SERMON: Proverbs 8:17 (The Conditional Love Of God)

The Shepherd's Church

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Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day sermon We pray that as we declare the

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Word of God that you would be encouraged Strengthened in your faith and that you would catch a greater vision of who

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Christ is May you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word and may the Lord be with you

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All right inside of every single human being we carry two very deep and very inescapable desires within us

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The first desire is to be known not just in passing not in the shallow ways of an acquaintance

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And how they know you or the person who sits across from you on the subway, but down to the marrow

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Known in your history your habits your hopes your fears known and even the little quirks and in the deep wounds known in the things that you talk about the things that you love the things that you're dreaming about and the things that you would

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Never speak out loud all of us in some deep way Want to be loved or known but not just that We also desire to be loved

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We desire to be loved We want once we've borne our soul to someone once we've revealed the spots the freckles the stains and everything else

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We want to at that point be accepted not rejected loved but not abandoned in Fact none of us actually want to be loved under pretenses

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We want to be loved based Not on some mask that we wear not on some image that we have to maintain or to keep up appearances

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But loved in light of who we really are Loved with all the cards on the table good and bad nothing hidden.

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No edits. No omissions and loved anyway But here's the question that all of us are haunted by If we were truly known truly

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Would we still be loved you see it's one thing to be loved when people see the good parts about you

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But what if they discover the parts you've been hiding? What if they could read your inner thoughts from yesterday the day before and even tomorrow?

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What if they knew the bitterness that you were nurturing? What if they knew the lust that was inhabiting your heart?

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What if they saw the seething anger that you've been suppressing the mocking the vexing the

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Horrendous and depraved things that you've done or said in your past that you don't want anyone to know what if they could see you without pretense and without filters the real you and See you in all of it without any distortion.

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Would they still love you? And here's another question if You were honest enough to even view yourself that way would you still love you?

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because all of us and some sort of primal deep self -protecting way know that if people knew how bad we really are that they would not like us and they would likely reject us and Because of that we spend the majority of our lives putting up enough filters

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Cleaning up enough of the muck in our soul to present a version of ourself a holograph of ourself that people will like and not

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Abandoned because if we were honest with them They would know who we are and they would not like us and probably if they were honest with you.

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You wouldn't like them either Because deep down all of us understand that love is conditional

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Love's not or love is based on conditions There is no such thing as unconditional love even though it's in all of the

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Hallmark cards and in all of the stories And we learn this early in our life for instance a child picks up on the fact that he receives more love from his parents when he does well and Less when he's rebellious players find that they are loved more by their coaches when they give the extra effort

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Than when they slack off on defense Husbands realize that their wives are happier with them and show more love to them if they act in such a way that is pleasing to them most of us know that friendships thrive upon reciprocity and so that both parties benefit in some way so that if the

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Imbalance of reciprocity lasts for long enough where one person is giving and one person is taking the relationship will die

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Because relationships and love are based on conditions If you've lived long enough you felt the knife of conditional love

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You've seen love withdrawn from you Because you didn't perform in a certain way

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You felt the sting of being measured and found wanting you've stood in the cold when someone else decided that you weren't worth the effort anymore and Because we don't like this attitude in the human heart no matter how much our society drones on and on about unconditional love

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Because we don't like this Conditionality in the human condition. We assume that God's love must be different and I will tell you this is a popular

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Misconception about the love of God Unconditional love is a love without terms.

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It's a love without boundaries. It's a love without any demands It's a love that is freely ours freely given always just and ever so We memorize verses like John 3 16 for God so loved the world and we treat it like it's a blank check

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Well, God just unconditionally loves me He just keeps on loving me no matter what I do. No matter what I say because his love has no conditions

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No terms, no boundaries. No stipulations. No clauses and yet in the Bible. We see that Jacob.

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I've loved Esau. I've hated there's a condition today

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When we come to a passage like Proverbs 8 17 Where lady wisdom speaks with the voice of God?

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It cuts through all of our assumptions about what God's love is and it challenges our expectations of what

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God's love is and even crushes our delusions about what God's love is and At the end of it all it gives us the most incredible.

