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Don Filcek, In the Light - 1 John; 1 John 4:7-21 The Confidence Cycle
Welcome to Recast Church in Madawan, Michigan, where we are growing in faith, community, and service. This is a message from the series called In the Light out of the Book of 1 John by Pastor Don Filsek.
If you'd like more information about our church, please visit us on the web at www .recastchurch .com. Here's Pastor Don.
Thank you for leading us. I'm very grateful for the time and energy they put into leading us in worship every week, so grateful for them. Be sure to have your Bibles open in front of you to 1 John chapter four, verses seven through 21.
Again, that's page 879 in case you lost your place. But having that open, that is really the outline of my message this morning, is walking you right through the text, and so that's where we're gonna go with this.
And then remember at any time, I know we just took a break, but if you need to get up and get more coffee or juice or donuts, I did just ask somebody to turn the thermostat down. I noticed some of you are kind of fanning, and it got really warm the first service, and then it really got warm in between the services.
And so we're, maybe if we prop a door open here or there, and then with the furnace off, hopefully it'll cool off. But again, if you need more juice or need to hydrate, you might need that in the sauna here today.
But are you guys ready to dive in? Are you ready? Okay, let's get to this. John starts off verse seven in essence saying, beloved, let us love one another. Okay, so he's saying you who are loved, you who are loved, show love for other people.
And that opening sentence really sets forward what will be his fundamental argument throughout this entire text, that because we have received love, we are now empowered to go out and show love to others.
He's gonna make a, he's going to make a strong case that love is the greatest of motivations towards living well in this life. Receiving love is the major, hear me carefully, receiving love is the major prerequisite to showing love.
Did you hear me? Receiving love is the major prerequisite to showing love, and that is receiving the love of God is the prerequisite. John gets right after it by declaring that love is from God, which is understated in the sense that all things come from God.
Can you think of any created thing that doesn't come from God? But that's kind of part of the catch in this is I don't believe that John thinks of love as a created thing. I don't think in essence it ultimately is a created thing.
He's not just saying God created love like God created trees and dolphins and stars and Adam and Eve and all of the created things that exist on this planet that have substance, because the next verse he's actually going to state that God is love.
In other words, God is, love is not a created thing that God fashioned and made for us. Love is something that existed before creation. Have you ever thought about that? Love is, by definition, by nature, it is a part of who God is.
Now, you might ask, I mean, my mind just, the minute that I start thinking about what did God do in eternity past before creation, my mind almost blows up, okay? Would you agree with me on that? How many of you would just kind of admit, all of a sudden we're in the realm of things I cannot understand that God existed before the creation?
Like, what was he doing? Like, just some simple questions, some fundamental questions, but I can tell you this, that whatever he was doing, love was a part of it. That he existed in eternity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together in perfect unity and demonstrating love toward one another for eternity.
It's a very, it comes from the nature of who God is. Are you getting what I'm saying in that? That the Trinity is actually a doctrine of love, in essence, a doctrine of relationship. And he has demonstrated that love to us.
Well, the text goes on to say, but whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Now, John has a theme of being born of God that is like a second birth, so to speak. We all, raise your hand if you were born at least once.
Okay, you were born, you're here, you just don't remember it, but you were. So you were born, but then he also talks about a second birth, and he actually first referenced that in his gospel, in John chapter three, he talked about, to Nicodemus, you must be born again.
Born of God, born again, becoming a child of God, all of those are kind of the same take on one common concept of entering into the family of God. And notice how relational this is that John is talking about.
He's not talking about subscribing to the Ten Commandments, he's not talking about following or entering into a contract with God. He is ultimately talking about knowing God and entering into his family, being welcomed with open arms into his family and becoming his child.
Are those different concepts? The idea of subscribing to a set of rules and regulations and laws and coming under the Ten Commandments and coming under the Torah and all the Old Testament laws and stuff?
He's talking about something different. He's talking about knowing God and being born of God. And he says that whoever loves has been born of God and knows God, but the converse of that is true as well.
Anyone who doesn't love others cannot rightly say that you know God. If we are not loving towards others, we cannot say in honesty that we know God because he is love. Now, it's very important at this point that we skip down to verses nine and 10.
I think John has in mind, if we were to sit down and read this in one chunk, we would have a definition of love already and we talked about that a couple weeks ago, but all of a sudden, that's kind of fuzzy in our minds and so as he's talking, we could easily be misunderstanding what he means by love.
How many of you know there's a lot of definitions in the world to the word love? And almost all of them in the world have something to do with how I feel. Would you agree with me on that? And the biblical definition is something that's very different from how I feel.
So we go down to verses nine and 10 to find out how the Bible defines love. How does John here, by the movement of the Holy Spirit, define what love is? And he talks about two of our holidays, ultimately.
He says, you wanna know what love is? Easy way to think of it. Christmas and Easter. Christmas, the meaning of Christmas and the meaning of Easter is his definition of love. The answer is pretty simple here.
