1 John 4:7-10

Intro:

Don’t tell you love them until you are ready to put a ring on the finger.

Big Idea: Where does love come from and how is it revealed?

Love is From God

We have another exhortation to love one another. And you may be wondering, why is John harping on this over and over again.

Perhaps they needed to hear it over and over again for two reasons.

It is an essential part of living out the gospel. This is our witness to a watching world. If we can’t love one another through differences that in the grand scope of things, are insignificant, then how can we bear witness to something with eternal significance.

The human heart struggles to be unified. We need to constantly hear the message because our temptation is to elevate ourselves, our way of thinking about an issue and not listen, not consider, not give weight to other peoples opinions. Just for clarity sake, this encouragement for those who are already a part of the church. The know who Jesus is, they believe that he is the Son of God in flesh. So when I talk about listening and considering, I mean those who are already seeking to follow Christ. I talked to a pastor from southern California this past week and he was so proud that not one person left his church over how they handled COVID. While that is encouraging, it is also very sad. That people would leave their community because of how the leadership handled COVID. This is why we need to hear this exhortation to love over and over again. IT is so easy to get disagree on methodology that we can end up impugning motives and questioning character. So we need to love one another.

Love for others was an indicator that we were walking in the light. Walking in God’s holiness. Second, it was evidence that they are a child of God. And now it is an exhortation.

This love is not something we can conjure up on our own. It is not something that we can get from a podcast or a YouTube video or some well-worn cliches. The type of love we need and what the gospel calls us to is a sacrificial love. This is the type of love God gives to his people.

And love toward your brothers and sisters is not optional if you are a Christ follower. And this type of love comes from knowing him. You have to be united to the source.

Can you be loving and not know God? Most of us probably know someone who is kind, and they aren‘t a part of any church or religious organization. So what is the source of that love? If God is not the source, the love is lacking in some way. And the love that we are called to found is in 1 Corinthians 13 is frankly impossible to do if God does not energize it.

And as we’ve talked about before, the love that God is the source of is the type of love that we are to demonstrate. That does not mean that we will always get it right.

But it does mean that love is not optional for us. Sometimes we treat Christianity like we are ordering food. When I order a burger, I don’t want tomatoes. Not a fan. But we can’t approach Christianity that way. WE can’t say, Ill take the salvation, but hold the love. I don’t like doing that. The mark that God has done something in our lives is shown by how we love others!

God is Love

John in the gospel refers to God being Spirit. Earlier in this letter he talked he said God is light.

God did not become loving at a point in time. He has always loved. Before anything was ever created God existed as Father, Son, and Spirit, and they were bonded together in holy love. This is significant because

“Love is love only if it is directed out, only if it seeks the good of another. Self-love is not fully love. A lonely single person cannot be love. Allah cannot be love. Neither can the deist God of the eighteenth century, whom many Christians have confused with the God revealed in Jesus and the Bible. The pantheistic God of New Age ecological idolatry cannot be love, because everything is really him, so loving anything is loving him/it/herself. These gods, these idols, cannot be love, and they cannot express love for us. Their love for us cannot express their deepest inner being.”

It is important to realize that saying God is love does not exhaust all we can say about God. But what we can say is that the dye has been cast. Everything God does, in all his acts are done with his love in mind. Does that mean we understand it? No!

Let’s delve a little deeper on what it means that God is love

It means he is good. That he is generous and kind. That he is gracious. That he is slow to anger and abounding in stead fast lvoe. That he is steadfast.

It means that his love is directed. Remember God’s love has an object. He places his affections not only as Father, Son, and Spirit but on his creation. Which is remarkable. Cornelius Van Til compares it to an incident he saw on a train, where a small girl sitting on her father's lap slapped him in the face. God still loves us in spite of our repeated slaps to his face.

God shows this love to specific individuals like you and I. Ephesians 1:4 “even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love”

4. God’s love is effective. Romans 5:8 “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” When God touches us specifically with his saving grace, we receive his love and we run to him. We are not dragged kicking and screaming. God is not a cave man and we are beaten into submission to worship him. God‘s love, his grace warms our heart to him and run to him, we don’t come kicking and screaming.

5. God’s love seek our ultimate good.

But my children don’t always understand why they have limits. Why screen time is limited? Why they can’t watch every movie they want to. Does that mean I am on ogre for restricting them? It could if it was arbitrary. But if it has en and and a goal, then just maybe it demonstrates love. In the same way, even in the limits Gods sets are done in love.

