God is Love but Love is Not God - Brandon Scalf

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1 John 4:7-12 Main Points:

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All right, everyone, grab your Bibles and turn with me to 1 John chapter four. 1
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John chapter four. I love hearing the phrase purpose clause.
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Makes my exegetical and expositional heart very happy. 1
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John chapter four, at the risk of being redundant, let me pray for our time together because we all need the
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Spirit's help especially me. Father, we come before you as I echoed this morning as weak and beggarly creatures.
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We come before you gasping for spiritual air as it were, looking for life.
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And we know that you have a life for us in your incarnate word,
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Jesus Christ. And in your written word, these here scriptures. And so we ask that you would illuminate them for us this evening.
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That you would lift Christ high and that his gospel would so saturate our hearts and minds that we would look different walking out of these doors than when we entered them.
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That you would help us to love one another as your word calls us to do. And that you would remind us that you are love and you get to define love because it is wrapped up in you.
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Ontologically, it is part of your being. And you can no sooner give up your loving kindness than you can cease being
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God. And so today, this evening, Lord, help us to see
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Christ more clearly, help us to love him more deeply and help us to love one another as we imitate your love for your bride.
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We ask these things in Jesus' meritorious name, amen.
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Last summer, a group of us went to a gay pride festival or parade or both,
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I don't really know what they call it. And we went there in the hopes of sharing the gospel with those who rejected the
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God of the Bible and rejected his sexual ethic. And I made a tract that we were handing out and it said,
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God is love. And of course, I decorated it in such a way as to make it appealing to them with the colors that they so love that they stole from us, by the way, that being the colors of the rainbow.
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And I did that purposely because one of the mantras that this kind of sect of humanity prides itself in is what they deem as love.
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And so on the surface, they would never disagree with the simple statement that God is love.
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But the truth is they have injected their own definition of the word love into that word love that they throw around so flippantly that they borrowed, by the way, from the
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Christian worldview and Christian theology. And they have poisoned the world with it because they have made love
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God instead of understanding that God is love. And what they do out in the open, flying their flags, doing their parades and so on and so forth is the same thing that you and I do every single day when we pervert the love that comes from God.
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You see, many of us are not very different in many ways. We are influenced by our culture and oftentimes we misunderstand what love is because firstly, we misunderstand who
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God is. And secondarily, we misunderstand what love is because we do not get our definitions from the
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Bible. And so John, the apostle whom
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Jesus loved, according to John, and of course, the Holy Spirit, is going to help us understand through 1
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John chapter four, verses seven through 12, what biblical love looks like.
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You see, his church needed to understand what it looked like to love properly. And so he needed to pastorally lean in and to tell them and to help them as it were, as a gentle shepherd.
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And so why don't we look at the text today with the backdrop and the understanding that we all come to, and we'll get to this more in depth as we move along through the text, faulty views of love.
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So if you would, please stand with me for the honoring and reading of God's holy, infallible and all sufficient word. And we will be looking at, like I said, verses seven through 12.
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This is the word of the Lord. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God.
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And everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know
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God because God is love. By this, the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent his only begotten son into the world so that we might live through him.
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And 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 also ought to love one another. No one has beheld
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God at any time. And if we love one another, God abides in us. His love is perfected in us.
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The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God endures forever, amen? Amen, why don't you have a seat?
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Before we dig in to verse seven, we must understand what's happening in context.
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Because context is king. If we divorce what the scriptures have to say apart from its context, we miss the entire point of what's being said.
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We cannot rip passages and parts of scripture, we cannot rip them kicking and screaming from their argument.
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And what's interesting about this passage on love is that it's not the only section of scripture in this letter about love.
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In fact, if you go to chapter three, verses 11 through 24, there is this great proclamation and assertion of Christian love.
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And then of course, we have here in four, seven through 21, another love -dominated section of scripture.
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And right in between it, you have chapter four, verses one through six, which are teaching about spiritual discernment and what it looks like to prize and hold to orthodox theology.
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In other words, it's teaching about how to exercise spiritual discernment in the body.
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So John here intentionally places the text on spiritual discernment between two love -saturated sections of scripture.
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And three, 11 through 24, there are seven love words mentioned.
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And in four, seven through 21, there is 29 love words mentioned.
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So the contextual point that John is trying to make is that love and orthodoxy are thematically linked together, or at least they should be.
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Right love, in other words, naturally flows out of a right understanding of who
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God is and what he's about. You could say it this way.
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Love and proper theology in the context of the local church are not opposed to one another.
