To Write the Love of God Above

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I invite you to take out your Bibles and turn with me to the book of 1 John.
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We are continuing this morning in our celebration of Advent and as we have already noted this morning when the words came and led, we are on the theme of love.
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We had been in a very long study of the book of Acts which last week ended in chapter 18 and I did not want to begin this morning in chapter 19 because chapter 19 and 20 takes us through Paul's time in Ephesians or the church at Ephesus and there is just so much there that I felt like if I started now that it would not be a good idea because over the next three weeks we are going to have quite a break up in our preaching schedule.
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Next week will be Brother Steve Atkinson from the Christian Witness to Israel will be here to preach.
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The week after will be Christmas morning which I will be preaching on that subject and then of course the week after we are having a surprise guest here will be to preach and Aaron Bell will be here.
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So that is going to be a blessing to have him and I am excited to have him back with us.
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I said it was a surprise and then I gave you the surprise but I am excited to know that he is going to be back in town because it was not something I knew about until very recently when I found out he was going to be here.
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I said, well, boy howdy, I know everybody wants to hear how things are going and so we look forward to that.
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So I didn't want to start the Acts 19 and then have to stop.
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So I have decided this morning that we are going to be stepping away from Acts and we are going to be looking at the subject of the love of God.
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The title of today's message is to write the love of God above which is part of a hymn which I will be addressing later.
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And I want to admit to you, I want to go in the beginning and admit that when I was considering what to say about this subject I felt a little bit overwhelmed.
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When you consider the subject of the vastness of the love of God you immediately realize that the Bible is filled with passages on the subject and yet all of those passages deal in different ways.
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There are passages which discuss God's love in general for mankind.
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There are passages which discuss God's love for His elect people.
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There are passages which call His people to love Him and there are passages which call His people to love one another.
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And there are even passages which call His people to love those who hate them and persecute them and don't love them back.
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So to simply say we are going to talk about the love of God is really too broad.
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Because of the breadth of the topic it is necessary that we narrow it down.
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So this morning we are going to fix our gaze upon one aspect of the love of God.
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We are going to look at God's love for His people.
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God's love for those that He is in a relationship with through His Son Jesus Christ.
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And we are going to look at 1 John 4 verses 9 and 10.
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Now I know we have stood up, sat down, stood up, sat down.
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But I do want to ask you one more time to please rise as we read God's Word.
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Because it is important that we understand that this is not the words of men.
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But this is the Word of God.
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It says in verse 9.
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In this the love of God was made manifest among us.
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That God sent His only Son into the world.
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So that we might live through Him.
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And this is love.
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Not that we have loved God.
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But that He loved us.
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And sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
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Our Father and our God I thank you for the opportunity to preach.
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I pray Lord as I preach that you would keep me from error.
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For I am a fallible man capable of preaching error.
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And Lord for the sake of your people and for the sake of my own conscience I pray that you would keep me from that.
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I pray also Lord for this text that it would resonate in our heart.
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That we would understand the love of God this morning.
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Better and newer and fresher than we ever have before.
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And that that love might permeate our spirit.
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And that we might understand what it means to say we love God.
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And God has loved us before we ever loved Him.
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Help us Lord.
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In Christ's name.
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Amen.
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Of the 27 books of the New Testament.
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5 of them were written by the Apostle John.
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He wrote of course the Gospel of John which bears his name.
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He wrote the book of Revelation.
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And he wrote 3 small letters, general epistles to the Christian church.
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The first of these 3 epistles is the longest by far.
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If you read 1st, 2nd and 3rd John you'll notice that 2nd and 3rd John are no more than just a few paragraphs each.
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But 1st John is 5 chapters of meaty, weighty, theological and practical truth.
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It has been called, 1st John has been called the no book.
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K-N-O-W It's been called the no book because within its short 5 chapters the word no is used 38 times.
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In most instances it is referring to how a person can know that they have eternal life.
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In fact at the very end of the epistle, 1st John 5.13, he gives us his thesis.
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I have written these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.
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This is the reason for this book.
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That you can read it, that you can look at yourself in the mirror of these words and compare yourself to them and see if you are one who is experiencing life in Christ.