Incarnation, the condescension of God to humanity is love. And then also, the atoning work of Jesus Christ, his sacrifice, his turning away the wrath of God from us. Love, is that loving? Amazing love given to us in those two things.
So ultimately, verse nine is kind of answering the question, how has God made his love known to us? And the answer is incarnation, by becoming one of us. But the question becomes even more general in verse 10.
How do we even know love at all? How do we come to understand what love is at all? And the answer to that question is the atoning work of Jesus Christ. So we are here looking at the source of love as love is defined in biblical terms.
And the answer is simple. God's love has been shown through the incarnation and truest love has been shown to all in that he sent his son to be the substitutionary sacrifice that has healed a broken relationship between humanity and their creator, God.
God's righteous and just wrath has been turned away, which is the word propitiation. Do you see that in the text? How many of you used the word propitiation this past week? Just in passing, you use that routinely and regularly, probably not so much, but it means to turn away the wrath of someone.
Somebody actually told me, by the way, that their Wi-Fi key is actually propitiation, so they laugh when I say that, like it actually is somebody's code, and so they do use it every week, which is kind of funny.
But propitiation, yeah, that's kind of funny. But it means that the wrath of God, his just and righteous and good and accurate wrath was toward you and me. Did you realize that? In our rebellion against him and in going our own way and in worshiping idols and in going off on our own, by the way, I'm not talking about bowing down to stone and wood and metal and golden calves and stuff like that, but do we have idols in our lives?
Do we have things that we worship that are not God? And so in our rebellion, he is just in his wrath being toward us, and yet the picture of propitiation is that the wrath, the channel of wrath that was flowing to each one of us has been diverted to Christ, and he has taken that wrath that you and I deserve on himself, where?
At the cross. The cross is the place where the channel of his anger toward us has been diverted, and it was all poured out on his son. That is propitiation. That is a picture of his love toward us. But as we consider the source of love in God, okay, so if the source of love that John is talking about here is found in incarnation and propitiation or atonement, his sacrifice, if that's the source of love in a genuine, real sense, do you hear John saying that?
I'm not making this up. This is what John's argument is here, and maybe it's a little bit hard to follow the logic, but if incarnation and atonement is the source of love, then how do we account for expressions of love among those who know nothing about incarnation and the atoning work of Jesus Christ?
Did that cross anybody's mind, as I'm defining love as the incarnation and the atonement? How many of you know somebody out in the world who is loving toward others, demonstrates and shows love, but knows nothing of Christ and really has nothing to do with him?
Do you know somebody like that? Okay, I think four of us, five of us do, six of us, raise your hand again if you know somebody out in the world who loves other people. I mean, it seems like they have some sense of love and some semblance of that, but they don't know Christ.
Would John suggest that people outside of the realm of biblical Christianity have no love or have no understanding of love? I don't think that's where he's going with this, but I do believe that John would go so far as to say that no one has a fundamental source of love outside of God.
He is the source of all love. So when an unbeliever loves their children, what is the source of that concept of self-sacrifice or giving to their children? It's God. Well, how does that work? Because they're not coming through the channel of understanding incarnation, they're not coming through the channel of understanding atonement, but let me suggest to you that every single one of us bears the image of God, do we not?
We actually sang about it earlier. We all bear the image, the imprint of our God, and so I like to think of, you guys probably, most of us in the room use something that bore our image this morning, and I love to use it as an illustration because we use something on a routine basis that bears our image.
It's called a mirror. Okay, so you stepped in front of a mirror and you believe that what the mirror reflects is accurate. Right, I need to get rid of that smudge and I need to get my hair straight or whatever, but you believe that it's accurate and it's reflecting you.
Now, what happens if somebody steps up behind you and smashes that mirror with a rock, okay? Now, have any of you ever seen a mirror that's been broken and shattered but it stayed intact? So, and what happens to the reflection in that context, in that case?
It's distorted and it's marred, and can you kind of make out the image of yourself in there? If you look hard enough and you figure it out, yeah, you can kind of be like, well, I'm kind of broken up a little bit, but well, that's what sin has done to the image of God in us.
So, does the world out there have a concept or an understanding of love? Yeah, because that's part of the nature of God that has been given to us in that image, but it is broken and it's distorted. Do you see that in our culture and in society?
A distortion of love, a brokenness about that? And so, the world has certainly access to an understanding of love, but even that still comes from God as part of us being image bearers of Him. I believe that all humans that have ever lived have a sense of love and care and concern that comes from God's imprint that He gave to humanity at creation.
It's broken in varying degrees. But as John is gonna go on to explain, there is a broken love and then there is a perfect love, a love that is being perfected in us as believers, but then a perfect love that comes from God as well.
There's a clear process of growing in love that shows that not all love is equal. So, the most pure understanding we have of love comes through the knowledge of God through the incarnation and atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
If you can think of it this way, Jesus is the mirror that was never broken. Jesus is the human who is rightly ordered and put together and accurately and honestly and truth reflects God as He is. Are you getting me on that?