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They're bedfellows. Another thing that it means, theological error and the promotion of theological error and the unwillingness to study to show thyself approved is unloving to everyone around you.
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So what is love? And what does it have to do with theology?
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Or more importantly, what is love? And what does it have to do with God? Well, let's look at verse seven.
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The first thing that I want you to see is that God is the source of love. God is the source of love.
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He begins speaking here in verse seven, saying, beloved. That means that he's speaking to Christians, people he loves and cares about who are underneath his pastoral care.
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He's not speaking to any passerby that might hear about this letter. He's speaking specifically to a specific people in a specific place, namely in the church that he is addressing.
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And he says, beloved, those whom I love, those whom I care about, those whom I cherish, let us love one another.
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Here we have an imperative command. It's not optional to love, as we will see as we journey through this.
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Because God is love, we must love one another. And when we love one another, we prove to be children of God.
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And not only that, but we perfect the love of God, as it were. So we are to love one another.
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And there is a reason here, and that reason is signified by this little word for.
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For love is from God. So love flows forth from God.
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He is the source of it. Not only that, but he goes on to say, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows
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God. So God, as it were, is this fountain flowing with love.
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And he is the source of love. And because he's the source of love, if we refuse to love one another, or we refuse to show love to one another, then we prove ourselves to be disconnected from that source, to be disconnected, as it were, from that fountain.
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And the presence of our love proves or authenticates our discipleship, authenticates our faith, authenticates our childness of God.
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It proves we're in the family, right? Because everyone, verse seven at the end here, who loves has been born of God and knows
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God. Now, this is going to fly in the face of much of our understanding of love. Because a lot of people will say, well, non -Christians can be loving.
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Atheists can be loving. Not according to this text. Anyone who actually loves with a biblical love has been born of God and knows
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God. That is, if you've been paying attention as we've preached through the book of Ephesians, has been regenerated by the power of the
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Spirit, has been resurrected from spiritual death, and has been given new life in Christ Jesus, and who now walks not according to the flesh, not according to the world, and is not influenced ultimately by the devil and his schemes.
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And not only that, but it's somebody who knows God. That is, is in a relationship with him, who loves him, cherishes him, and seeks to honor him.
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Paul elsewhere says that those who know
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God, and then he stops and says, or rather, God knowing you, you do these things.
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So knowing God means you've been known by God, and God has made himself known, which is why you can love.
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He's the source of it. Here's what that means practically.
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Everyone who loves with a biblical love loves with a derivative love.
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I'll say that again. Everyone who loves with a biblical love loves with a derivative love. Love does not originate in us.
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Love does not find its source in us. We do not give it its lovingness, as it were.
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And we know this because of verse 10 especially. In verse 10 of chapter four, it says, in this is love, not that we have loved
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God, but that he loved us. You see, because spiritually dead people cannot not only not respond to spiritual stimuli, but they cannot love, not with a biblical love, not with the love that God has.
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So God is the source of love, and we love because we love with the love that he shows us and he gives us.
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So God is the source of love. Second, God is the definition of love.
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God is the definition of love. John continues on in his diatribe on why it's important to love by saying in verse eight, the one who does not love does not know
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God. So that's the opposite of what was being said before. If you love God, it's because God knows you. It's because you know
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God. It's because you've been born again. If you do not love, it means that you do not know God.
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It's heavy. In other words, if you are marked by a life that is unloving, ungracious, and unmerciful, you don't know
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God. You're not a Christian. And here's the reason, because God is love.
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How can you know the source, who is not just the source or fountain of some ethereal love that he has taken and just given?
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No, no, no. God is love. There's not love that exists outside of him.
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And now this is some kind of heavy theological stuff here that we're getting into.
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The men at the Shepherds Institute, we talked about this for, I don't know, three hours two weeks ago, four hours maybe.
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I think everybody stayed till like 10 o 'clock. There is no love outside of God.
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All of God and all of his attributes are him.
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Fully, this is what's called divine simplicity.
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That God is not made up of parts. He's not loving over here. He's not gracious over here, and sometimes vengeful and wrathful over here.
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He's not holy over here. He's all of himself all of the time. And these things exist because he's
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God, and they are him. He is love. So God is justice.
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God is love. He is his attributes, and his attributes are him. Does this make sense? See, you and I, we don't function like this.
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Brandon Scalf is not love. We can experience love.
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We can show love as love has been shown to us, but love is not created in me ontologically, and it's not created in you ontologically.
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That means it is not bound up in your being. The reason that love exists at all is because God exists, and he is love.
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Does that make sense? So God is not saying, there's this really awesome concept of love, and I'm gonna borrow that, and I'm going to employ that.