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As James tells us in his epistle, some people come to the word as it were a mirror and leave having not made any changes.
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They come in and think about that in the morning time.
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You get up and you go to the mirror.
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You look in the mirror and you see that your hair has done that crazy thing it does at night.
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If you have hair, you know, it's a crazy thing it does at night.
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And your eyes are a little crusted over and your face needs to be washed.
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Imagine if you didn't do anything, you just walked on out and left.
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It would be kind of foolish, right? Well, that's what James says.
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He says, when someone comes to the word of God, they read it and it doesn't change them.
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It's like a person who goes to the mirror, sees what they need to change and then they walk away having not made any changes.
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Well, 1st John is a mirror.
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And this is why often times when a person wants to find clarity, if a person comes to me and says, Pastor, I want you to tell me whether or not I'm saved.
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I can't tell you whether you're saved or not.
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I can tell you if you've professed Christ because you can profess Christ.
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I can tell you if you've been baptized, but neither one of them necessarily means that you're saved.
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The Bible says that the demons know that Jesus is Lord and shudder at that.
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Jesus said, many will come unto me on that day and say, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in your name and cast out demons in your name and done many mighty works in your name and yet I will say I never knew you? Right? So how do we know that we're saved? Not just by a profession of Christ, but by a possession of Him that changes our life.
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And so John is that book that shows you what a life changed by Christ looks like.
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And within the book of 1st John, within this short five chapters, we have some of the most convicting passages in all the Bible.
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It calls us to genuine holiness in our life, something you don't hear about today a lot.
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You don't hear about the call of holiness, holy living.
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If you even talk about it, you're called a Puritan, which I really don't take offense to that.
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I say those are some pretty good guys.
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Read what they wrote and you'll see.
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All we ever hear about the Puritans was how hard they were, but they were concerned with holiness.
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1st John also tells us that a person who lives a life of habitual, unrepentant sin is not really a believer.
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And it tells us that if we do not love one another, we cannot love God.
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It says you cannot love God who you cannot see if you cannot love your brother who you do see.
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But here's the thing that I want to point out about 1st John because 1st John, while it has all these convicting passages, and it does, it's also balanced with other passages that remind us that living a life of faith is not an impossible task.
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And John recognizes that we will fail.
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It would be impossible to live a life of faith if that meant you had to be perfect.
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It would be impossible to live a life of faith if that meant you'd never make another mistake.
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We'd all have to stop right now.
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We'd all have to give it up.
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So John balances his call to holiness and his call to reject sin with the reality that he knows that we're not going to be perfect.
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And he makes a point to say that if anyone says he has no sin, he is a liar and the truth is not within him.
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And he goes on to say, when we sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.
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In the midst of this tremendous letter, John adds a note about the love of God for his people that I want us to focus on this morning.
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As I said, the theme is love and I want us to focus on love, but all of that was sort of a context for the book to push us to a better understanding.
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Because if you don't understand context, you don't understand the text.
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So you want to understand the text.
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That's the context of the book.
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Now we go to 1 John 4.
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And what is 1 John 4 about? Well, verses 7 through 12, which is the immediate context of what we're looking at, is John is calling believers to love one another.
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Later is when he will say, in verse 20, he'll say, if anyone says I love God, doesn't love his brother, is a liar.
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So it's in the midst of that.
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And let's begin at verse 7.
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He says, Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.
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Anyone who does not love God does not know God, because God is love.
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Then our verse for the morning, In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent His Son into the world, so that we might live through Him.
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In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
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Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.
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No one has seen God.
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If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us.
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So here's the context.
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John is calling us to love one another.
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He's calling believers to love one another.
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And he says, if you want to know what that looks like, look at God.
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If you want to know what love between you is supposed to look like, look at what God has done for you.
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So what I want to do is, I want to break down verses 9 and 10, because this is Paul's example of what love is.
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In fact, the title of the message could be, What is Love? Because 1 John 4, 9, we see this.
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He says, In this the love of God was made manifest.
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Now that's the way the ESV says it.
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Some translations say, In this the love of God is revealed.
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It really doesn't matter how you translate that, because both of them sort of mean the same thing.
