WHY DO WE LOVE ONE ANOTHER

Intro

Good morning guys, I hope you all have had a great week so far. I am so excited to here this morning. I know that you guys have been walking through the theme of loving your neighbor, and how you can do that. Today I want to talk to you about why? Why do we love our neighbor.

We can all sit here and come up with a ton answers to this question, but in the end the Bible is going to help us understand they why. So, let's look in our Bibles at 1 John 4:712.

1 John 4:7–12 (CSB)

KNOWING GOD THROUGH LOVE

7 Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his one and only Son into the world so that we might live through him. 10 Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice, for our sins. 11 Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God remains in us and his love is made complete in us.

The Nature of God. v 7-8

So the first reason we love one another is because of the character of God himself. We see in verse 7 where Love actually comes from. It comes for God. It's something that God has made a mark of his own character. That the way God wants us to see Him first and foremost is that he Loves. Now this not the only thing about God, if we were to bring in a book on the things of God, we would see God is a God of justice. But the Bible is going to make this constant claim that God IS love.

So as I read the Bible I am convinced that God wants us to know that about himself. That everything he does is based out of love. That is to say, that even when God acts out of wrath he is doing it out of love for His people. So, when we discuss the very nature and character of God, we should start with his Love. We don't read anywhere else in the Bible that God IS wrath, or God IS another attribute. But we do see God IS love.

God is love. Everything we know about him teaches us that, and every encounter we have with him expresses it.

Gerald Bray, God Is Love: A Biblical and Systematic Theology (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 17.

This sounds very odd to us who are finite creatures, because we are trained to think that if you are angry then you have no love. But thats not the case with God. Because has saved a people, and has His children his goal is to protect them. So, it is actually quite loving for God to show wrath towards sin because He is guarding His children.

If someone was to break into my house and try to harm my family it is loving for me to protect my wife and kids. So, when we think of the idea of loving each other, we have to think of it in terms of how Gods nature and that God is in fact the full embodiment of love.

How Does God Show This Love? - 9-10

So, knowing that God is the full embodiment of Love the question to ask next is for proof. Because I can tell you all day that I love you, but then never actually talk to you or show you any affection at all, and you would say well that might the fakest person I've ever been around. The same could be said of God, but there is proof of Gods love for us, it's proven all throughout the Scriptures. This text is going to lay it for us perfectly. I love the way the CSB says it here. That Gods love is REVEALED to us. How was it revealed? Through the death of Jesus. The Father sent His Son into the world so that we may actually know the depth of His love. We a reference point of how far, how deep Gods love actually goes for us.

Because if you ever doubt that God loves you, then you can put that thought away in knowing that He was willing and wanted to send His only Son to the world to die in our place. Because, here is the truth of the matter. We are not deserving of the Love of God at all. It would be perfectly fair and just for God to not offer us any chance to be saved at all. But instead He does he greatest act of sacrifice and service to us.

Gods love for us atones for our sins. Gods love from us frees us from death. So, then the next question that you need to ask yourself is this. Have I experienced Gods love, have I said yes to Jesus and the free offer of Gods love. Have I laid down myself and picked Him up.

The Purpose of our Love 11-12

Now, if God then has loved us like this, and if you are in this love. Then what is the reason we should love each other. Because our job is to mirror God. We are His image bearers and when God changes us by the Holy Spirit. Then we are made new and now our purpose then changes. We are changed from ones who loved sin to ones who hate sin. We are changed from one who says Ill take vengeance upon myself, to ones that lets God take vengeance for us. We are ones that are charged from saying its ok for me to hate my enemies, to ones who love our enemies.

But it even goes deeper than that I think. I think when we think about love and hate, we think very broad like what I just said. But what about relationships amongst each other. Heres what I mean. You know why you are not too have sex outside of marriage? Because you are treating the person you are in relationship with with love and respect. You are saying, God has plan and purpose for this person as an image bearer and I am told to honor her/him. Thats love. Thats how we love like like God loved us in Christ. We set aside our wants and desires for others.

Because listen if we claim to love God but then we turn and don't love others we aren’t Christians

For the loveless Christian to profess to know God and to have been born of God is like claiming to be intimate with a foreigner whose language we cannot speak, or to have been born of parents whom we do not in any way resemble. It is to fail to manifest the nature of him whom we claim as our Father (born of God) and our Friend (knows God). Love is as much a sign of Christian authenticity as is righteousness (2:29).

John R. W. Stott, The Letters of John: An Introduction and Commentary, vol. 19, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 161–162.

Love is the ultimate marker of what it means to be a Christian.

Charles Spurgeon said it like this “Our love to one another is simply God’s love to us, flowing into us, and flowing out again. That is all it is.”

Charles Spurgeon, Spurgeon Commentary: 1 John, ed. Elliot Ritzema, Spurgeon Commentary Series (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2014), 1 Jn 4:11.

Our love for others is the showing of how God loved us and how God loves those we come in contact with.