The Love of God

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ. Based on the theme in Galatians 2 verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said,.

But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you. In short, if you like smooth, watered down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry.

The Love of God and the Meaning of Agape

My name is Mike Abendroth, and today we're going to be talking about a very important topic, a topic that I want you to think properly about, and I also want you to think biblically. I guess proper and biblically would be together.

And so what is that topic? The topic is the love of God. What is the love of God? Does God love? How does God love? Does God love in ways that are different than our love? And what should be our response to the love of God?

So today we want to talk about the love of God. You say, well, your slogan is always biblical, always provocative, always in that order. How can the love of God be provocative? Well, once you hear me talk about the definition of the love of God and how God's love is uninfluenced, sovereign, distinguishing, I think you'll realize that it's a fairly spicy topic indeed.

But before we do that, we've got to kind of work up to that, and it might take me some time to get to the provocative stuff, but that's okay. We'll work together. And if you are impatient, roll down your window in the car if you're listening in the car to 760 WV &E, and just embrace some of that wonderful, clean, crisp Worcester air, and I think you'll be fine.

Today, the love of God. The Bible uses lots of words for love, and so that's one of the big things that we need to work through. There is eros, E-R-O-S, and you might be thinking, that sounds like erotic.

You would be right. There's an eros love, and that love is an erotic love. It's a physical love. It's a sexual love, and the Bible mentions that. And if you talk about that love and engage that kind of love in context, a biblical context, you're fine.

And the biblical context for erotic love is in marriage between a man and a woman. And so the Bible is certainly not Victorian. It's not prudish. It's certainly not on the flip side pornographic, but it's very clear when it comes to erotic love.

Proverbs 5, Song of Solomon, and so that is a fine kind of love. It can be taken like anything else because of sinful nature and sinful humanity, taken too far, taken wrong ways, but that's the one kind of love.

There's another kind of love that we call Philadelphia love, and that's the Greek word phileo, and that's the word for brotherly love, brotherly kindness. And so that's a wonderful kind of love, camaraderie type of love, band of brothers kind of love.

There's another kind of love, storge, and storge is talked about in 2 Timothy 3 in end times language. How do you know you're in the end times? But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come, for men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy.

And now in verse three of 2 Timothy 3, we get the word where storge is used, and that is family love. And in this particular case in the end times, there's a lack of that, unloving, where there should be love in a family, there's this family love that is absent, and you can tell you're in the end days when that is happening.

And then the final kind of love, the love that we'll focus most of this program on in the next program is agape love. God's love is agape. And so this was a word that was around in Old Testament times, New Testament times, but it didn't really have the kind of meaning that the New Testament writers gave it.

The background is basically this. There are a bunch of gods, small g, all competing with each other and wanting to get their followers to follow them. And they would many times lust after the women who were worshiping them.

But they wouldn't love sinners in the way God loves sinners in a self-sacrificial way. And it's as if the New Testament writers grab this word or rescued this word or Christianized this word. And this word basically means to seek the highest good in the object of the one who is loved.

Seeking the highest good in the one loved. And so C .S. Lewis would say, God who needs nothing loves into existence holy superfluous creations in order that he may love and perfect them. That is agape love.

A love that seeks the welfare of its object. And so that's the love we're talking about today on No Compromise Radio. It's the kind of love that Galatians 2 .20 speaks of, where the son of God loved me, Paul said, and gave himself for me.

It's not a feeling-oriented love, agape isn't, although I'm sure that could be secondary. It is a love of self-sacrifice. It is a love that says, I know you deserve something different, but I'm going to love you anyway.

Arthur Pink said, it is staggering that God should love sinners. Yet it is true. God loves creatures who have become unlovely and unlovable. And so we think about that. Actually, that's a J .I. Packer quote, not a Arthur Pink quote.

So when you think of love, you're going to have to think of the biblical kind of love. You can't think of some kind of love by traditional standards and its definitions, love by what you think it is, what movie stars say it is, what poets say it might be, rock stars.

