is not the case, how then are we supposed to love our enemies as ourselves?

Matthew 5:44 NLT

But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you!

C. Married people experience this quite frequently. Though we may feel like getting a divorce, we choose, instead, to love and stay married. “I love you, but I don’t like you right now.” In this light, a popular anthem today is “love is a choice.” But still, we can’t seem to ignore the importance of the feeling of love. Consequently, what I want to propose here is that love is so much more than just a deep affection; it is also a choice. Furthermore, love is so much more than a choice; it is a feeling. Therefore, love is a choice and a feeling.

D. So let’s flush it out a little bit more. You know as well as I do that we can’t make ourselves feel a certain way, especially toward people we don’t like. Can we really be expected to make ourselves have deep feelings of affection for them? Yet we can, no matter what some may say, control our actions despite our feelings.

E. For example, some will assert that they cannot control themselves when they are angry. But when they are at their workplace and their supervisor is present, it does not matter if they are angry. If they want to keep their job, they will not have an outburst. So you see, depending on the circumstance, we can control our actions despite our feelings. We do it all the time. When we have the outburst, it is because we chose to do it and don’t care about the ramifications. The issue is not that we can’t control ourselves. It’s that we won’t control ourselves.

F. Furthermore, we can still obey our boss even if we dislike him or her, and we can still give our spouse a kiss goodbye and say “I love you” and mean it, even though an unresolved disagreement lingers with feelings of disgust. But some of you may, at this point, interject that these situations are different. Loving our enemies is just one of those things that the Bible must be exaggerating. Some may also assert that ignoring our feelings about our bosses differs from blessing the person in the other cubicle next to us who curses us, steals our promotion, sabotages our work, slanders us in the break room, and immediately blames us for things that go wrong in the department. Kissing our spouse goodbye after a fight differs from doing good to a person who hates us, degrades us on social media sites, hacks our computer, steals our identities, cons us, steals things that are valuable to us, and outright tells us they hate us and will destroy us.

G. But in spite of all this, the passage of Scripture and command of Christ is not exaggerated. We are to love our enemies. We must make the choice to love them despite our feelings. What is more, Jesus actually gives us the seemingly impossible standard of how to love and how much we are to love our enemies. We are to love and do good for them in the same way we want others to love and do for us. This is a big deal. If you are not sure what or how you are to treat them, do what you would want someone to do for you. This is the Golden Rule according to Jesus.

Matthew 7:12 NLT

“Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you. This is the essence of all that is taught in the law and the prophets.

H. The Golden Rule commanded by Christ is a radical one. It demands so much more than the others we might have heard. It differs greatly from alternatives given throughout history. Yes, the Golden Rule of Jesus is a positive, not a negative. For example:

Tobit in the Apocrypha – “What thou thyself hatest, to no man do”

The Jews in Alexandria – “As you wish that no evil befall you, but to be a partaker of all good things, so you should act on the same principle towards your subjects and offenders”

Confucius – “What you do not want done to you yourself, do not do to others”

King Nicocles – “Do not do to others the things which make you angry”

Greek Philosopher Epictetus – “What you avoid suffering yourself, do not afflict on others”

The Stoics – “What you do not want to be done to you, do not do to anyone else”

Buddhism’s Undana Varga – “Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful”

Hinduism’s Mahab Haratta – "Do not do to others what would cause pain if done to you."

Zoroastrianism – "Whatever is disagreeable to yourself do not do unto others."

Islam’s Muhammad – “Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you”

Justin Timberlake – “What goes around comes around”

I. So you see, the other golden rules present it in the negative. Do not do something. You fail at keeping the rule if you do something bad to someone you do not want done to you. You do not want people to steal from you; therefore do not steal from others. You do not want people to lie to you; therefore do not lie to others.

J. Jesus’ Golden Rule is radically different. If you do not do good to someone, then you are failing. Do the good. It is not passive; it is active. You can’t just stay away from others and leave them be. You have to go to others and do good for them to fulfill the Golden Rule of the Lord. This is why I call it radical.[1] Puritan Scholar Richard Baxter states, “To do no harm is the praise of a stone, not of a man.”

K. This is what we capture from the end of verse 31. It is the standard of how we are to perform this Messianic Golden Rule with our neighbors and enemies. We are to love others as much as we love ourselves. For this reason, this passage is a great display of the truth of the Gospel and the transforming power of the Holy Spirit because in no way will this rightfully happen on our own. We are filled with the Spirit; that is why we are expected to fulfill the impossible. Do we not believe that the reason He expects so much from us is because we are filled with the Spirit and will therefore bear the fruits of the Spirit? Kent Hughes states, “This is how you are to treat your enemies! Is this unnatural, unconventional agape love possible? Can anyone today live on this level? With God’s help, yes.”[1] Therefore, the reason He expects us to be able to love our enemies is because we are the only ones who can.[2] If we are actually and correctly doing it, then we should praise the Lord because He has empowered us to to love our enemies and bless them in the same way we would want someone to bless us.

