Love as Taught by God

1 Thessalonians 4 and the Call to Brotherly Love

We'll turn your Bibles, please, to the book of 1 Thessalonians, and chapter 4. I will read from verse 1 through verse 12, but the preaching will be just on two verses, verses 9 and 10. Just to get more of the context and the flow of the Apostles' thought, we'll read verses 1 through 12.

So when you have that, please stand with me in honor of the reading of God's Word. 1 Thessalonians 4, 1 through 12. Now concerning brotherly love, you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another, for that indeed is what you are doing to all the brothers throughout Macedonia.

But we urge you, brothers, to do this more and more, and to aspire to live quietly, and to mind your own affairs, and to work with your hands as we instructed you, so that you may walk properly before outsiders and be dependent on no one.

It is the Word of God. Please be seated. You know, there was a popular satirist, a humorist, if you will, living in the second century. His name was Lucian. And like I said, he was quite popular. He was a humorist.

He was a satirist. He was a bit cynical. And he especially enjoyed lampooning superstitions, religion of any sort, and all belief in the supernatural. Christianity, in his day, was still fairly new, and so he had a lot of fresh material in the Christians for his humor.

I want you to listen to an observation he made of the Christian church. This is a quote. It is incredible to see the ardor with which the people of that religion help each other in their wants. They spare nothing.

Their first legislator, and of course he means Jesus Christ, their first legislator has put it in their heads that they are brethren. It's a pretty incredible statement. I don't watch enough TV to know who the talking heads are in our day, who the humorists are, but I imagine, and I hear quite a bit, that they're very cynical about religion in general, perhaps Christianity in particular.

Can you imagine any of them making a statement like Lucian did? He was a cynic and a humorist, and especially enjoyed poking fun at things supernatural. When you see what Lucian saw was a church in general.

We don't know which church it was he saw, but he saw a church whose love for one another could not be denied or made fun of. Their commitment to their first legislator, Jesus, and first legislator of course is his words, it was unwavering, and it was a commitment that expressed itself in ways that couldn't be ignored, couldn't be explained away.

While Lucian rightly saw the ridiculousness of superstition and the pagan religion that was so common in the empire, he was really taken up short by what he saw in Christianity. He conjectured that Jesus had put it in their heads to spare nothing to help each other, and he was right that the attitude that he saw in them, and the things that he saw them doing for each other, he was right that that came to them from Jesus Christ, but he was wrong about the place where that deposit was made.

He said that Jesus put it in their heads. Well Jesus put it in the hearts. Jesus put it on their hearts to love one another, and he saw this flourishing in a way that even he, the cynic and the humorist of his day, couldn't make any fun of.

He just said it is incredible to see the ardor, sort of an old word meaning the enthusiasm, the commitment, the energy that they give to this, with which this people, this religion, help each other, and at once they spare nothing.

They are all brethren together. We don't know which church he saw when he said this. We know he was a Syrian, we know he was a Roman citizen, and he died about the year 180, so as I said the church was pretty new in his day.

He might have been looking at a church like Thessalonica. He ought to be able to see the same thing at the church in Antioch, the church at Philippi, Ephesus, Rome, and if there was a Lucian today looking in upon Silicon Valley Reformed Baptist Church in the year of our Lord 2021, he should be able to say the same thing.

He should be able to look here and see something so real, and so genuine, and so fervent, that he just can't poke fun of it, even for someone who makes his living doing just that. The Thessalonians were so dominated by these expressions of love that the Apostle Paul, the Apostle Paul could only say, what?

Just keep doing what you're doing more and more, no advice, no correction, no three easy steps to having greater love, and we'll start this on Monday morning, and here's the way you need to do it. No, nothing like that.

Keep growing in what you are doing. Do so more and more. Remember chapter 4 verse 1 about living lives pleasing to God. Do so more and more. Loving each other so fervently that Paul can only say of this one character that more than any other is held up as our distinguishing mark, well sort of in our day a little bit of slang, keep on keeping on.

You're in the right direction. Your trajectory is good. Go that way and don't get off that track. Incredible that the Apostle Paul on this key characteristic that he brings to the fore so profoundly in so many places, we'll look at a few of them as we go through this, and that's all he can say.