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Hope when we get past the myth of unconditional love When we do that, we get to actually see that God's justice his holiness his purity are all

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Maintained in how he loves us based off of his conditions But we have to see that we have to go through that so if you will turn with me

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Proverbs 8 17 just one verse today I've heard that there's some who now are trying to figure out how many verses

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I will take in a sermon So hopefully you hopefully you were right one

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Let's read Proverbs 8 17. I love those who love me and Those who diligently seek me

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Will find me let us pray Lord. There's often many times as Christians That the lines are blurred for us on what is biblical and what is cultural and God what

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I mean by that is that there is a kind of cultural Christianity that That looks more like American than it does

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Biblical All of us do it every culture does it we bring our

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Assumptions our worldviews our ideas about the world and about life and about reality and we impose them upon the text

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Word, I pray today That our assumptions about what love is would bow the knee to the text and that we would see

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That the only reason we can have hope Is not because your love is unconditional

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But because the conditions were met Lord, we thank you in Jesus name.

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Amen Now, let's begin with the fact that nobody actually loves conditionally the structure of today's sermons gonna be like this

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No one loves conditionally. God doesn't love conditionally and the conditions were met. That's the structure of the sermon

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So no one actually loves conditionally not you not your spouse Not your mother not your best friend and certainly not

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God at least not in the syrupy sentimental diabetic kind of way that our culture talks about When people talk about unconditional love, they're meaning a love without conditions.

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I Love divorce from every standard a love that always must affirm. It always must approve

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It always it always must welcome no matter what evil no matter what abuse no matter what betrayal no matter what is thrown at you

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It is a kind of love that lets the adulterer keep the marriage as if nothing happened, it's unconditional

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It's the kind of love that leaves the knife in the murderer's hand because to take it away would make them feel judged

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It's the kind of love that tosses the key to the criminal so that he can ransack the house again and say well

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I must love him unconditionally With no rules no standards nothing

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If your spouse Began cheating on you You would reach a breaking point

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There would be a moment when you would walk away When you would not go on dopely receiving the abuse everyone in this room has conditions has standards has

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Rules that are in place that if they are violated for long enough without repentance without remorse

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They break the covenant status of that love Now I'll freely admit that in some relationships.

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You need more patience and more long -suffering than others for instance, you should have a higher tolerance of Pain and a more liberal application of grace with your covenant spouse than you do with the mailman

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You can write the mailman off for a mild spout of rudeness. But with your spouse you need to work through it.

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I But I also get that all of us have unspoken and very real conditions that if they are violated and violated for long enough with no evidence of remorse or repentance or Reconciliation then the relationship is severed and broken and that's a good thing because if there were a relationship that could do all manner of evil against you without recourse and You would just keep on loving them back keep on taking the abuse keep on Calling that true love that wouldn't be true love.

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That would be complicity that kind of love without conditions would turn you into a domesticated doormat where everyone could just wipe their feet all over you with no boundaries and you would have no backbone and with and With that that's not good or true or beautiful love

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And love without standards, it's not noble It's relationally suicidal and love that affirms evil is not compassionate.

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It's cruel a Love that refuses to draw the line in the sand is not tolerance it's treason against truthfulness and Here's the point if God loved in that way

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He would be the great cosmic enabler The heavenly codependent smiling while we sprint towards ruin

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Imagining a judge imagine a judge in a courtroom who says to the guilty. I don't care what you've done. I love you

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I'm not gonna punish you. I love you we would call him a lunatic and call for his

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I Don't know. What is it called when a judge is removed in pastoral world? It's defrocking.

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What is it in the judicial world? Impeached Disrobed de -judging if God's love were like that It would make him the most unloving being imaginable because love without standards is not love

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Love without standards destroys things Love that's unconditional and the truest sense of that term is not love at all.

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It's abdication of love It makes God unholy because holiness hates evil, that's a condition because God's justice demands truth and Righteousness and it punishes the wicked it would make

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God a liar It would make him the kind of being who could watch a murderer butcher the innocent and say

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I'm bound to love you That's not the God of the Bible The God of the

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Bible loves with a holy love a righteous love a love that has covenantal stipulations and standards

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I love that has a moral spine a love that rewards good opposes evil delights in righteousness refuses rebellion

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It's a love that can be you can be cut off from covenantally speaking Or it's a love that you can be found in for covenant -keeping.