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It means this is how it's shown to us.
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This is how the love of God is put onto display for us.
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This is how we experience it.
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This is how we recognize it.
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This is how we know it.
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And by the way, let me ask this question.
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What is love? Some people make a big to-do, and I'm going to get into the Greek just for a second.
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Some people make a big to-do about agape.
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They'll say, Agape, love, is what God has, and that's a special type of love.
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And then they'll make a distinction between the other Greek word that means love, which is phileo, or phile, however you pronounce it, depending on how it's being used.
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Philos is the root.
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And they say, Philos is a lesser love than agape.
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I don't know if you've ever heard that.
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I don't even know if that's even registering on your dial this morning.
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But let me say this about that.
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Agape and philos are used interchangeably several times in Scripture.
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It is not the word agape that makes the love of God special.
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It's the one doing the loving that makes the love special.
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Because God tells us to agape one another.
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God tells us to agape our enemies.
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It's not the word.
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It's the lover who makes it special.
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It's the source of the love that makes it special.
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In this, the love of who? Of God.
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That's the point of this text.
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It's not about the Greek word agape.
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It's about the word theos, God.
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He is the one doing the loving.
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And that's what makes it valuable.
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It was made manifest among us.
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In what way? How is the love of God revealed to you? That God sent His only son, monogenes theos, or monogenes huion, His only begotten son.
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That God sent His only begotten son into the world so that we might live through Him.
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That's how God shows His love to you.
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That's how God demonstrated His love to you.
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He sent His son into the world to die for you.
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He gave His monogenes, that word means only begotten, or, more particularly, one of a kind, unique.
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His son like no other son.
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You know, when you come into God's family, you come into God's family by way of adoption, which is special.
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And I love adoption.
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I have two children that we adopted, and we love them just like our two children that were born into our family.
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There is no distinction made between us.
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And that's the beauty, because when you're adopted into God's family, there's no distinction made between you either.
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You come into His family having been adopted into His family, and He loves you with an eternal, unshakable love.
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But He does say something specific about Christ.
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He's the monogenes.
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He is the only begotten.
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He is the only one that is God of God.
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As the Nicene Creed says, God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made.
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He is God in the flesh.
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He is God the Son.
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He is the eternal Son of God who came into the world to give Himself a sacrifice for sins.
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And He did so at the behest of the Father.
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He did so because God sent Him into the world because He loved you.
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How does God show His love? Through Christ and through the sacrifice of Christ.
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Verse 10, In this is love.
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I love that construction there because it's important.
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How many of you know the verse that...
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Well, I'm not even going to say how many of you know.
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You all know it.
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If I said, For God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son.
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That word in John 3.16 has been made much of, sort of like agape.
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I don't mean to be killing sacred cows this morning.
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If you came in with a sacred cow and I'm chopping into a hamburger, well, they make the best hamburger.
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Trust me.
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But the word so in John 3.16 has been made much of.
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God loved the world so much.
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That's not what the word so means.
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The word so there, hutas, means in this way.
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According to this way.
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In this way God loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.
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This is how He did it.
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This is how He loved the world.
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That He gave His only begotten Son so that every person who believes in Him will not perish but have everlasting life.
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That's the way He did it.
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It's not talking about amount.
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Now you could express the amount because that's a lot of love.
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But you could never express the fullness of the amount even with the word so much.
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It's not about the amount.
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It's about the way.
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In this way God loved the world.
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He sent His Son that whosoever believeth in Him will not perish.
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Well, this is a similar construction here because He says in 1 John 4 in this is love.
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In this way is how God loved.
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And then He adds in the uk which is Greek for not.
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Not that you loved God.
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Not that we loved God.
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But God loved us first.
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God did not love you because you loved Him.
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In fact, not only did you not love God, you were an enemy with God.
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Romans chapter 8 and verse 7 says this, For the mind that is set on the flesh and that's all unbelievers because they don't have a spiritual mind because they're spiritually dead.
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So that references all unbelievers.
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For the mind that is set on the flesh is what? Hostile towards God.
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It does not submit to the law of God.
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Indeed it cannot.