Love is the dominant characteristic of true Christianity. Love for the brethren is the badge that we wear, the badge that we proudly display. The way a soldier would a medal that he won for valor on the battlefield.

And I ask you, what trait do you display? What trait flows from your heart into action with the brethren? What's that beginning, that foundational attitude, demeanor, thought process towards brothers and sisters in the Lord, towards the brethren?

It must be love. Love like this love that we're speaking of here was just as foreign for the ancient church in Thessalonica as it is for you today. It's like faith. Faith is foreign to you. It's not inherent in anything you have.

Faith is a gift from God. This love we will see is also part of the regeneration that God grants to his people. They needed God's enabling spirit to arouse this in them no less than you do today, than all of us do today to have this.

We need to look at this love. We need to look at what it is the Apostle Paul is even speaking of here and what it says about us, you individually, us as a body. Do we show this kind of love? Do we even have this kind of love?

Philadelphia and Agape as Family Love and Self-Giving Love

I want to look first at the word that is used here, and actually there's a couple of words, one a little less common than the other, and you'll see this as we go through this, but I want to make sure we know what this love is.

And Paul names it. He says brotherly love. It's brotherly love, and the word there is Philadelphia, or Philadelphia, if you will, the same as that city in Pennsylvania. Well, that's made up of a couple of words.

It's made up of philo, which is love, and delphia, which comes from adelphos, which means brother. So we have love of a brother, or as we have it here, brotherly love. This love is especially used normally, most commonly, to describe the love within the bonds of a family.

People are physically related together, a family unit, parents for children, siblings for each other, and so forth. This love amongst blood relatives, as we call them, is something expected from most every society, and almost every culture known to man would expect there to be this special bond of affection and love amongst family members, and we can expand that beyond parents and siblings.

We can go to cousins and first cousins and so forth, uncles and aunts, but related together by this physical thing, and we call it blood relatives. You know, it's so expected, it's so much a part of almost every society, that we're shocked when it doesn't happen.

We're shocked when we don't see it. The Shakespearean tragedies are all the more tragic when it's someone within the family who's the traitor against a brother, or a mother, or a parent, or something like that.

One of the refrains in the Godfather is what? You never take sides against the family. Why? Why does that resonate? Why did that make that movie so great? Because you don't do that. You are faithful to this family, you're loyal to your family, because you love each other.

There's this automatic bonding that's just a part of the human nature, a gift from God, I would argue. Blood ties were everything, and more importantly, the scriptures would confirm this, would they not?

Paul says in 1 Timothy chapter 5, verse 8,. So Paul's using this word, Philadelphia, brotherly love, in a literal sense. If you were there in Thessalonica, you would have seen something much like we have today.

Different people, different backgrounds, different ethnicities, different education, different economic situations, different health situations, different ages, different abilities. If you looked around right now, how many of you would see a literal family member?

Well some of you are sitting together, but if you turned around, if you looked forward, you're going to see people who are from different families, different ethnicities, different everything. You're going to see someone who's not really your brother and sister, right?

Well no, not right. That would be wrong. We often speak of each other as brothers and sisters in the Lord. My sister in the Lord said this, my brother in the Lord helped me through this trial or prayed with me about something.

We use that in the Lord conditioner. Well it's true, and I don't want to throw that expression out, because I love speaking about people who are my brother and my brother, my sister in the Lord, because it's the Lord who binds us together.

But you know something? We have to remember that in the Lord, it's not really that necessary, especially here when we're gathered together as this family. You're just my brother. You are my sister, and you can say that same thing to the others around you.

Paul uses this word Philadelphia, Philadelphia, very literally. You think of how literally true this really is, and how do we have this blood relation with people? Because we have the same parents, and there are parents by blood, right?

Blood relatives are parents first of all, your brothers and your sisters by blood. This is how we think of the family. This is often the expression that's used for it. Well I'd ask you, is God your father?

I should have gotten a loud amen or something like that, yes, hallelujah. Is God your father? We should say yes, thank you, I've at least got a head nodding. He's my father too, so you're my sister, you're my brother.

We have the same father. Brothers and sisters and families are bound together by blood. Have we not been bound together and bonded together by blood? Why are we able to claim God as our parent, as our father?

Because of the blood that binds us together, the blood of Jesus Christ shed on the cross, the blood of Christ which was shed for our sins. And by that blood, we're bound together as brothers and sisters.