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It's not sentimental love. It's not Hallmark mushy Vagaries with feelings it's a bond cut in blood for you

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That's covenantal and it's your Swedish security and it's the most sobering reality in the universe that God's love has conditions

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This is why Proverbs 8 17 says I love those who love me. That's a condition.

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I Love those who love me And that leads to our second point not only

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Do we not actually love unconditionally but neither does God The condition here is

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I love those who love me and those who diligently seek me will find me which means that God is saying

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I only love the ones who love me And I will only allow those to find me are the ones who are rightly seeking me

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That's the conditions that God is saying in this passage and these words are not loopholes.

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They're not exceptions They're not just a general Reinterpretation, they're not Solomon just being poetic

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This is the love that is talked about from Genesis to Revelation a kind of love that discriminates a

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Kind of love that seeks what's right and not what's wrong Which means that if we have rightly ordered love

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Then God loves us. And if we have rightly ordered seeking then the reward that he gives us is his presence

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And our indifference then is met with his absence and our coldness is met with his hatred

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And maybe you're like that's not what I've been taught. That's not what the Bible says. Well, let's go through the passages Let's go through what the

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Bible actually says because I think at the end You'll see how good this actually is and how necessary this actually is for instance

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Exodus 20 Mount Sinai God proclaimed I show loving -kindness to thousands to those who love me

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To those who keep my commandments not I blank check show love to the world. I show love to those who love me

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That's a condition His loving -kindness is not for whosoever or whatsoever or whensoever.

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It is for those who love him Psalm 145 20 David says the

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Lord keeps all who love him, but all the wicked he will destroy the Lord keeps those who love him

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That's a condition and if it's not met he destroys you John 14 21, this is a

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New Testament This is Jesus himself speaking he who has my commandments and keeps them is the one who loves me

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And he who loves me is loved by my father. Do you see the condition if you love Jesus?

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Then God loves you If you love Jesus is because you're obeying his commands and then that opens up the floodgates of the love of God But without obedience to Christ there is no love from the father.

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That's what Jesus is saying These are the words of God and they're not the words of a

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God whose love is applied aimlessly without anchor or aim they're the words of a

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God whose love is connected to the highest standards defined by exact conditions and covenantally bound through his own stipulations a

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God who gives covenant blessings for obedience and a God who gives covenant curses for covenant breaking

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He does not say do this and perhaps I will love you And he also doesn't say just try hard and I'll keep on loving you

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He says if you bay my commandments, my father will love you. That is so clear

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If you love me rightly God the father will love you.

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If you seek me rightly God will let you find him And listen, I know you're probably already going there.

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This is a terrifying verse Proverbs 8 17 is terrifying

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Because if God only loves those who loves him then who in this room deserves to be loved

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Because scripture dismantles the whole of our preconception about how good we do in this area Because the natural state of man

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Paul says in Romans 130 is not that we are lovers of God We are in fact haters of God Romans 130

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We're not neutral observers or casual skeptics. We are active enemies and religious terrorists against God Romans 8 7

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Continues the diagnosis the mind set on the flesh is hostile towards God for it does not subject itself to the law of God It is not able to this means

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Our corruption is not just skin deep that on loofah and some soap can scrub off It's not a scratch that goes just barely upon the epidermis of the matter.

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It is the total rotting of The deepest most fundamental and core parts of our identity and soul

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This is why Paul says there is none who understands there is none who seeks for God all have turned aside together

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They have become worthless That's why he says in Romans 3 13 our throats are open graves

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Our tongues are deceit -filled our lips drip with the poison of asps

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This is why God says of the fallen man in Genesis 6 5 every intent of the thought of man's heart was only evil continually

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This is why Genesis 8 21 repeats that after the flood happens Where he says the intent of man's heart is evil from his youth

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That's why Jeremiah says in Jeremiah 17 9 the heart is more deceitful than all else it is desperately sick who can understand it so listen

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If the goal is we must love God in order for God to then pour out his love on us.

