Agape-Love Your Spiritual Siblings Like God Loves You
Notes
Transcript
Handout
1 John 4:7-21
1 John 4:7-21
Dear Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ,
You can tell someone how to do something till your blue in the face, but until that moement of understanding comes - things just don’t click. That’s how it may seem like Jesus telling his disciples the way of love, or John now some 5o yeras later, telling these confused, tired, withdrawing Christians - to really love eacho ther. Buthten somehitn clicks and it makes sense in a way htat it never did before. Kind of like when Mark Twain on a tour… monotone - preternd to be hesitant and apologetic, started over a gain wiht same short story -shfiting seats. Then a thrid time - same hseitatnt, funny voice - then one and anoaher - caught on - he’s pulin gour leg, had the palce in sticitches, as like a wave of both relief but also understanding. Well, that same kind of meomewnt of realization, understanding, kind of liek you get it now - has to happen with this command to love one another - heard it once, Ih’ve heard ina hundred times - but just like another attribute of God, just like another comand of good duties God gives me - try to be kind and loving - like taping on a flower to a stem, or fruit. Actually this is the fruit of the Spirit of God, one love with all the other aspects. And JOhn in what is probablly the greatest section about love, greater than even 1 Cor 13, uses that uniuie Christ self-givign love - times in half a chapter. Three etimes the command, LEWt us love one another. This is the last time that JOhn is going to circle over this love test, each of them wtice already, but now love for a third time. But in this third time, its with the assurance and confidence that God’s Spirit is within us, its now with the realization that we can love differently because we have experineced This TRUTH within us, enables us nto see things differently. And so
Key Truth: Believers love each other like God loves, as they abide in God’s love and God lives in them!
We must begin then not with our love of God, or our love of others, but of God’s love for us, whici s both the course and the model of the agape loving that we are commanded to, and capable of letting flow to others.
I. The Source of Agape-Loving is God’s Love for Us
a. God agape-loving us
Now its true JOhn begins and ends, and puts in the mdidle this command about our lvoing one another - present tense, conitnous, keep loving, keepi practicing, grow in this new reality in how you live with spiritual spibblings. JOhn isn’t saying, you can just start lovinng like this and then you’ll be born again. No, right away he wants to give us the living source of real agape love.
1 John 4:7
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.
Peter Kreeft put it htis way. Agape love like this is not like other subjects. It cannot be understood and then practices. It can only be understood by practice. it more like measles than math. Our word love in our culture, like a warm group hug, sentimental emontoian word about your feelings for tsomething. BUt agpe love is an unconditional love a love tha seeks the hgihest good of the one you ar lvooing, and with a totlal commitment. And like the measal’s to really knonw it, you have to get it, not like math learned from distance. JOhn is saying love is not just by imitation from a distance, but more from participation from within, ongoing continuous tense. Our culture says love is about feeling passive and receptive - we fall in love, nice weather, good digestions, good vibrations, environment is where our loves come from. When it comes to people our culture says, I love if, I love you because. Not so God’s agape love! But agape love flows from the very heart - its a pariticpation with God at the cetnre of your being!
That’s what it means to be born-again, born of God, to really not just know about God, but persoally know HIm. COming to this table we are testifing that we hav come to know God, expeirenced that He does love us and that we live in his love.
John says, anyone who does not love conitnually, not perfectly, not without struggle, but anyone who doesn’t agape love - isn’t in a rght relationshisp with God, doesn’t really know God in Hebrew way. Why Because God is love. The world may say, Love is God. Vague sense that love is the right way, and if there is some abstract genral God - he would conform to our surpeme idea of love. Usually warm fuzzyg idea of love. But John says, no its not tha our idea of love is surpeme. It is that the LIving and Personal God - his inner hcracter is love, all of his actions, all of his character are love. Not like the other attributes of God - mercy, grace, justice, wrath - all inclusive and in harmony. But the NT describes three atttirubutes of God that sum up all the others, each by : God is Spirit. God is light. God is love. All His other attributes are done with this love - even HIs wrath - expression of love for His world, His reactino HIs people - responds in love to evil. And while he does not take pleasure in the death of the wicked, while as Isaiah 31 puts it - evil not something he created, and his response to it in a sense alien to His desired dealings; love is the most treasured attribute to us: he is slow to anger, but quick to mercy. ABOUDNING IN STEADFAST LOVE - hesed, faithfulness in action!
b. God’s Love Must Be Made Manifest
But this divine love, like agape love it produces in the one who expereiences it, it isn’t just nice feeling to other nice people. Agape love is practical it is action, not just a warm feeling. We dind’t really know what love was, until it’s fulness was uncovered to the human race in the Person and Work of Jesus. Look at how the love of God is described as a force in our lives that will create something new!
1 John 4:9
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 didn’t hate us, until Christ came and changed his mind on the Cross. God out of pure mercy loved us from all eternity, and he showed this by sending on a mission - the only One, the Son of God into this world. And what is the mission: so that we might live through him.