You know, Jesus once waved his hand at an entire crowd and he said, here are my mother and my brothers for whoever does the will of my father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother. And what is the work of God?

You remember in John's gospel when the Pharisees asked him, what is the work of God that we may do it? And Jesus said, this is the work of God. Believe in him whom he sent, and who did he mean? Himself.

Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and his blood shed for you on the cross. And that is the blood that binds us together as a family, as brothers and sisters. Stronger ties than even within a family. Bound together by ties and blood, so much more important than we might have by birth.

That relationship comes by shared blood and it's the same here, where the blood that binds us as a family is Jesus's. And see, when Paul uses this word Philadelphia, this brotherly love, he's not being poetic, he's not using a metaphor.

He's using this word Philadelphia, brotherly love, in its literal and most important sense for the true love of true brothers and sisters. Bound together by faith in Christ Jesus and by that faith and by his blood, claiming, rightly claiming, God as our father.

Is it not literally true that if we have the same father, we are siblings? We're brothers and sisters together? So look at our verse again. Now concerning brotherly love, concerning Philadelphia, you have no need for anyone to write you.

And I just have to pause for a moment. And you know, one of the great books I've ever read about the apostle Paul was written by F .F. Bruce. And it's called Paul, the apostle of the heart set free. Paul, the apostle who virtually defines love for us.

No need to write to you. Incredible. For you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another. So if brotherly love is that word Philadelphia, Philadelphia was the second word. You're taught by God to love one another.

That second word for love, the one that precedes taught by God, that's the more common word for love, which is agape. Agape. So concerning Philadelphia, you have no need for anyone to write you. For you yourself have been taught by God to agape one another.

Both words are used here. Peter does the same thing in second Peter chapter one, verse seven. He says, supplement your faith with brotherly affection, Philadelphia, and brotherly affection with love, with agape.

This pairing of Philadelphia and agape, the more common word, is something that I think is very important here. You know, Harold Hohner in his Theology of Love, he points out that Philadelphia is a love that is warm and merited.

Merited. While agape is an unmerited, self-giving love. So on the one hand, because we're brothers and sisters together, we are merited the mutual love. In a sense, I could say you owe it to me and I to you.

This warm, affectionate love of a true brother, a true sister together. And then on the other hand, for those people that a dear old friend of ours called Regs, R-E-G, requires extra grace, those more prickly types, doesn't matter.

Unmerited, self-giving love is owed to them as well. Any way you look at it, the scripture has us covered or surrounded, and most of us ought to say convicted, and many of us ought to say in need of some repentance here.

God whose love we are to imitate. I mean, read John chapter 17 in the end of Jesus' high priestly prayer. Read John chapter 17 a few times, and you're going to see this. God whose love we are to imitate is totally unmerited to us.

We can't call God down and say you owe us some love. We've done something that makes us loving towards you. No. Unmerited love from God gives us towards each other a love that is owed, a debt that we need to pay for each other, to each other.

You know, we do think this way. We need to think this way when you look at that poor, as I said, reg, the requires extra grace person over there, the one for whom you need to force yourself to say something like, oh Lord, we pray and we thank you for this undeserved love you poured out into my heart by your Holy Spirit.

And that's Romans chapter 5 verse 5. Now please help me to give to him or her what they most definitely do not merit from me. And because of the love you've poured in my heart, I'll do something nice for them.

You can see how wrong such a demeanor and such an attitude would be. But that person over there, that other one is one for whom Christ also died, shed by the blood that binds us together as brothers and sisters, shed by the blood that Jesus was anticipating when he said, who are my mother and my brothers and my sisters?

It's those who do the work of God, those who believe in him whom he sent. Jesus himself calls us all family if you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, if God is your father by faith in his sacrifice, Christ's sacrifice.

He calls you God's son or daughter by your faith in him. It is his blood that did this for you as much as for anyone. You are my brother, you are my sister by blood that's thicker than birth, more precious than life and more powerful than anything else in creation.

Because of him, they are merited your Philadelphia, merited this warm and affectionate love. This should be our badge. This should be like a cloak that we wear. You know, there's a striped rainbow outfit that people wear.

You see it on the news all the time. You know what that stands for? We don't have to go into any detail. You know, when you see those colors, that's a badge, that's a cloak, that's an advertisement. I stand for something.