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Why not? Because it's set on the flesh.
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It loves the flesh.
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And when God comes into the picture, He is revolted against.
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He is rebelled against.
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Do you know why unbelievers hate God? Because they consider themselves their own authority.
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And when God comes in to bring His authority to bear, they do not want to hear it.
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And you say, now wait a minute, pastor.
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I know a lot of people who love God who aren't Christians.
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And I loved God before I was a Christian.
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I've heard people say that.
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I like the face he just made.
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I wish I had a picture of that.
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Sorry, that would be embarrassing.
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But there are people who say, I loved God before I became a Christian or I love God or I know people who love God.
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Let me say this about that.
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Or I hear people say, I've always loved God.
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That's my favorite.
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I've always loved God.
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Well, let me explain it like this.
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Every person in the world loves the blessings of God.
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So I don't have a problem when you say, no, you loved what God had to offer you.
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But do you want to know how I know unbelievers do not love God? When I begin to tell them about Him.
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Because immediately they will say, that's not my God.
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All you've got to do to find out if somebody loves God is introduce them to Him.
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Introduce them to who He really is.
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Just say that four letter word, hell.
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My God would not send people to hell.
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You are absolutely right.
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Your God won't send people to hell because He's an idol and He doesn't exist.
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He can't do it.
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You have created Him in your own mind.
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You have made a God according to your own likeness and He cannot send people to hell.
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So you're not wrong.
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Your God won't send anybody to hell.
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But the God who created heaven and earth, all things seen and unseen, has established according to His own righteousness, His standard of holiness, by which if anyone does not meet, they will end up in hell.
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And the only way to meet His standard of holiness is to have the sacrifice of Christ pay for our sins and to have His righteousness stand in our place.
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And if you are here this morning thinking that you have anything else other than Christ that will stand in your place, if you're here today thinking that your goodness, your righteousness, your holiness, or your good works are going to stand for you on judgment day, you have an eternity of hell to look forward to for such thinking.
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And you need to repent.
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And that's why he goes on to say, not that we have loved God.
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Don't think that God loved you because you loved Him.
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God doesn't love you because you loved Him.
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He loved you first and He demonstrated that love by sending Christ to be the propitiation for sin.
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I wrote this this week and it's really sort of resonated in my heart.
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I made it in bold pink letters so I wouldn't forget.
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I said, God didn't just love me before I was born.
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He loved me before the world was born.
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God didn't just love me before I came into the world.
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He loved me in eternity past because God's never learned anything.
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God has known me forever.
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God has known you forever.
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He didn't have to learn about me.
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God doesn't learn.
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That's an interesting thought.
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We don't really dig into the mind of God much, but an infinite being who is completely holy and never has to have a new thought because all is His.
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Something we don't even try to consider because it's so far beyond our own.
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But God did determine in eternity past to save me.
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He determined in eternity past to save me, but at the same time He did that knowing that I would be in need of saving.
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And so He sent His Son to be the propitiation for my sins.
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Sometimes people hear big theological words and they want to avoid them or they want to just sort of not deal with them.
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But very quickly, I want to tell you this.
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Honestly, if there's any 50 cent word that you need to learn, if you haven't yet, yeah, it is a long word.
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It's five syllables.
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In the Greek, it's still five syllables.
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Hilasterion is still five syllables.
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It isn't short even in the Greek.
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If there's a word you need to know, especially if you want to know the love of God, if there's a word you need to go, the word you need to understand is the word propitiation.
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Bruce Ware says this.
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He says in his lecture, he gave on propitiation.
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He says, we normally think of salvation as dealing with our problem of sin.
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And it is true that salvation does deal with our problem of sin and guilt and death.
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But salvation also more fundamentally deals with God's problem.
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God's problem is how do I forgive, justify, and accept sinners? How can this be? How can a holy, righteous God accept those who are unholy and unrighteous wretches? Forgiveness would not be a problem with God if He were unrighteous.
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By the way, this is the problem with the God of Islam.
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The God of Islam forgives without propitiation.
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The God of Islam forgives based upon works.
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And guess what that is? That is unrighteous.
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God is a perfectly righteous judge.