L. It is hard to think that there would be deep and natural feelings of affection directed toward our enemies. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that love is a committed choice. How can we be commanded and expected to love if it were not an act of the will? This is a choice to love them to the standard of loving ourselves whether we feel like it or not. It is a controlled action which we can do, but it is also a controlled by the Holy Spirit action when we love to the standard given by Christ. In us, love is shaped by the Gospel, and when we love our enemies, it will be a testimony to the power of the Gospel. This leads us to our passage today.

II. Love Divine

- God is Love.

A. Family, here is a sobering passage of Scripture. The love we have for others shows us the reality of our regeneration and our knowledge of God. Deficiency in love for others displays deficiency in our knowing God. Another way of putting it is that an unbeliever does not love because he does not know God.

1 John 4:7–8 NLT

Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

B. God is love so we cannot assume any true knowledge of God if there is no love for others. In other words, the reason we can love God and love our neighbor as ourselves is because we know God. Hendrickson and Kistemaker write, “The believer loves his neighbor as himself because, as John writes, the believer knows God. That is, he has fellowship with God the Father and his Son (1:3) and thus reflects the virtue of love.” Therefore, why would we think that we are born again if we have no love for others? Colin Kruse states, “The point here is that the absence of love for one another is evidence that a person does not know God because God is love, and there can be no real knowledge of God which is not expressed in love for fellow believers.” The Johannine (modus ponens) syllogisms (In logic, it is a form of reasoning where a conclusion is supported by two premises. All A is C; all B is A; therefore all B is C. All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal.) are clear.

Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God.

You love.

Therefore, you are a child of God and know God.

Anyone who does not love does not know God.

You do not love

Therefore, you do not know God.

C. John compares his readers who do not love with that of an unbeliever. This would be a serious comparison then, as it is today. Danny Akin writes, “The one who does not love is a stranger to God. He never even began to have a relationship with God; that is, there was never a time when this person could have legitimately claimed that he knew God.”[1]

D. I think you get the point by now. Let’s not forget this truth as we walk hand in hand with other members of our church community. There should be the waving of serious red flags if we have a community of persons that have no love for others. The new standard set by Christ is one that transcends what is humanly possible, and the love we are to have for our enemies is ridiculously hard. Therefore, can we at least love our friends, other Christians, almost as much as we love ourselves? If we look at our history and even around the corner, we can’t even love our spouses, friends, and family half as much as ourselves, if at all. This is the corruption of remaining sin in the Christian. This is where Gospel shaping comes on to the stage. We must repent and believe, in step with the truth of the Gospel, trusting the power of the Holy Spirit to transform our hard hearts into a softened heart. We are the temple of the Holy Spirit, filled with the Spirit, and gathered, enabled to experience a loving others as ourselves kind of community.

E. We must never forget our regeneration and our being empowered by the Holy Spirit. We cannot force ourselves to love others even if it is a choice, much less a feeling. With this in mind, instead of forcing love, we should get on our knees, repent, and pray to the Father for a fountain of love to well up in us; believing that He will cause us to walk as Jesus did (1 John 2:6). Moreover, we cannot force ourselves to love in order to be Christian. We love because we are Christians. We are not Christians because we love. We are Christians because we believe. And because we believe, we love. This is a reminder as to why this love, in a loving community, must be shaped by the Gospel. It is a fellowship of those who have been regenerated by the power of the Spirit and can, therefore, love as Christ loved. This is why the standard for love is so high. It is not by our might, but by the power of the Spirit that this is made possible. This community is not man made. This is community shaped by the Gospel.

III. Love Displayed

- The standard of Love is high.

A. We must never forget our regeneration and our being empowered by the Holy Spirit. We cannot force ourselves to love others even if it is a choice, much less a feeling. With this in mind, instead of forcing love, we should get on our knees, repent, and pray to the Father for a fountain of love to well up in us; believing that He will cause us to walk as Jesus did (1 John 2:6). Moreover, we cannot force ourselves to love in order to be Christian. We love because we are Christians. We are not Christians because we love. We are Christians because we believe. And because we believe, we love. This is a reminder as to why this love, in a loving community, must be shaped by the Gospel. It is a fellowship of those who have been regenerated by the power of the Spirit and can, therefore, love as Christ loved. This is why the standard for love is so high. It is not by our might, but by the power of the Spirit that this is made possible. This community is not man made.