We wouldn't agree with it, but that is clearly what they stand for. The church, we, we don't have a special clothing, we don't have a special garment that we put on other than the Lord Jesus Christ is not special.

We display this in a way that as for Lucian in the second century should be undeniable. It should be our badge of honor. It should be something that just exudes out of us, and people should say, I know who they are because of the love I can see in them.

They must be those Christians. You know, my grandfather on my mother's side was a career army man. He had been in World War I. He became a master sergeant. During World War II, he was a drill instructor, and he trained much of the famed 7th Cavalry.

He was about 5 foot 11, strongly built. He was strong as an ox. I think he got sick once in his life in his late 80s. He got a cold, led to a heart attack, and he died. That's the only time in his life he was sick.

Died with a full head of thick white hair. To his dying day, he looked, and he talked, and he lived like what he was. He was a soldier. If you met him, you would know that you were in the presence of a soldier just by the way he carried himself.

He was ramrod straight. He lived in Las Vegas after he retired from the army. He could walk, and work, and shop, and eat, and do all the things in the heat of the Las Vegas sun. And you know, at the end of the day, there'd still be not a single crease or spot on his shirt.

I have no idea. He'd tuck his shirt in perfectly. Why? Because he was a soldier. And everything about him said, here's a soldier. This is the way the church needs to be with its love. Where everything about us, as we commune together as a body, is this Philadelphia, this merited love, this warm, affectionate, brotherly love.

Lucian saw this sort of thing in the second century. It was so clear. It was so real that he could only comment. He couldn't make any fun of it. Paul saw it in Thessalonica. And all he could comment on it was, you're on the right track, and keep going on that track.

You know, we are only going to have it here at our church when we all take up this mantle, when we understand that mutual love is a debt owed to Christ for what he has done for us in our redemption, and then consequently owed to each other, because we are literally family together.

Unmerited self-giving to the undeserving, that's agape, and merited warmth and affection to our blood relations, that's the meaning of Philadelphia, and the true family of God, the faithful in Christ.

Taught by God, the New Heart, and the Source of Christian Love

Where does this kind of love come from? Is it not foreign to us, as I said before, as faith is something that we don't have at birth? Faith is something that is given to us. Where could a love like this come from?

Well, that's our second point. If the first point is to understand what Philadelphia is and how it pairs with agape, the second point is for you yourselves have been taught by God. Now, Paul presumably heard about this from Timothy.

You remember, Timothy came back from Thessalonica, bringing a good report of their love and their desire to see him and how well they were doing. So Paul got this detailed report from Timothy. And we need to imagine this for a moment again.

The apostle for whom love was the shining light of the Christian faith, the apostle who wrote 1 Corinthians 13, the same who wrote how love must work through faith, has nothing to say or add. So profound and genuine was their love that he could only encourage them to continue.

You know, sometimes we can have too much of a good thing. Proverbs 25, verse 16, it speaks of one of my favorite good things. Honey, I like honey. What does Proverbs 25, 16 say? It says, if you have found honey, eat only enough for you, lest you have your fill of it and vomit it.

That's a hard thing for me to read, how much I love honey, to think of that having to happen with it, but he's right. Sometimes we can have too much of a good thing. Not all good things should or even can be taken without measure.

However, that's not true of this love that the apostle Paul speaks of in 1 Thessalonians 4, 9 and 10. Where did this come from? Where can you find such love as this? Well, there's only one source. It comes from God.

There's only one way. It is something that God gives. It was taught to them by God. And he's no more specific than that. What does that mean? You've been taught by God. Well, Paul didn't write about it and tell them.

He declined to write, but the phrase should be startling. I have nothing to add. You've been taught by God. Well, that's a quote from Isaiah chapter 54, verse 13. You don't have to turn there. It's just one sentence.

All your children shall be taught by the Lord and great shall be the peace of your children. And if this is what Paul is alluding to, and I think it was, then this love cannot be reduced to a written instruction.

It's a divine love that would only get messed up if we tried to tell someone else how to do it. If we tried to distill it down to a process, a set of procedures, like I said before, the three easy steps, if you accomplish them on Monday morning, by Wednesday that week, you're gonna be better off at it.