But this is so important to remember when our live goes differently than how we expect. The health diagnosis that turns everything upside down. The business that we started that falls apart. The child that goes wayward. The difficult marriage that we struggle with day in and day out. the mental health issues that we struggle with. Anxiety, depression, etc. As difficult as that may be, remember that all of this is cast with the dye of God’s love. Yes these things are a part of living in a fallen world, but they are not outside of his control. Find the taint of love found even in your difficulties and disappointments.

6. God’s love is for us found in the gift of Jesus Chirst.

God‘s Love demonstrated

In this is love - manifested sending his son to give us life. God’s love comes at a personal cost to himself. He is willing to do what ti takes to bring the gift of salvation into reality.

In this is love - he loved us first and send his son to be a propitination. WE’ve seen this word before. It means

Propitiation - here is your $10 word. We don’t use this word a lot. Probably never. It means to turn away the wrath of God.

Why is God wrathful…is this good cop bad cop. We can’t paint the Father as the Ogre of the Old Testament and Jesus as the Peace Hippy loving everybody in the New Testament. That is the picture that comes to mind when we think of wrath and Jesus pacifying it. But why would God be angry or have wrath toward sin.

With this [triune] God, it is not as if sometimes he has love and sometimes he has wrath, as if those are different moods so that when he’s feeling one he’s not feeling the other. No, for all eternity the Father was loving his Son, but never once was he angry. Why? Because there was nothing to be angry with until Adam sinned in Genesis 3. So God’s anger at evil from Genesis 3onward is a new thing: it is how the God who is love responds to evil. Like God’s holiness, then, his wrath is not something that sits awkwardly next to his love. Nor is it something unrelated to his love. God is angry at evil because he loves. Isaiah speaks of the pouring out of God’s wrath as his “strange work,” his “alien task” (Is 28:21), because it is not that God is naturally angry, but that evil provokes him: in his pure love, God cannot tolerate evil. That makes complete sense to me as a father: if I could twiddle my thumbs and yawn while my daughters suffered, it would prove I didn’t really love them; but precisely because I so love them I hate the thought of anything evil befalling them. How much more is it so with the Father of lights, in whom there is no darkness at all. Love cares, and that means it cannot be indifferent to evil. “Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good” (Rom 12:9). Only such love is sincere....[W]ith the God who is eternally love [as a result of His triune nature], his anger must rise fromthat love. Thus his anger is holy, set apart from our temper-tantrums; it is how he in his love reacts to evil. The Father loves his Son, and so hates sin, which ultimately is rejection of the Son; he loves his children, and so hates their being oppressed; he loves his world, and so hates all evil in it. Thus in his love he roots out sin in his people, even disciplining them that they might be freed from their captivity to it. In his love he is patient with us. And in his love he promises finally to destroy all evil as light destroys darkness.

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.”

It was the love of the Father, that maintained his Justice and saved you!

In the picture of a righteous advocate standing before the Father on our behalf, ‘the case is not that of love pleading with justice’. Rather the opposite: ‘Justice pleads with love for our release!’ (Findlay).

This gift is for all. Not for every human who has ever existed, but no one is excluded from the gospel. Slave, nor free, male, nor female, Jew or Greek. Rich or poor. LGBTQ+ community. The gospel needs to be offered to all.

And what is truly remarkable about this is that God moves toward us first. We didn’t choose God and then he came and said, you know what, I’m holy, but I will make a way for you to be in my preseence. Not at all. God chose us and made a way for us to be in his presence through the work of Jesus and we respond to that work by trusting in it.

Conclusion: We are called to love. As those who have experience God’s amazing grace, we are called to rely on the source of our love, God himself. But there are some here who may have never received God’s love in the first place. I want to encourage you to see what God has done in history through Jesus Christ and receive the gift of his love by placing your faith in him.

For those of you who are already Christians. In a few moments we are going to baptize Emma Aguilar. And I want you see this baptism as a picture and reminder of God’s great gift of love toward you and me. And remember that his love for you is not a one time event, but and ongoing relationship and that once you are in fellowship with him, his Fatherly love for you will never fade, diminish, or go away because you are found in his son whom who will always and has always loved.