Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro

Read 1 John 4:7-11

The Command to Love

1 John 4:7 (NASB95)

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God...

He has already written that those who are truly born again do exhibit the characteristic habit of love (cf.

2:10, 11; 3:14).

why command a person to love who can’t help but love, because he knows God and has been born of God?

Why tell a person to do a thing if he can’t do it?

And why tell a person to do a thing if he can’t help but do it?

God intends to fulfill his promise through the use of commands.

God has ordained to keep us alive in love by the regular feeding of his Word.

And the Word of God contains warnings, promises, and commands.

The commands are part of the food that the Spirit has provided for the nourishment of the saints, so that our love will thrive.

John calls his audience “beloved” demonstrating the love for the brethren that he admonishes.

This is a statement of identity.

John has been making statements about those that are from God or not from God.

These are the two categories of people.

Which camp do you fall in?

The Logic of Love

1 John 4:7–8 (NASB95)

...and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.

The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

“Born of God” signifies parentage in contrast to being the “sons of disobedience” as well determining the characteristics of one’s life flowing from one’s parent.

Likewise, “born of God” signifies that we are not “all God’s children.”

It only makes sense that we who claim to know God should love one another since God is Himself love.

As He is love, He is then the source of all love.

If we know Love and are born of Love, we should love.

If your mom is a moose, and you went to moose school, then you better “moose.”

Since God is the source and origin (ek) of love and all true love derives from him, it stands to reason that everyone who loves, that is, loves either God or neighbour with that selfless devotion which alone is true love according to John’s teaching, has been born of God and knows God

He that does not love the image of God in his people, has no saving knowledge of God.

There are three other statements in the New Testament concerning what God is in substance and nature: he is ‘spirit’ (John 4:24), ‘light’ (1 John 1:5) and ‘a consuming fire’ (Heb.

12:29 from Deut.

4:24).

Love is inherent in all He is and does.

Even His judgment and wrath are perfectly harmonized with His love.

not merely is loving, for then John’s argument would not stand; for the conclusion from the premises then would be this, This man is not loving: God is loving; therefore he knoweth not God IN SO FAR AS GOD IS LOVING; still he might know Him in His other attributes.

It is the most comprehensive and sublime of all biblical affirmations about God’s being, and is repeated here twice (8, 16).

Man remains unloving and unlovable till the gospel takes him in hand, and by grace accomplishes that which the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh.

The Letters of John: An Introduction and Commentary (1 John 4:7–8)

He who is love is light and fire as well.

Far from condoning sin, his love has found a way to expose it (because he is light) and to consume it (because he is fire) without destroying the sinner, but rather saving him.

knowing God necessarily results in being a loving person.

If you could know God and not be loving, then verse 8 would be false

The converse of of 1 John 4:7 is also true.

If you don’t love in action, then you don’t know and are not connected to the source of love, God.

How is God love?

The very nature of the perfect relationship of the Trinity is the embodiment of love.

In their perfect love of one another, the Trinity Persons establish the standard for us to recognize in a cognitive sense.

knoweth not—Greek aorist: not only knoweth not now, but never knew, has not once for all known God.

In the Bible, the word know has a much deeper meaning than simply intellectual acquaintance or understanding.

For example, the verb know is used to describe the intimate union of husband and wife (Gen.

4:1).

To know God means to be in a deep relationship to Him—to share His life and enjoy His love.

the great rolling ocean of the love of God, without bottom and without shore

love

God is love because the relationship between God the Father and God the Son is a relationship of love.

It has accurately been said that “love does not define God, but God defines love.”

The Doctrine behind Love

It is, as he began to say in 3:16, that God has revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ as self-sacrificial love.

God is love in himself (8, 16); God has loved us in Christ (10–11); and God continues to love in and through us (12–13); these are the reasons why we must love each other.

While the origin of love is in the being of God, the manifestation of love is in the coming of Christ.

No greater gift of God is conceivable because no greater gift was possible.

Beyond just understanding love in the cognitive sense, we see love on display through the person and work of Jesus Christ.

The crucifixion and resurrection are not explicitly mentioned, but the reader is to know that life through Christ is impossible without those historical acts of love.

Love is shown to not be ethereal, warm-fuzzies.

It is action.

Love that has no action is not love.

Just ask your wife.

It is not our love that is primary, but God’s (10), free, uncaused and spontaneous, and all our love is but a reflection of his and a response to it.

The coming of Christ is, therefore, a concrete, historical revelation of God’s love, for love (agapē) is self-sacrifice, the seeking of another’s positive good at one’s own cost

So the greatness of his love is seen in the costliness of his self-sacrifice for the wholly undeserving (cf.

Rom.

5:7–8).

The Greek aorist expresses, Not that we did any act of love at any time to God, but that He did the act of love to us in sending Christ.

Very naturally many conclude that this means “not that we loved God first.”

That is not exactly the truth taught here,

The unregenerate heart is, as to love, a broken cistern which can hold no water.

In our natural state, there is none that doeth good, no, not one; so is there also none that loveth God, no, not one.

We see in this exercise of God’s affection the grand condescension of the Lord to us.

Utilizing the word “propitiation,” John shows us that the love that is expected from us is sacrificial and selfless.

The Debt of Love

The historical manifestation of God’s love in Christ not only assures us of his love for us, but lays upon us the obligation to love one another.

No-one who has been to the cross and seen God’s immeasurable and unmerited love displayed there can go back to a life of selfishness.

Indeed, the implication seems to be that our love should resemble his love: since God so loved us, we also ought—in like manner and to a like degree of self-sacrifice—to love one another.

Cf. 3:16, where the duty of Christian self-sacrifice is deduced from the self-sacrifice of Christ.

Brothers and sisters, we shall not have grasped the truth unless we feel that our love to men must be practical, because God’s love to us was so.

His love did not lie pent up like the waters in the secret caverns of the earth

We are duty-bound in response to this kind of love from the very source of love.

Institutes of the Christian Religion (Institutes of the Christian Religion II, xvi, 4)

Augustine: “Incomprehensible and immutable is the love of God.

For it was not after we were reconciled to him by the blood of his Son that he began to love us, but he loved us before the foundation of the world, that with his only begotten Son we too might be sons of God before we were any thing at all.

God’s love is pre-existence, pre-creation love.

It is the conscious choice of the omnipotent sovereign to love those whom He had not yet formed.

The “if” of this verse is better rendered “since.”

The word “ought” carries the significant weight of owing like a strong “should.”