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And one thing a perfectly righteous judge does is judge perfectly rightly.
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Ergo, when an unrighteous person stands before God, he is judged guilty.
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Because everyone in this world is a sinner.
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Everyone in this world is unrighteous.
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And God judges them guilty.
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But the disposition of God is love and kindness.
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And He desires to save.
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And He takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked according to Ezekiel 33.11.
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So He chooses to provide a way that both His justice and His mercy can be put on display.
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And it's called propitiation.
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Turn with me to Romans 3.
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Hold your place in 1 John.
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But turn with me to Romans 3.
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And I want you to see how the Apostle Paul outlines this for us so clearly.
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In Romans 3.21-26.
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Romans 3.21.
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But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law.
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Although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.
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For there is no distinction.
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For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood to be received by faith.
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This was to show God's righteousness because in His divine forbearance He had passed over former sins.
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It was to show His righteousness at this present time so that He might be both just and the justifier of those who have faith in Jesus.
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Alright, let's break this down very quickly.
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What does propitiation even mean? What does the word mean? The word propitiation means to appease or to satisfy the wrath of God.
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When Christ was on the cross, He was satisfying the demand of the law.
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The law demands the death of the sinner.
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Christ was not a sinner Himself and did not deserve death.
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But God appointed Him as a substitute for sinners and He then bore the wrath of God which the sinner deserved.
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And God remains perfectly righteous and infinitely merciful.
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He's perfectly righteous because all the punishment you deserve, all the wrath that you've incurred is nailed to the cross, Paul says.
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Because it's in Christ.
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And God gets to be merciful to you while not giving up His righteousness.
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He becomes just and the justifier.
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Of the one who has faith in Christ.
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He's just because He never gives up His righteousness, but He justifies the ungodly by punishing their sins in a substitute.
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Now that doctrine is not difficult to understand but it is hated by many.
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You talk to a person who is of a liberal bent regarding theology and they'll tell you propitiation is the worst thing they've ever heard.
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They'll call it cosmic child abuse.
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That God would punish His Son? That's terrible.
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But you know what Isaiah 53 says? It says, It pleased the Lord to strike Him.
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Why? Because God gets His jollies on beating His kid? That's stupid talk.
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That's stupid talk.
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Because God loved you so much He was willing to send His Son to be your substitute.
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Because His wrath could not justly be put away.
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His Son willingly took it for you.
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And this is love.
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Not that you loved God, but that He loved you and He loved you so much that He sent His Son to be beaten, bloodied, nailed, and died in your place.
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I have three thoughts I want you to take away from this morning.
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They are on the back of your folder.
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Recently I was told that some of our young people enjoy filling in the blanks.
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And maybe some not so young people, that's okay too.
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But I like to include the family in this.
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And so I want to give you some things to take away from the lesson.
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An application.
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So if you have your folders out, here are the three things.
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The application of today's message.
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Number one.
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God's love for His people precedes their love for Him.
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God's love for His people precedes their love for Him.
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I want to ask you a question this morning.
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And you don't have to answer out loud.
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I'm not asking for a show of hands or bowing heads.
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I'm going to ask you one thing.
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Do you love God this morning? Do you love God this morning? If you love God this morning, it is because He loved you first.
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Not only did He love you, but He gave you the ability to love Him because you were lost.
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You were dead in your trespasses and sins.
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You were like a blind man in an art gallery.
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You were incapable of realizing the beauty all around you.
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And God opened your eyes to love Him.
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His love precedes your love for Him.
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That's one.
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Number two.
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God's love does not cause Him to forfeit His holiness.
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His love does not cause Him to forfeit His holiness.
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To forfeit means to give up something.
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If young people are unfamiliar with that word.
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God loves, but God is also holy.
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In fact, and I like to point this out.
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I pointed this out to a man this week from another church.
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He's a youth minister at another church.
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And he and I were talking.
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And I gave him a copy of The Holiness of God by R.C.
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Sproul.
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And while talking to him, I said this, you need to understand one thing about God.
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His holiness is not like His other attributes.
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Because His holiness is the only thing in Scripture that He is called three times.
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He is not called love, love, love.