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We can't because we are desperately sick and Our affections are desperately broken

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John 3 19 Jesus Tells us exactly who we are

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If you want a verse to identify the identity of the human condition he says that they love darkness rather than the light

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That is who we are and it's because we love our sin and in loving it.

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We hate him and As we hate him His holy love

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Exposes our corruption and we hate him all the more because he condemns the sullied things that we have cherished rather than falling down on our faces and thanking

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God for his Revelation of how desperately wicked we are we weep and gnash our teeth and grit them in hatred

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This is why Paul says in the book of Ephesians chapter 418 that we were darkened in our understanding

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Excluded from the life of God because the ignorance that is in us because of the hardness of our heart

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That's why Ephesians 2 1 he says that we're dead in our trespasses Ephesians 2 2 that we walk according to the course of this world according to the

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Prince and the power of the air Ephesians 2 3 by nature. We are children of wrath

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This is why Titus 3 says that we're foolish Disobedient deceived enslaved to various lust and pleasure spending our life and mouse and envy hateful and hating one another

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We could keep going. This is the universal testimony of God's Word about us We are haters of God willfully wicked not merely sick

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But spiritually dead stillborn in our soul limping not towards heaven

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But sprinting towards the gates of hell skipping with the light Every faculty of our mind our will our emotion our conscience has been contaminated by sin

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The very loves of our heart have been mangled so that we do not desire the God who made us and left to our own devices we never would

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The human heart is not an open meadow awaiting the seeds of truth

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It is the volcanic rock where nothing grows where our affections are not neutral and they are bristling with countless perversions and The evidence of that is all around us

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Do we delight in the law of God or do we duck it when it afflicts our conscience?

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Do we savor his presence or do we run from it in shame and avoid it?

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Do we thirst for his glory or do we hoard glory for ourselves? Even when our hands that appear to perform obedience

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It's often an elaborate performance staged for our own internal self Exaltation Our worship is fractured by distractions.

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Our prayers are swollen with selfish requests Our service is tainted with the desire to be seen

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Our mouths bless God in the morning and tongue lash our brother by noon

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We sing his words on Sunday and we spend the week bowing down to the

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God of mammon We long for the applause of others instead of the approval of God We long for the right kind of body instead of well -ordered affections.

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We try to please our boss instead of our Savior We say that we love truth but quietly avoid passages that contradict our view

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We say we love God, but we are bored with obedience. We are ravenous for gossip and slander

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We are faithful to our gym memberships, but not to our prayers We are experts on our sports team and novices on the minor profits

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We resist correction when someone brings it to us. We bristle at leaders who point out real dangers

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We despise authority when it's exercised against us We justify our contempt as some form of alien discernment

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We justify sexual sins on the screen as entertainment in the imaginations as fantasies

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Inflirtations as harmless play and at best we call it a struggle While we make plans for our very next fall, we trade the

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Sabbaths for golf tournaments overtime and errands We treat the Lord's Day as if it were a mere suggestion rather than a covenant gift

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We arrange our paychecks so that the God of our system comes first and that God is us

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We run up our bills like fools so that we have no space and we complain of scarcity

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We honor him with our lips when our hearts are far away We mindlessly catechize our children in the anthems of worldliness and we complain when they walk away from the faith

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We check our phones before getting out of bed much less before bending our knee to God and prayer

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We consult the experts and the influencers before we consult his word by the Bible's measure.

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We do not struggle We do it willingly and joyfully

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Our life is riddled with all kinds of unfaithfulness Which the Bible does not just identify as sin it calls it hatred of God and this is why

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Proverbs says as A sort of immutable and unchangeable noose that is hanging around our neck.

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I Love those who love me which means unavoidably that in our flesh

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We are not loved We may have the common kindness of general affection

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Where we have breath and bread and wine and sunlight and all of the rain that that pours down on both the wicked and the good

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But his saving love his adopting love his keeping love his protecting love his delighting love is reserved for that soul

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That truly loves him and we do not This is why the hate the psalmist says in Psalm 5 5 you hate all who do iniquity

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That's us That's why Psalm 11 5 says the ones who love violence his soul hates

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That's us And if you feel like this is some kind of cold providence from God Then what you're really doing is you're asking

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God to love you on your terms not his You're not asking for unconditional love.

