1 John 4:7-21, "The Love of God for the World"
Sermon • Submitted
0 ratings
· 6 viewsNotes
Transcript
When I was younger, it seemed like everyone was obsessed with the rapture. This is the event in the end of time when all Christians will be caught up in the air to meet the Lord Jesus as He returns to earth. Certain creative people came up with all kinds of scary scenarios to describe the impact an event like that would have on the world. One person, writing from an American perspective, put it this way,
“Now try to imagine the U.S. losing a million people in the blink of an eye. Or 5 million people. Or 25 million people. Or more.
“If you’re riding in a car driven by a believer who suddenly disappears, that car very well could crash. If you’re on a plane flown by believers who suddenly disappear, that plane also could crash. Highly valuable and experienced military commanders and business leaders and medical professionals will disappear, perhaps in the middle of critical projects or medical procedures. The impact will be catastrophic.” (Tyndale.com)
The truth is that if all the Christians were taken out of the world, many things would look the same. The world would still have pilots, soldiers, business leaders, and medical professionals. But as it turns out one essential would be different. It would be a world without love.
John is writing this letter to Christians who are being tempted by false teachers to leave their faith in Jesus behind for a more “enlightened” philosophy. Following Jesus as a lifestyle comes with a high cost. The philosophies that are tempting people away from the faith have fewer demands. John is encouraging Christians they can be assured they have eternal life and fellowship with God in Jesus Christ. So stay on the path.
But not just for your own sake. The world needs you. We are the only way the world will know and experience true love. Just imagine, what would our world look like if everyone who understood love was gone?
Love One Another
Love One Another
“Let us love one another.” So far this is not newsworthy or interesting. We know we should love one another. It’s John’s reasons that draw our attention. “Let us love one another for...
love is from God
whoever loves has been born of God and knows God...because God is love
“Whoever does not love does not ‘know God at all, for God in his very nature is love. To the statements, then, that God is light (1:5) and God is righteous (2:29), John adds the supreme statement “God is love” (4:8, 16). Love so conceived is not to be understood as one of God’s many activities but rather that ‘all His activity is loving activity. If He creates, He creates in love; if He rules, He rules in love; if He judges, He judges in love. All that He does is the expression of His nature, is - to love.’ (Dodd, Johannine Epistles, p. 110).” (Expositor’s)
So, the obvious question is, can someone who doesn’t know God, who hasn’t been born of God, love others? Discuss for 1 minute with a friend beside you.
If it were true that people who do not know God are unable to love others in any way, then no atheists would ever love their spouses or children or friends. And we know that isn’t true. So maybe we need to understand what John means when he uses the word “love”.
John has already laid the foundation for understanding love in some other passages we have studied. He told us that the love the Father has given us comes from another place; 1 John 3:1 it’s a different kind of love than the love humans know naturally. And he followed that up in 1 John 3:16
1 John 3:1 (ESV)
See what kind of (lit., “of what country”) love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.
The world doesn’t know this kind of love. It’s not from here. The kind of love John is talking about is a love whose source is God. That makes it different than any other love you’ve known. How did God make this love known?
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.
This is giving, sacrificial love from a supremely perfect Person to sinful people. This is the One who is supremely worthy of the love of all His creatures, yet is unloved by them, and they should fear His wrath for their sin. But He loves them as their Savior. This is the love of a good Father who gave His most precious treasure, His only Son, to make slaves and sinners and dead people into children, fully alive.
So, if we want to know the kind of love John is talking about, here is the way we will know. It is not our love for God or anyone else...
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.
The love of God is known through the gift of His Son to be our propitiation. Propitiation appeases the wrath of God for our sins by establishing justice through the perfect obedience and loving sacrifice of Jesus Christ, cleansing the sinner who repents and believes, and reconciling us to our loving Father.
This is divine love. It is a very particular kind of love. John’s application seems impossible, then.
Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
This is how we ought to love one another? That would be amazing. What kind of a world would it be if people began to love one another in the way God loves? What if we loved people by serving them sacrificially in Jesus’ name so they could know forgiveness for their sins? In other words, what if we loved sinners and enemies in a way that demonstrated God’s love for them?
How is this possible? In our nature, we don’t love like God does. We love those that we find lovable, who please us in some way. We loves ourselves so strongly, that we turn love for others into self-love. Even our love for God can be really about loving ourselves.
“In religious terms, love is perceived as ‘essentially the love of man for God - that is to say, the insatiable craving of limited, conditional, and temporal begins for the infinite, the Absolute, the Eternal’ (Dodd)…love for God as it was expressed by the false teachers becomes primarily an exercise in self-gratification.” (Expositor’s)
There is only one way our world will ever experience the kind of love John is talking about. It is if God loves others through His children. And this is exactly how John says it will happen, in verses 12-21.
We Make God’s Love Visible
We Make God’s Love Visible
No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
As we begin to find a love for one another in us that wasn’t there before, John says we can know the reason it is there. God is abiding in us, and He is perfecting His love in us. This immediately removes the one biggest excuse for not loving others, the one that says, “I’ll start loving others when they start loving me better.” The only way to experience the love of God in this world is not to wait for it to show up in someone else. We begin loving others the way God loves us in Jesus, and we find God is there. Don’t wait for others to come to you. Go to them. Don’t wait for others to forgive you before you forgive them. You forgive them first. Don’t wait for others to help you before you help someone else.
In fact, John says this is the way God confirms that we have truly found new life in Him.
By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is God in us, empowering our love for others. The Holy Spirit gives us assurance of our eternal life as He loves others through us. But the assurance is not for us alone. John says when we see this happening, it is a testimony to others.
And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.
If you have seen Jesus as the demonstration of God’s love for you, and you respond by loving others in the same way you have been loved by God, your life becomes a testimony to the love of God for the world, and your confession of faith in Jesus as the Son of God is another assurance that God is living His life in you. This assurance is for you, it gives you confidence when you think about standing before God on judgment day. And it is an assurance to the world. God is for the world. 1 John 4:14 “And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world.”
I believe one of the reasons people don’t believe in God is that they cannot believe a good God would love a world as messed up as this one. God’s love for evil people doesn’t make any sense to our natural minds. It’s unbelievable. The only way to believe it is to experience it.
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.
As you experience God’s life in you, loving others through you, you can grow in your knowledge and belief of God’s love for you, and
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.
This world is indeed messed up. But remember God’s love is different than ours. He doesn’t need anything from us or our world. So He doesn’t love the world for what it will give Him. He loves the world for what He gives it. And “as he is so also are we in this world.” We don’t love the world for what we get out of it. We love the world for what God has done for it in Jesus.
God’s love will restore the world through His Son who died in the body to sin and death, is resurrected to eternal life, and ascended to rule over this world until all of His enemies have been overcome. On that day, He will sit as judge. Some enemies will raise their fists. Others will be anxious. We will have confidence, because we have come to know and believe in God’s love for us in Jesus. We have received perfect love through Jesus, and our fear is cast out.
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.
And this frees us to love in the way we have been loved.
We love because he first loved us.
Now John circles back to conclude where He began. For religious people who claim to know and love God, we have one sure test.
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. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.