Do you get that - we need to be born of God, because by nature in this fallen world, we all cam e into it spiritual dead. We didn’t have a life in the family of God to live, we were under the wrath and condemnation of God - rliving reebelliously apart from God and apart from real hope! And though we had remnants of all types of love in us, we din’t have God’s love yet in our lives, nor did we live by it. But look what agape love does, not just sends a gift, look what this Jesus did:
1 John 4:10
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.
Elsewhere we see the purpose of Jesus incranation, his earthly ministry, his resrruected ascended job as head of new humanity, but at the very heart of God’s plan dn love we see that Jesus, the Christ was born to die. We see that though this love is so free, it comes witha great cost to the lover. We see that out of love Jesus is sent to propitiate our sin. Turn away the wrath of God from us. Have you ever stepped in between danger and another’s life - for our children - sheild and screen - hit me not them. ie. Miracle on River Kwai - miscounted shovels! As you come to the table your confessing out of love, out of a preference for your life - Jesus went through hell to save you. And rises again to say - believing in me, my death, now I rise, for your justification - yes sacrifice accomplished forgiveness, it paid the debt, defeated sin and death and hell, But now I rise up - so that justified status you start to live with God in new way!
c. The Results of Experiencing the Love of God in Christ is ABIDING
1 John 4:15-16
Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.
This is what Jesus prayed for you and men and promised us before going to the Cross: John 17:23
I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.
Do you believe the love God has for us, did this on the Cross, but then the love that the Son enjoyed from the Father - Jesus says, they will have that love in them, and the way the Son lived in the Father and Father in the Son, so united, now they will live with the Father and the Son in them! That’s what that word - abide means - Where do you abide, What’s your abode. It s the place you live. When you have taken to yourself Christ and all the benefits of his atoning, propitiating, expiating scarfice - God says I will now live in you! Jesus promises that what the Spirit’s job is now in your life and mine And so JOhn reminds them: 1 John 4: 13
By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.
Don’t you feel that even as you come to the table, cotnemplating not only his body and blood sacrficed for you, but offered to you as His life in and for you? And so the Spirit says, I have that Person Christ by the Spirit dwelling in me, I have his nature, his love overwhelming my soul - I ama son - daughter now - and my inner life participates int he very nature of the Living Loving Triune God! Romans 8:15-16
For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God,
So this is the cource, the example, and the result of God’s love, and we come not first of all syaing I love likehtis but that I experience this love from God, before I ever loved him or loved my neighbour like God loves!
II. The Command of Agape-Loving: Our God-like Love of Others
But then JOhn hastens on to the thrice repeated command: Let us love one another. Then at the end of these description soof God’s prior and first love of us, a twice repeated and vitally necessary second step in experiencing the agpe love of God. It’s like our childrehn’s song: ONce you’ve experienced it - you want to pass it on. I doubt that you missed the 3x command, and it hits your ears like Twains speech. But the aha moment is in the twice repeated 1 John 4:12 Perfecting of love!
No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
It’s not like there was anything lacking in God’s love to us, but still as we experience it, as we come to this table believing and receiving that perfect love, it hasn’t yet reached it goal by you and I, just receiving it has it. Christ came and offered himself up - so that we might begin living through him, right. How does that purpose get achieved? God’s agape love to you - isn’t supposed to be like a one way ticket to the destination of your home, your private bedroom, or to your pew in church here - cut off from others. No, its supposed to return ticket back to God. But even more like a passenger with a connecting flight, the final destination after it touches down in your life, is to go out to your neighbours house, this spiritual siblings life - and God’s love gets completed and perfected in our experience as we live that love with another!
And John has been saying, if we are not agape-loving others - if love hasn’t become our new default attitude and disposition to other people, even our enemies, not done perfectly, yet nonetheless still the new default position of my soul to others - we haven't yet known and experienced God and his love. God made his love visible! To whom are you doing that with practical actions? Here’s the trick question that John gives you and me: 1 John 4:20
If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.
Trick question: What is harder to love God or to love the people around you. John says, anyone even an unbeliever can claim to love God in abstract non-agape love kind a way, but to love a neighbour, a church member, a fmily member - one with flaws, annoyances, who rubs shoulders with you - to that love that person that is hard! But taht is how agpe love of God works, it only gets perfected as you practice, like God did, with flessh and blood people - you don’t love them because they deserved or earned it, you don’t love them more when do good things, or less when don’t pelase you. You lvoe them like God in Christ, whiel weere yet enemeis, we love not because they loved us, but because we first choose to love!
And so JOhn puts a second time, how is God’s agape love to you perfected? Only in relationships with others as you act and love like Christ, with them: 1 John 4:17
By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world.