You've been taught by God. I thought about this for a while. I tried to get my arms around it so I could explain to you just what it means that what the apostle is saying there. And I think I came close, at least from my understanding.

Be interested afterwards if this helps you at all with this. Have you ever wondered why the 10 commandments were written with the finger of God? It's very specific in the book of Exodus that it was written by the finger of God.

You know, for the rest of Israel's law, the Lord was content for Moses to write what he told him, but not the Decalogue, not that. For that, the Lord brooked no human intervention and instead he wrote it down himself.

Paul doesn't say how we're to implement this love that is held up as a standard. And maybe that's for the same reason that God wrote the 10 commandments himself. It is of such importance, it is so distant from human ability that it must come straight from him.

As it were, excuse me, as it comes straight from him without even going through the process of divine inspiration through a human means. B .F. Westcott wrote that this love was not so much divine communication as it was evidence of a relationship with God who is love by faith in the son of his love who is Jesus Christ.

This is what he said, quote, it is as those who have been born of God and whose hearts are in consequence filled with God's Spirit that the Thessalonians on their part can no longer help loving. Did you get all that?

It is as those who've been born of God and whose hearts are in consequence filled with God's Spirit that the Thessalonians on their part can no longer help loving. If you're filled with God's love, if you truly know the love of God poured in your heart by the Holy Spirit, if you've really pondered the redemption and the cost of that redemption and what it meant that God sent his only begotten son, that whoever should believe in him should not perish but have eternal life.

Speaking of the cross and all its agony, speaking of him who knew no sin, who became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God, this must fill our hearts with a kind of love that cannot be contained, a pure love, a brotherly love, a warm and affectionate and self-giving love, one that just screams the character of Jesus Christ in all that we do as a body.

It's love that cannot be learned from a book, even a book as good and inspired and holy as our Bible. It's beyond mere imitation. Even if it's Jesus as a model, you can't just do the things that he did and go through a process as, okay, here's my seven steps.

I've gone through them. Now I've got Jesus's love. It's a person whose heart has been changed, who knows the love of God themselves, who can acknowledge the depths to which their sin had plunged them, and then the corresponding heights that God's love had rescued them.

This one cannot but love all others who've had that same common experience of grace. Taught by God. It was exhibited in their church life. No apostolic correction. What can all this mean? Well, it seems that there's an impartation of God's nature here.

God is love, says the apostle John. God is love and his people are to be love. There's this impartation in this being taught by God, his love, his love that comes with conversion to him. Let me give the full quote from Romans 5, 5.

I've alluded to it a couple of times. God's love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who's been given to us. God's love for ruined sinners has been poured into your heart so that you might know his love and so you might live his love.

Jesus said it this way. Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. It's love that comes with conversion to Jesus Christ. It comes when you realize how undeserving you are to be receptacle of his grace.

When you realize what is meant by, for example, Ephesians 2, verse 4, where the apostle extols God this way. But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.

It was not a matter of show. It's not a matter of mere doing. It's a matter of salvation. It's a time to examine yourself and see if you're really in the faith. To look into your heart and ask yourself what comes out of it first.

Paul says that God taught the Thessalonians the love that left Paul silent. The kind of love that it seems a couple centuries later, Lucian saw. They saw a love that he couldn't poke any fun at. The same spirit has poured this love of God into your heart, your old and stony heart that could no more absorb this love than a rock can water.

You know, the human heart is a depraved heart. The human heart is a heart that cannot know this kind of love, cannot manifest this kind of love, cannot be this kind of love. Jeremiah chapter 17, verse 9.

Most of us know this. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Who can understand it? But I would ask, can that stony heart be the heart that God leaves behind when his spirit remakes you?

Can that stony heart be the heart taught by God that then displays the kind of love that leaves the apostle himself silent? Ezekiel chapter 36, 26 is the heart of stone passage. And I'll give you a new heart and a new spirit.

I'll put it within you and I'll remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. Could a desperately sick, deceitful above all else, stony heart be the one which can understand and practice God's love so thoroughly that Paul can only say, keep going.

Now, see, it's not a human heart that's in view here. It's the heart of God. It's the heart of flesh that replaced the stony heart. Now, I'm not believing and I'm not meaning to imply anything approaching perfection.