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No, no, no. Love exists because God is love. Here's where all of this theology pays off.
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That means he gets to define it. If love doesn't exist outside of God's being in terms of where it comes from, then nobody else gets to say what it means.
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Another important thing it means, love is not God. What that means is love, or a concept of love, is not driving
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God, but God, because he is love, is always acting loving.
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So if you don't think God is loving, it's because you don't believe in what I'm saying. If there are times in your life where you say,
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God is not being loving to me, I would say God is love, and you don't get to throw that accusation at him because he's
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God. And it's not just, oh, he's God, and we better just deal with it.
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It's, no, because God is love, that love that is in him and the love that he shows is what love is.
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So returning back to our beginning illustration and our introduction, these people at the
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LGBTQ plus parades and so on and so forth, they borrow our words and they twist them.
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Or, that's easy one, right? Because we can just do this.
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Yeah, that's them. How horrible. What about you? What about me? See, we start to think that love is really when someone really makes much of me.
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A lot of us can find ourselves there. Love is when
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I get presents bought for me. Love is feeling this really fuzzy feeling when we're on a date or we meet a girl or a guy we like for the first time.
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There's more divorces now than there has ever been. And at the top of the list is irreconcilable differences, which just means, ah, we fell out of love with one another.
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It's just not working anymore. Why? Because when we invert and we misunderstand love, the fuzzy feeling is not gonna do it on the deathbed.
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It's not gonna do it in trial and tribulation. It's not gonna carry us through. Why? Because it's not real love. Love is not governing who
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God is. God is love. He's the definition of love because it's bound up in him ontologically.
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But not only is God love, but he has loved, which brings me to my third point, which is God has publicly displayed his love in history.
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So the good news is John doesn't just stop telling his church members that God is love, which means love is not
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God, which means that we need to love one another because that shows that we are children of God, that we know
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God, that we have been regenerated by the power of the Holy Spirit. So love, he doesn't leave us wondering.
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He doesn't leave us without an example of what love looks like.
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Yes, it looks like God, but it actually has some real life, practical meat on its bones, as it were.
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So how has God publicly displayed his love in history for us? Well, there's two that we will talk about here in these next few verses, but then there's another one at the end that we will get to, which is that our love is perfected when we love one another, when
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God's love is perfected, when we love one another, which is a third way that God publicly displays his love in history.
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But that's one that continues on. These two were done in the past. They're objective, they happened, they're real, and they matter.
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And if you're paying attention and you weigh it against maybe your definitions of what you think love ought to look like when you give it to others or when you receive it, it might just rock your world, and I pray that it will.
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The first way that God has publicly displayed his love in history is by sending his
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Son that we might live through him. Look with me here in our text.
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Verse nine goes on to say, by this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent his only begotten
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Son into the world so that we might live through him.
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So John goes on to explain what love looks like because our views of love, the culture's views of love, cannot define
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God, which means they cannot define love.
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But he shows us that love was made known or manifested, according to verse nine, or revealed in us that God has sent his only begotten
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Son, his precious Son, his eternally and forever generated
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Son into the world so that we might live through him.
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Here's the thing about the triune God. The triune God needs none of us.
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And despite what you've heard in the Gospel Coalition conferences, he wasn't in need of an expression to pour out his love.
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The Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit were completely content within themselves.
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They did, however, choose to make man in their image. And by they, I mean him, right?
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Because there's one God, three persons who all share the same nature, essence, and attributes.
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But they display their loving nature by sending the second member of the
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Trinity in human flesh for you and me.
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The God -man, Jesus Christ, second member of the Trinity to nature's fully
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God, fully man, was sent to the earth that he created to be rejected by those whom he created and ultimately to be betrayed and killed so that we might live through him.
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Where we were dead in our transgressions and sins, he made us alive by sending his
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Son that he did not have to send. And most importantly,
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God publicly displayed his love in history by slaughtering that same
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Son that we might be forgiven. He goes on in verse 10, in this is love, not that we have loved
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God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be what? The propitiation for our sins.
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Despite the fact that apart from Christ, we didn't recognize love, we didn't know what love is because we did not know
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God. And because we lived in a constant rebellion against him, even when we were weak, even when we were sinners, even while we did not love, in this is love, not that we have loved
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God, it's not that we loved him, but that he loved us and sent his
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Son, not just so that we might live through him, that he would be the propitiation for our sins.
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Now this word propitiation has a lot of imagery behind it. But essentially what it means is that Jesus absorbed the wrath of God on our behalf.