You can't use love in the kind of, I love Coke, I love dogs, I love corn dogs, I love my boyfriend. You can't do that. Here's the Pink quote that I was thinking about in his great book, Attributes of God, maybe my favorite book outside the Bible.

There are many today who talk about the love of God who are total strangers to the God of love. Divine love is commonly regarded as a species of amiable weakness, a sort of good-natured indulgence. It is reduced to a mere sickly sentiment patterned after human emotion.

End quote, page 77. This kind of George Burns, grandfather, indulgent, oh God kind of love has nothing to do with the love of the Bible. We have to be very, very careful that the scriptures teach us and inform our minds what biblical love is.

And we have to remember that love is not defined by society, not defined by us, but what the Bible says. Berkhoff said, God loves believers with a special love since he contemplates them as his spiritual children in Christ.

It is to them that he communicates himself in the fullest and richest sense with all the fullness of his grace and mercy. God loves sinners. He looks out for the best in them. He seeks their highest good.

He seeks their welfare. Some people run around and say, well, since God is love, that basically means love is God. And you can switch the words around without switching the meaning. This would be pantheism.

This would be somehow thinking that everything that is love is God. That sounds more like Dr. Phil or Oprah or someone else. 1 John 4, 8, the one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. Now, certainly we believe that God is love, but God is more than love, isn't he?

This is not the pinnacle of his attributes. This is not his only attribute. Nowhere in the Bible does it say God is love, love, love, like the text says in Isaiah 6, where the angels say, holy, holy, holy.

You cannot exhaustively describe God by saying that God is love. Now, what I don't wanna do is swing so far away from the modern evangelical that we distort the God of the Bible. I don't wanna run into the error that the other people do, but it is true that most evangelicals talk too much about the love of God, that somehow this love becomes indulgent and it just does whatever, it just puts up with whatever.

It reminds me when my grandmother said, the next time you disobey, Mike, when I was five years old, I'm gonna go over there and get that yardstick. You know, you used to get those free yardsticks as giveaways from banks or hardware stores, and I'm gonna apply that to your rear end.

And so I realized that she never ever would do that because she was all talk, and she had said that many, many times before. So I walked over to Grandma Nona's table area, picked up the yardstick, broke it in half, and now it's two half a yard sticks, and gave it back to her.

And she still didn't spank me. That kind of representation of God would be wrong, that he's only love, and there's nothing you can do to make him angry, wrathful for him wanting to exercise his righteous justice.

No, we don't want to do that. We wanna make sure that we talk about God's self-sacrificial love in context, but we talk about other things as well. God is not just only love. It is, he has more attributes.

When I asked Sinclair Ferguson, the great scholar, what is God doing right now? He said, God is simultaneously exercising all of his attributes. So while we wanna think about God's love in a show like this or in a sermon, that is fine, but he has other perfections, other attributes, other things as he communicates who he is to us in nature, and specifically in Scripture and his son.

God is love, but God also is holy. God is love, but God also is wrathful. You don't wanna push it too far. If you have God as love, meaning that he's just a loving being, but he's not holy, you're going to run into lots of problems.

Some people don't think that God's holiness and God's love could ever be reconciled. How could one being, one God, have both of those? Well, he is holy and he is loving. Did God not spare his son? God did not spare his son.

Jesus became sin for us at Calvary, and so what did God do? God the Father poured out his wrath, his holy wrath on his son. Jesus was wounded for our transgressions. It was the will of the Lord to crush him.

It is true when the Bible says, for God so loved the world, he gave his only son. The Father did love the world, so he sent his son. Yet the Father poured out his wrath on the son because he is too pure to look on evil, and he needs to punish evil.

So what happens? I think of the well-known hymn that says, love found a way to redeem my soul. Love found a way that could make me whole. Love found a way to redeem my soul, yet holiness was not offended.