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You're asking for conditional love where you get to set the conditions You're asking for God to forego his justice to overlook his holiness to ignore his standards of righteousness to allow you to persist in the lie that you are somehow good when you and I know that we are not and know this

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The judge of all the earth is under no obligation to embrace his enemies His love is not a human right because you exist

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And if it is given only to those who love him then every loveless heart by nature deserves his wrath

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We pray with our lips and our bodies turn away from his law

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Proverbs 28 9 says that's an abomination to God Our sacrifices are polluted with blood -stained hands.

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Isaiah 1 11 through 15 says that that wearies him Our religion nauseates him

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Amos 5 21 through 24 our attitude towards him provokes us to abandon

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Provokes him to abandon us for Samuel 2 30 This is why Jesus said if anyone loves the world, that's every human being that's ever existed

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If anyone loves the world the love of the Father is not in him first John 2 15 and this is where this verse is meant to bring us

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This verse is meant to bring us to the place Where every false assumption that we have about God's love is stripped from us

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Where every lie that we've believed about God's love is shattered where every potential opinion that you are somehow

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Basically good and basically lovable on your own terms has been annihilated

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He loves those who love him and you and I do not That means that without external help

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We are worth nothing but the purest fury of God for an eternity Until that reality is broken upon you and your conscience.

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You will not feel the Unbearable weight of your sin nor the awesome beauty of God's love and what he actually has done for us

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What he actually has done to reconcile us to him we won't feel it because we'll be so busy thinking that we earn some of it that we deserve some of it because we're

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Basically good with them with a few little screw -ups here and there. That's not what we are and Until we don't until we realize who we really are

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We won't see the beauty of God's love poured out for us The passage goes on to say

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And those who diligently seek me will find me I'll just I'll stop short here to say that God is not allowing us off the hook.

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He's twisting the knife in the festering wound of our supposed goodness

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There's none who seek after God Romans 3 11 John 3 19.

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We prefer the darkness over the light. We suppress the truth and unrighteousness Romans 1 18 Adam and Eve like them

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We hear God and we run in shame like Jonah at the ports of Joppa. We've run from God Jonah 1 3

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We're blind 2nd Corinthians 4 4 we're deaf Matthew 13 15. We're mute Romans 3 14.

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We're dead This is one of the best. This is one of the reasons I became a Calvinist We're dead

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Go to a funeral and look at your buddy Let's say he's his name is Jim Bob Jim Bob has passed away and you say old

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Jim Bob rise up and have life and He does not move because he is dead and that is us in our sin

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We don't move we don't make professions of faith. We don't choose Jesus We don't sing songs like I have decided to follow

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Jesus. We are dead We are dead. Our hearts are stone. We are dead

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Hosea 7 14 says that we wail on our beds, but we don't cry To him from our heart because we want to avoid the consequences that we know our sin has given us

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But we don't want the the actual judge of all the earth We just want to avoid the judgment.

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We are just like Herod Whom loved to listen to John the

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Baptist and Was the same guy who beheaded him? We're just like the crowd in John chapter 6

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That kept following Jesus until he refused to give them bread And we realized in that moment that they wanted bread more than the bread of life

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At the bottom of our heart is a motivation towards self -centeredness

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Seeking the giver and not the gift seeking the healer the healing and not the healer and in this passage

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We have not loved him and we have not sought him and what we see there is now we have a double

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Condemnation if we thought that one out of two, maybe God will give us 50 %

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That's even better than Joe DiMaggio Like one of the greatest hitters of all time Barely made it above 400 batting average.

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So clearly 500 is good, right? No You have a double knotted noose like I do around your neck

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We are fugitives not followers. We are drifters not disciples We are dollars not worshipers and in our own flesh

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We are twice condemned and in our own strength. We are doubly dead Destined to be uprooted twice without hope and this is where we begin to see the grace of God Not an unconditional love that doesn't exist.