What a high calling: As He, the LORD JESUS is, so now also by the same manner of love are we in this world! Do you get it now - like the crowd with Twain. Oh here’s the point - of course, not just repeating commands and duties. This is the logic of the gospel - indicative before the imperative. God’s action, before the command. GOd’s grace before your behaviour! Experience what God accomplished in Christ , and only then in the grace do I do the works prepared in adavnce for me. But the doing the works of agpe lvoe - that is the OUGHT of my life now. I have this love, it my obligation now to live that LOVE ONE ANTOHER LIFE OF THE NT>
And in theory that may sound nice and flowery. But as we come to this table we look not only in, and up, and forward, but look around - like Peter and John and Matthew would have at the first Lord’s Supper. John 13 new commandments i give unto you - love - I am among you as one who serves, Lord of the universe but humbmle servant! And not nice and flowery theory - but Peter saying I’ve got to love that dreamer John with his head in the clouds, Matthew looks at Thonmas, I got to lvoe that skeptic so weak and fretting. Thomas to Matthew I have got a love a tax collector. But look again John 13: 34 as I loved - love!
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.
Jesus isn’t talking about loving as the world loves, lesser love of appreciation and self interest - it used to be all about me, self on the throne, self-centredness, self assertion, conceit induglence, pleasing seeking senstivieness, self-dfenseiveness, self-sufficentcy. But Christ says - you really have experienced the New covenant , you have new love - just as I have loved - now you love one another.
God so loved the world that he gave … And Tertullion says, you know before the word sof the gospel penetrated my heart, the lives teh friendship the love of Christains did. I was brought to Christ not because he had studied the Scriptures but because he had seen Christians’ lives and coveted what they possessed that caused them to live the way they lived. Francs Schaeffer caaled it the final tesimony?
This is why John says, so much in that little word so 1 John 4:11
Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
God extrgavantly loved with self sacrfice and cost, yet so humbly, - and if He loved us like that surely that kind of love means all the barrier s we face in loving people around us, melt away! Edgar Guest has a poem entitled “Sermons We See.” It begins like this:
I’d rather see a sermon, than hear one any day; I’d rather one should walk with me than merely tell the way.
… And the best of all preachers are the men who live their creeds, For to see good put in action is what everybody needs.
Congregation, I hope you are basking in the love of God for you as you come to the table, but what of our partiicpatinig in that very same love in us that God will work toward others? John gives us one great encouragment to keep on loving like this, that is especially pertinent in our times!
The believers in John’s day in Ephesus, were living in fear! Fear of being wrong, fear of living wrong, fear of being left behind, fear of being alone, fear of persecution, fear of looking a fool, fear of judgment of God. But John says, not only will you living this agape e love in the community of believers - not only will that be God manifesting His love through you, but as you do that agape love will conquer all fears in your life!
1 John 4:18
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.
There is a healthy fear - respect. One taking communion last week, shouldn’t wwe always feel guilt. Of course sound cosience, But John is speaking of negative fear of punshment, of condemnation. But John is saying, there is a negative kind of fear that is about being condemened, unforgiven, not enough, judged, punished. And JOhn is saying, taht you willl live your life either by agape love or by negative fear. Fear is the legal principle - thin of what ahppens with fear paralyzes, keeps at a distance, anxious reaction, often angery, or sullen. Fear terments a life. But perfect love, agape love of God - that’s not a gelgal principel live by but gospel principle. YOu get this love confrmed even at the table this morning, then leave this table, not aghish torment and fear, but strong love, exercised - not distance to God and others - bold confdiience. Do you know that love fronm God? Do exercise it to your spiritual sibbling?
As Spurgeon put it: What is it we have been talking about? It is God’s love to us. Get the thought into your head a minute: “God loves me”—not merely bears with me, thinks of me, feeds me, but loves me. Oh, it is a very sweet thing to feel that we have the love of a dear wife, or a kind husband; and there is much sweetness in the love of a fond child, or a tender mother; but to think that God loves me, this is infinitely better! Who is it that loves you? God, the Maker of heaven and earth, the Almighty, All in all, does He love me? Even He? If all men, and all angels, and all the living creatures that are before the throne loved me, it were nothing to this—the Infinite loves me! And who is it that He loves? Me. The text saith, “us.” “We love Him because He first loved us.” But this is the personal point—He loves me, an insignificant nobody, full of sin—who deserved to be in hell; who loves Him so little in return—God loves ME.
YOu are loved by God like that, then you love him back, and when loving like that impossible that life is ruled by hate of others. We leave this table as God’s agents of love dispatched into the world for and in Christ!
What are we to do with a rebellious teenager? We are to love them with a love that costs us. What are we to do with a hateful, cruel, hurtful neighbor, church member, fellow worker? We are to remind ourselves of the cross and love them with sacrificial love. What is love? Amidst the myriad of voices claiming to define love, God plants a cross. Love is sacrifice. Love is taking the first step. Love is selflessness with people who are unworthy. New Testament love ‘involves a consuming passion for the well-being of others, and this love has its wellspring in God,’ says Bruce.
If we will do that: ‘the unseen God, who was once revealed in His Son, is now revealed in His people if ad when they love one another…God’s love which originates in Himself (7, 8) and was manifested in His Son (9, 10) is perfected in His people (12).
How Deep the Father’s Love for Us