God's love did make us whole, but not at the expense of his truth, not at the expense of his holiness, but at the expense, as Culver said, of the life of his only begotten son, not at the expense of his holiness, justice, or truth.

The Cross, Romans 5, and Eternal Love

When you think of the love of God, I want you to think of the cross. The cross will help you in so many ways because the love of God there was just seen in blazing technicolor. If you think of IMAX movies and how crisp they are and how clear the DVD, the HD is, and the 3D, you think that when it comes to the love of God, that's where it was profoundly shown.

Oh, certainly the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us, Romans 5, verse 5, and he does that with not a sprinkling, not with a little dabble, do ya, but a pouring out, a free flow, a large quantity, an inundation, one man said.

That is true, but I think when you believe that Jesus died for sinners at Calvary, that's where God demonstrated his love for us because that's what Romans 5, 8 says. God demonstrated, he proved, he rendered conspicuous, he made an exhibit of his love towards us and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

And if you're a Christian, you ought to say to yourself, I know God loves me, I know God loves me because I'm in this trial, I've got this financial issue, I've got this health issue, there are conflicts in my relationships and at church.

No, don't ever say to yourself, does God love me and let me go through this? Because what you should be thinking of is the cross, going back to Calvary where God's own love towards us was demonstrated and he would love sinners and have his son die for us, that is amazing.

And that is love, that is self-sacrificial love that gives at the expense of self. Here is this gracious love because Jesus is dying for sinners, for those who would kill him if they could, those who are dead in trespasses and sins and are blind to this God of the universe because this God of the world, Satan is blinding them.

And so that's where we find the love of God. You say, well, I wonder when that love started. Well, that love that was shown on Calvary had a beginning and it was in the eternal counsels of God. God's love is eternal.

As God is eternal, having no beginning and no end, so too is his love for his people. Reminds me about his love for Israel. I have loved you with an everlasting love. I've loved you with an everlasting love.

For the Christian, God's love started in eternity past when God predestined you. Ephesians 1 .4, just as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.

In love he predestined us. People say, oh, predestination is not loving. Well, that kind of talk is unbiblical. It is not right because the text clearly says, in love he predestined us to adoption as sons.

When a couple adopts a child, what a loving thing to do, giving them their name, giving them a place to stay, giving them food, taking care of them, inheritance, adopting them, family. What an act of love.

So too, and how much more in Ephesians 1. In love he predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to himself according to the kind intention of his will, his free, his sovereign, his uninfluenced will.

He said, I will love you before time began, and I will show my love the pinnacle, the apex of my love will be seen when Jesus dies on Calvary for you. And so we have to realize that this great God's love can be seen mainly not in some kind of maudlin, mushy, sappy, tear-jerky kind of way as God would somehow ignore sin or sweep it under the table or wink at it, no, that God in his loving holiness and his holy love still punishes sin, punish Jesus in our place instead of us, that's kind, that's loving.

That should cause you to praise the Lord, especially when you realize this, that there is nothing in you, there was nothing in you for God to say, I think I'll choose that person to love because they're so lovely.

Did you know for each and every believer, for every person that's ever believed, from Paul the Apostle to Peter to James to Stephen to you, if you're a Christian, there was nothing in you or them to attract or prompt his love.

It was the opposite, there was enough to repulse, there was enough to run away from, there was enough to destroy, but this love of God is uncaused. The only reason God loves anyone, even you if you're listening, is found where?

In his own predetermined, sovereign, uninfluenced will. God's free will, he said, I will love you with an everlasting love. There is nothing in you, nothing in any of the objects of his love to call his love into exercise, Pink said.

Nothing in us to attract or prompt his love. When we love people, it is because there is something in them that makes us want to love them. But the love of God is free, spontaneous, and uncaused. The only reason God loves anyone, or even you, is found in his own sovereign will.