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It's a myth We begin to see the love of God through his conditions

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Because we ought to die not just metaphorically but actually

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The Firing squad that would send us headlong into the flames of hell should be the trigger should be pulled the electric chair that crackles us into Eternal death where the flames of hell tickle our feet should be for us.

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The lever should be pulled Because we have not loved

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God we have not sought God we've spat on his law We've trampled his glory and there only remains for us

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Hebrews 1027 a terrifying Expectation of judgment and the fury of fire that consumes his adversaries.

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That is what we expect in our flesh That is for us.

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That's what we've earned. That's what we deserve That's what the fruit of our labor has should be given to us that is the wages that we have earned in our labor and yet Here is the very madness of mercy

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The judge himself does the unthinkable For the haters of God and for the enemies of grace

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For those who never sought him and would have never found him for those who have a lifetime of rebellion under their belt spitting in the face of God and if you were there and if I were there we'd have joined in with the crowd and said crucify him

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For those of us who deserve the boot of God's wrath upon our necks he sent his one and only son not to excuse us with some kind of sentimental version of unconditional love not to bend the rules of justice not to bend the truth of the law and of the gospel not to give

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Unconditional love but to meet the conditions you and I could not Because God did not loosen his standard in order to welcome us into his love

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His standard is what it is so that he sent Christ to meet the standard We didn't seek

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God. Therefore we should have been abandoned but Jesus came and Jesus sought God Perfectly every thought every word every heartbeat

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He said I don't even speak unless I unless I say the words of God Jesus in a lifetime sought

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God Perfectly Jesus in a lifetime found God perfectly and here's the scandal of grace

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That the one the only one who loved God rightly the only one who sought God rightly

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Gained that victory and gave it to you and I That's it He met the conditions we could not meet and then he gave it to us the covenant lawbreakers and rebels who never deserved it he met the conditions and Because he met them you can have hope

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Because here's the problem If God's love is unconditional God is not holy because he accepts whatever and that undermines who he is

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If God's love is conditional and in your own your own, you can't meet them. You can't obey them. You can't

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One sin and you've broken covenant with God the only hope you have

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Is not in a kind of sappy Teenage girl at a Backstreet Boys concert

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Unconditional kind of love and not in a kind of smug. I can do it myself

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I can pull myself up on my bootstraps. The only hope you have is that Christ met your conditions

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If God only loves the ones who love him, then you have to be in Christ If God only reveals himself to those who rightly seek him you must be in Christ That my friends is the scandal of the gospel

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That Jesus met your conditions and you cannot and if you try to stand in your conditions

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Your condition is hopeless but if you stand in the love of Jesus you get the love of God and If you stand in the pursuit of Christ you get the presence of God that Is what true grace is and that is the hope in which we stand

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Not in our performance not in our merit But in Christ and Christ alone. Let us pray

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Lord we thank you

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That your love is not conditional Lord we thank you that your love has standards standards so high that we could never meet and in that it

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It up it upholds your holiness and your righteousness and your truth and yet Jesus who came did not violate your holiness justice or truth.

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He met the standard The standard wasn't laid aside or sacrificed. He met it.

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He did it. He obeyed it and he turned and Shared it with us

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Lord I was thinking this week What it would have been like Trying to wrap my head around what this looks like And the only thing

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I could think of Was it would be like George Washington? Walking up to Benedict Arnold and saying

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I forgive you and actually I'm gonna make you general of the army a lying weasel a

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Betrayer one who spat in the face of Of this little upstart nation a man whose name goes down in the halls of history for pure infamy

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Being forgiven and shown grace and I know that's not the story that happened Lord But it's my story

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It's our story We were Judas the ones who betrayed you

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We were pilot the spineless cowards who wouldn't stand up for you We were the

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Apostles who ran away all of us in our sin have fallen short of your glory and all of us have deserved nothing but your wrath and by some

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Sweet mercy and grace that I cannot even fathom

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You allowed your perfect beloved son to earn the love of God for me

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To earn the presence of God for me so that now I can stand in his merit instead of my own

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Lord I pray that we always remember these things and remember that if not for Christ and Christ alone