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It's wrapped up in sacrificial temple imagery where the priests in Old Testament Israel would bring together these sacrificial lambs and they would kill some of them and then they would wipe blood on others and send them away.
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And in that, sin, looking forward by faith to the coming
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Christ, would not only be dealt with in terms of their sin being erased, but being transferred, transferred to another.
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So the idea here is, friends, is that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten
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Son to be slaughtered on our behalf. The God man,
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Jesus Christ, lived the perfect life according to the law of God. Why? As Hebrews 12 says, the joy that was set before him.
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In other words, because he loved those whom he would redeem, he was happy to experience the bludgeoning on our behalf, even though he was innocent.
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He took your record and he took mine and he took the nails that we deserve. And God punished the second member of the
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Trinity, Jesus Christ the righteous, his only begotten Son, his unique Son, the
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Son of his love. And he poured the cup of wrath down his face.
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In Jesus' human nature, just before the crucifixion, he cries out to God the Father in prayer.
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And he says, Lord, if it be your will, let this cup pass from me. And he did not pray that, friends, because he was scared of chains and whips.
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He prayed that prayer because in his humanity, he knew that he could not fathom what it would be to experience all of humanity, do a wrath on himself.
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For all those whom Jesus would trust in, he tasted their hell.
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This is why Jesus quotes Psalm 22 on the cross. My God, my
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God, why have you forsaken me? Because if you are a believer, if you know God, if you have been born of God, Jesus tasted, experienced, felt, and was destroyed by the wrath that was due you.
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He was bloodied, he was beaten, and he was broken. So that one day you can stand before God and you can hear him say, we can dwell in the house of the
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Lord forever. And what
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John is trying to help us understand here, friends, is that's what love is.
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That's what love looks like with flesh on it. That's what it's all about.
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In other words, love looks like death. Love looks like sacrifice.
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Love looks like taking the brunt of a punishment that you didn't deserve and taking it on the chin and loving in spite of that reality.
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Now, I could stop there and that would just preach, but I won't because what
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I want to do now is I want to drive the nail in deeper to show you that that is precisely the type of love that we ought to show one another in the body of Christ.
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Showing, of course, spiritual discernment, having a proper orthodox understanding of theology, but loving nonetheless, but more on that in a moment.
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The fourth thing I want you to see is that God's love has not only been publicly displayed in history, but that it is perfected when we love one another.
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Now, this is an interesting concept, so hang in there with me. He goes on to say in verse 11, beloved, speaking once again to the
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Christian community, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another, repeating this same command.
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Not only is it true that God is love, so he gets to define love, but also that he loved us by showing us love, and because that's true, we also ought to love one another because what?
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That proves our Christianhood, it proves that we are children of God, that we've been born of him and that we know him, and it gives us an assurance of our salvation in many ways.
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But then he goes on and says, no one has beheld
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God at any time. That is, nobody has seen God with their eyes. Why? Because as the confessions plainly state and as the scriptures clearly teach,
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God is spirit. God is not something that we can lay our eyes on, except for, of course, in the person of Jesus Christ.
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But even he is sitting, as Ephesians has already taught us as we've been walking through it, in the heavenly places, sitting on the
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Davidic throne. And so we do not see him here with earthly eyeballs, though we will.
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We see him with our heavenly gifted eyeballs. But because no one has seen
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God any time, if we love one another, which is commanded, God abides in us, that is, he lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.
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In other words, what's being said here is that love is our testimony to the world that God is.
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And there is this triangle of completion, as it were, where God's love is brought full circle.
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And the unseen God is seen because we love one another.
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So as I just hopefully clearly and plainly stated that God has publicly displayed his love in history, and the person and work of Jesus Christ, specifically on the cross, he now, in real time, and throughout future history, displays his love when we properly and biblically love one another.
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And then this act of love is completed. A theologian that I was reading earlier this week explains it this way.
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The shape of perfect love is triangular. Love comes as a gift from God, because God is love, that enables us to love each other, and so return to God the gift that is given to us.
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Where any one leg of the triangle is missing, love remains incomplete and immature.
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But where the triangle is whole, love is complete. So what
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John is trying to get his people to see is that God is love, has shown love, and when you love one another, the world gets to see
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God's love on display. And when we're fighting, when we're hating one another, when we're twisting what love actually is, we show the world that God does not exist.
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Now, of course, he does exist, but we're preaching the wrong message with our behavior.
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Now, correct theology is important, so don't hear what I'm not saying. In fact, that's John's point, because correct theology would lead you to this very conclusion.