Perfection awaits Christ's return and our resurrection. It will not happen in this life. But what I do say is that God has given you, if you are in Christ, he has given you a heart, a new heart, a spiritual heart, as Ezekiel says, a heart of flesh that pulses with a love like his.

A heart that Titus chapter 3 verse 5 says comes by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit. Unless that is, God in doing this open heart surgery, as it's sometimes called, removed the heart of stone and gave you faith to repent and to believe in the gospel of his son, Jesus Christ, washed you and regenerated you by his spirit and then closed you up having put the wrong heart back in.

And he looks and says, oh, well, there's the heart of flesh I was gonna give him but I've got a line of people waiting so he'll have to go with a heart of flesh. Now go love. No, it just doesn't work.

You're taught by God how to love when his love overcomes your sin and you repent and believe in Jesus Christ. How is that even possible? Because he's given you a new heart. He's giving you that soft heart of flesh that believes the gospel.

You're taught by God how to love when his love overcomes your sin and you repent and believe in Jesus Christ. 1 John 3, verse 1, the apostle writes, see what kind of love the Father has given to us that we should be called children of God and so we are.

Repentance, Assurance, and the Church's Witness of Love

So what do we take from this text? What do we take from 1 Thessalonians 4, verses 9 -10? The apostle says, that concerning brotherly love you have no need for anyone to write to you for you yourselves have been taught by God to love one another.

For that indeed is what you're doing to all the brothers throughout Macedonia but we urge you brothers to do this more and more. Well, 1 Thessalonians 4, verse 8 says that the Holy Spirit's been given to believers.

Ephesians 1, verse 19 says that the power that God exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead is the same power he exerts towards you who believe. And now 1 Thessalonians adds this, that the Lord God himself teaches the church to love in a manner that so reflects him that Paul simply moves on to other topics.

Does it sound like good news? It is good news because the Lord has made it available to you. No, he's positively given you what you need to live a life pleasing to him. His spirit, the new heart taught by God, his word, the church, the communion of the saints, everything you need has been given.

So it's wonderful news but there's a flip side to that wonderful news because one might ask, why then do I still sin? Why then do I not love the way I should? If God has given us all that he has given us and indeed he has, what excuse is there for lacking love?

For having less than warm affection and regard for your true brothers and true sisters? For being less than self-giving to the undeserving? It's like what James writes in James 4, verse 3. You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly to spend it on your passions.

We let the flesh rule over the new heart. Psalm 66, 18 says that if I cherish iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. Other versions of the Bible say, or if I cherish iniquity in my heart, regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not listen.

Unconfessed sin can block the outflow of love just like grease can block your kitchen drain. Bitterness harbored against the brethren has a way of winning out against the impulse of love. It's a constant, it's a desperate battle between the new heart and the old nature that surrounds it.

You know, if you are in Christ, you claim God to be your father and therefore me to be your brother and her to be your sister by the faith he's given you to believe in him but you find that you don't have this love for the brethren, a true love, a true warm regard for your real brothers and sisters.

What do you do? Well, if you're in Christ, you repent. If you're in Christ, you go to God and don't just tell him first, I would suggest don't tell him first to give me this love, first repent of not having it, of not having shown what he's given you.

The love of God's been poured in your heart by the Holy Spirit's been given to you. So the first repentance is for not having done what God gave you to do, repent of that. The heart that God has given you, that soft, tender heart, that heart of flesh made of divine material is able to repent, is able to hear the word of God and say, yes, that's right, I must repent of this because God has made me able to repent because of that same heart that should be exuding that love.

Are you outside of Christ? Do you know the Lord Jesus Christ? Have you repented of your sin and gone to him for forgiveness? That's just a way of asking if you believe this gospel of salvation. This love then, if you're outside of Christ, this cannot be yours.

God gives it to those who confess themselves to be sinners and seeing Jesus' sacrifice, their only hope for salvation. God gives a new heart to those who will humble themselves before him and by faith in Christ and repentance towards him, seek his forgiveness.

Have you done that? Do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ? If not, you can go to him today. You can go to him now where you are sitting and repent of your sins. Put your faith in him. Seek his forgiveness and know God is your true father.

If love for Jesus is a starting point, love for the brethren is the evidence. Another way to say it is that the inner working of God's spirit is seen in the outer show of love. Do you have this kind of love?