A .W. Pink, The Attributes of God, page 77. Isn't this love of God similar to how God loved Israel Deuteronomy chapter seven, the Lord did not set his love on you Israel, nor choose you because you were more a number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of the peoples, fewest of all peoples.

But because the Lord loved you and kept the oath which he swore to your fathers, the Lord brought you out by a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.

God didn't choose Israel because they were lovely. Read Israel's history a little bit and you'll find that's not the case. He chose them because he wanted to. He loved them because he decided to. And it's the same for the Christian.

Second Timothy chapter one, verse nine, who saved us and called us with the holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was granted us in Christ Jesus. Now here comes the drum roll.

When was this granted? What time was it granted? And what age was it granted? From all eternity. Friends, you love God because he first loved you. It's not the other way around. He loves because you first loved him.

No, you didn't move one nanometer, millimeter, parsec. I don't know what the different units of measure are, but there was nothing in you to make God love you. There was everything in you to make God loathe you, yet he loved you.

So shouldn't you be excited, happy, thankful, feel blessed? Yes, God did it all. Jesus paid it all. Sin had left a crimson stain, though he washed it white as snow. God had Jesus die for us, not to make us lovable, but because he already loved his people.

And so when you look at the cross, you think to yourself, love. First John 3 .16, this is how we know what love is. Jesus laid down his life for us. First John 4 .10, this is love. See how we have to look at biblical definitions and have to think about things biblically?

This is love. Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Before I go any farther, when you think about songs and responses and practical implications, by the way, this is Mike Abendroth, No Compromise Radio, 760 AM, Worcester, WVNE.

When you think about implications of this truth, would you rather sing about your love for God, God, we love you, when you know that love for God is faint, fickle, frail. Sometimes it's a lie if we're to love God because we can show that by keeping his commandments, how we don't obey, even as Christians, how we fall short.

Don't you think you should rather sing songs about God loving us? This is what real love is. Jesus was sent as a propitiation for our sins. That's better language and that's better theology and that's something to sing about.

I don't think we have much to rejoice in when we say, God, I really love you. No, we don't wanna sing only those kind of songs. If you wanna sing those once in a while, fine, but you won't see a lot of that kind of singing in the Psalms or singing in the Bible songs.

What you'll see is God loved us. Worthy was the lamb who was slain. That's what you'll see for the most part. Don't ever let it get into your mind that somehow we are loved because we're lovable. No, God loves us in spite of who we are, in spite of who we were.

It's like the old extreme makeover illustration. It's not for the home makeover, but for the face and they'll make ladies up or make men up. And so I have a question for you. When these personal makeup artists choose people, do they choose ugly people or do they choose pretty people to make over?

Well, the answer is obvious. They choose ugly people. They choose those that when the session is over and the makeup is on and the haircut's there and the clothes are picked out and put on, that everyone will say, yes, she's beautiful, but they'll say, look at the skill of the extreme makeover people.

And so don't think that God loves you because you are lovable. God don't make no junk. Well, God doesn't make any junk, but there's a thing called the fall and God made sinners, I mean, excuse me, God made people upright, Ecclesiastes, and they fell into sin.

Discriminating Love and Evangelism

And so we don't wanna say, well, God loves indiscriminately, God's love is this way or that way. No, we need to think about biblical love. And when we talk next time, we're gonna talk about discriminating love.

God does not love everyone the same. God does not love Hitler the same. Now, as Hitler's in hell, or if you don't think he's in hell and saved at the last minute, how about Judas? We know he's in hell.

There's a discriminating love and he loves the apostle Paul in a different way. There's a love of creation and a love for his people. And we'll talk about that next time on NoCompromiseRadio .com. The love of God.

I hope you sing about it. I hope you love it. And I hope you think about Christ Jesus. But don't be thinking God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life is the right way to go about evangelism because we'll talk about that next time.

Info at NoCompromiseRadio .com. This is Mike Abendroth. Go to our website for downloads, podcasts, or we'll see you next time on 760 AM.

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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