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He's not called mercy, mercy, mercy.
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He's not called justice, justice, justice.
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Or truth, truth, truth.
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But He is called holy, holy, holy.
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Because that is the attribute of God that undergirds all other attributes.
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His love is a holy love.
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His justice is a holy justice.
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His mercy, His grace, all of them are holy.
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This is why so many people hate propitiation.
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Because they don't like a holy God.
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They want a God who can be bartered with.
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They want a God who can be bribed.
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They want a God who will give up that holiness and God will not.
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They want a God who will turn a blind eye to sin and He will not.
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Some accuse propitiation of being an ancient relic of pagan religions where the capricious gods had to be appeased with the people's offerings of virgins or children.
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But you know what the difference between the God of Scripture and the God of the pagan is in regard to propitiation? The God of the pagan tells you to offer your child, tells you to offer your virgin, tells you to offer your whatever.
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The God of Scripture gave His own offering.
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That which God required, He provided in His Son.
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God will not give up His holiness just because He loves you.
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So He sends His Son as a demonstration of both.
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Thirdly, God's love is manifested in the sacrifice of Christ.
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God's love is manifested in the sacrifice of Christ.
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Do you remember, and this is where I'm going to start to draw too close.
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Do you remember the story of Abraham on the mountain with Isaac? I love that story, especially since becoming a father, it has an all new meaning than it did when I was a child.
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When you're a child, you put yourself in the place of Isaac.
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What would I do if my dad said we're going up a mountain and I'm the one that's going to get the knife? And when you're a child, you sort of have this sort of fear, well, I hope God doesn't call my dad to that kind of faithfulness.
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But when you're a father, you look at Abraham and your attitude towards the story and your relationship with the story sort of changes.
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And I remember how the King James renders, Take thy son, thy only son, whom thou love, and go and offer him up on the mountain.
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And so Abraham is taking his son up on the mountain.
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And do you remember the climax of the narrative? Abraham is standing above his son.
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He is ready to plunge the dagger into the heart of his son.
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And yet, he is stopped by God's hand and he's allowed to substitute his son for the ram.
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Beloved, when the Son of God was pinned between heaven and earth, there was no reprieve.
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No one substituted the Son of God for a ram because He was the substitute.
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If that doesn't show us what the love of God is, nothing ever will.
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There's a great hymn, and I want to read these words as I draw now to our time for prayer.
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The love of God is greater far than tongue or pen could ever tell.
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It goes beyond the highest star and reaches to the lowest hell.
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The guilty pair bowed down with care.
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God gave His Son to win.
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His erring child He reconciled and pardoned from His sin.
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When hoary times shall pass away and earthly thrones and kingdoms fall, when men who here refuse to pray on rocks and hills and mountains call, God's love so sure shall still endure, all measureless and strong, redeeming grace to Adam's race, the saints' and angels' song.
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Could we with ink the oceans fill? Or were the skies of parchment made to write the love of God above? Would drain the oceans dry? And were every stalk on earth a quill and every man a scribe by trade, the scroll could not contain the whole, though it stretched from sky to sky.
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O love of God, how rich, how pure, how measureless, how strong, it will forevermore endure, the saints' and angels' song.
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Father, I thank You for Your Word.
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I thank You for the love that You have provided for us in Your Son.
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I thank You for the mercy that You give us in Jesus Christ.
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I thank You that He gave Himself a propitiation for sin and that in Him we find forgiveness, grace, love, joy, mercy, kindness, and a wonderful Savior who is so much greater a Savior than we could ever be a sinner.
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I pray, Lord, today for those under the sound of my voice.
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First, for those who have already experienced the love of God, that they would understand that they have experienced Your love because You are merciful and that You have opened their hearts to understand it and believe it.
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And Lord, if there are those here today, whether they be young or old, whether they be man or woman, whether they be rich or poor, may they understand that today is the day of salvation and that You have appointed this day for them to hear the Gospel and that if they will believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, they too can experience that relationship with You and a peace which passes all understanding.
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Lord, I pray for their repentance and faith.
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I pray that You would be merciful to us now as we look forward to communion together.
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In Jesus' name, Amen.