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Martin Luther, a famous of mine. Peace if possible, truth at all costs. Yes and amen.
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Love and unity cannot be built on anything but truth, and yet there is a way to engage even minor disagreements in love.
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Would you say, if you had to guess, that the biggest disagreement in history was between God who died for his people and his people who lived contra to his love?
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Do you die for those who would do nothing for you?
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Would you die for those whom you feel would not die for me?
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I fear many of us would not. So how does the Bible tell us to love? What does it look like specifically, as I tried to mention earlier, to love somebody else according to the
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Bible? And we need to know that very practically because we love because God is love and we love like God loves if we are to love biblically at all.
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Well, it's interesting if you do a search in the
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Bible as to how a Christian ought to love, you see this theme that has been presented here in 1
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John running throughout all the scripture. In John 15, 13,
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John, this same author here, makes this argument, greater love has no one than this, that one laid down his life for his friends.
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In other words, you're not looking to see what you get out of it. You're not looking for an emotional equilibrium adjustment.
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Well, if I show them this, then I will get this in return. No, no, no, no. Or if they don't show me this type of love that I want to receive, then that wrecks my entire day, life, week, year forever.
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No, because as Jesus has shown us on the cross, or rather as God has shown us through his bludgeoning of a son, love is sacrificial.
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It's absorbing death. Ephesians 5, 1 and 2 makes the same argument, although a different author, the
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Apostle Paul. The Apostle Paul says in Ephesians 5, 1 and 2, therefore be imitators of God.
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Okay, I'm listening. As beloved children, all right, and walk in love, just as Christ also loved us and gave himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.
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How do you walk in love? By imitating the love of God in Christ as he gave himself up for, that is died for us, those whom are his beloved, because it is an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma.
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Specifically husbands, specifically husbands, the Bible tells us how we are to love our wives.
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It says husbands, love your wives just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her.
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That means what? Do you love your bride as Christ loved his bride and died for her?
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That means your life is no longer about you and your dreams and your aspirations. That means loving and leading.
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That means dying to yourself regardless of what you might receive in return because what did
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Jesus get? A death sentence and he did it for the joy that was set before him.
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Not only that, he did it because it was loving. Wives in the same way, it says in Ephesians 5 .22,
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be subject to your own husbands as to the Lord. If you don't think being subject to a sinner as to the
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Lord looks like death, you're not trying hard enough. So when we see these scriptures littered throughout the
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Bible, we come to this conclusion that love looks like death.
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So you read something like 1 Corinthians when it says that love is patient, love is kind. Which is all important stuff.
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Don't hear what I'm not saying. And the thrust of it is that it's gonna be hard.
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And yet it's loving and yet it is loving.
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And when we love like the Bible tells us to love, we make the unseen
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God seen and we make much of Jesus. Which is why John says in John 13 .35,
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by this all will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another. What I find most interesting about the placement of this specific text mixed with John's words and his gospel.
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And what's actually being said here is that orthodox doctrine is not sufficient evidence of your conversion.
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I'll say that again. Orthodox doctrine, having the right theology nailed down is important, it's necessary.
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But it is not sufficient evidence that you have been revived and regenerated by Christ. The gospels are replete with episodes of demons understanding
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Jesus and what he's up to more than any of us probably ever will.
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John did not say in John 13 .35, by this all will know that you are my disciples.
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That you have all the correct doctrine and you let everybody know it all the time. That you get your way, that you love one another.
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And as we have seen, as we've done a biblical taxonomy, it looks like dying to self, dying to preferences, stepping in the way and loving like God loves.
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Which is different than the way the world loves. Because the world loves itself.
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Apart from Christ our sinful hearts love ourselves. And that's precisely what the men and women did at this parade, it's precisely what we do in our own sinful ways.
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If we don't buy into that propaganda, and we shouldn't, we become the object of our own affection.
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And what this text teaches us is that the object of our affection should first and foremost be
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God. And because of that reality.
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Because of what he has done in our hearts and what he has shown us in history, we then perfect God's love.
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That is bring it to completion by loving one another sacrificially.
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Like Christ loved his people and gave himself up for them. Would you pray with me?
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Father, we thank you. We thank you that you have given us a God who is a God of love.
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A God who is love and has shown us what love looks like in history so that we do not have to wonder what love actually looks like.
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We ask today as we move throughout the rest of this week that you would help us to be more loving, help us to be more compassionate, help us to be more sacrificial so that we might display the glories and beauties of your gospel in our lives and our marriages and in our homes.
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We ask this, not because we merit any of it because Jesus Christ did on the cross. We ask it in his name.