Are you tracking with that? Jesus is the mirror correctly ordered. Now, it's not that He was broken and had to be put back together. He came to us from the right hand of the Father as a perfect human, born of a virgin without sin nature and came into this world to show us what love and compassion truly looks like.
He accurately and honestly and truly reflects the Father and John was very, very expressive about that throughout the end of his gospel, how he is the exact representation of the nature of God. Paul talks about it often.
But in verse 11, John states explicitly that those of us who have come to know this source of love found in Jesus Christ ought to then in turn love one another. In other words, that we know the love of God through Jesus should be enough to push us out to love of others in the church, to others in our family, others in our community.
And we're gonna talk more about how that motivation works here at the end of the message. But John spends the majority of the time going over the top in our text to explain that God is the source of love.
Not as its creator, but love actually flows out of His very nature. He is love and all that He does is loving. Now, to say, John says twice in our text this morning, God is love. But what if you flip that?
Because I think that's a major problem in our culture that we have flipped that to not say God is love, but we have basically bought into the notion that love is God. Are those two different statements?
Do you worship the God who is love or do you worship love and make a God out of it? And I believe that a lot of problems in our culture today come out of people who have adopted a, basically have taken a human understanding of love and applied that to God and said, well, God is just loving.
So He's just gonna let everybody have their own way. He's gonna let them, you know, just have fun and get away with things and all that. And He's just the big daddy in the sky who's just gonna just lavish gifts on everybody just generously.
And are you getting what I'm saying? The idea that God is love is what the text says. The text does not, you are not making a biblical statement to say love is deity, love is God. And so what we've done in essence is we've crafted an idol out of love and just asked ourselves fundamentally the question, every turn of decision in life in our culture is what is the loving thing to do?
Now, is that a good question to ask? It is a good question to ask as long as you have the right definition of love, right? As long as you have a biblical definition of love that flows out of the character of God, then it's not a bad question.
But the problem is we start with our own definition of love and then work backwards from it. So we can sing songs like love is all you need, which is the opposite of the biblical declaration, God is all you need and He is loving.
You hear the difference? Love is all you need? No. How many of you would acknowledge I need a little bit more than just love? I need God, I need God. And God is, how many of you are glad that we can add the next part to that?
I need God, He's my primary need and He is love. Glad for that? I am so glad that God is love. And here in verse 12, John highlights a problem. It's like he kind of takes us out of this for just a second and it would look like the start of verse 12 is kind of ripped out of context.
It's like, where are you going with this, John? All of a sudden he says, no one's ever seen God. Yeah, okay, I'm tracking with that. He's stating what's an obvious problem to our Western scientific mind.
Ultimately what he's saying is God is invisible. How many of you noticed that? Did you already have that on board like when I started this message? Before I ever told you, before John ever told you, you're like, I get that, God is invisible.
I haven't seen Him. But I want to point out that John, John had a lot of evidence. You think about the disciple John and all the things that he saw as he walked with Jesus. He walked on the shores of Galilee.
He saw Jesus walk on the sea of Galilee. He watched the feeding of the 5 ,000 at the shore of Galilee. He heard the teaching. He saw miracles. He saw Him raise the dead. How many of you think that he had some evidences for the existence of God and not just the existence of God, but that Jesus Christ was God in flesh?
Would you agree with me? He had some evidences. And yet he still knows that we struggle as humans. I think he even himself struggled to see God in the day to day. And he's like, we haven't seen God and He's invisible.
And how many of you have ever just come up against that? Could you just give me a hug, God? I just need to see your presence. Could you just show yourself? How about a phone call or an email? Is this too much to ask?
Could you text me? Have you ever been there? Just like, I want to hear from God. I think many of us have been to that point in our lives if we're honest. But if we are loving one another, John's argument here, nobody has seen God, but if we love one another, then God is showing Himself through us.
We can, in essence, manifest God's love to each other. But you're not gonna get a hug from God, but how many of you know, how many of you have got a well-timed hug from another follower of Jesus Christ just when you needed it?
And that is them being the arms of God to you, providing for you what you need at the right time, and that is God working through them. They are the conduit, but He is the source of that love. That God's love is perfected in verse 12, it goes on, it says, no one has ever seen God.
If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us. It doesn't mean that there's a lack in the quality of His love, that it needs to be perfected like it's imperfect and now we've fixed His love and made it better, but it is, in essence, making it known to others around us.
We have a chance to manifest the love of God. It's as if, picturing it this way, He is the source and we are the conduit. He is the power source and we are the wires through which His love travels to the world around us.
Does that make sense? And we know we abide in Him when we love, that it's a sign, it's a sign to our souls, it's a sign to our minds that we are indeed His children when we love in this way. And then, equally, it says in the text that His spirit dwells within us, and we've talked about how, if His spirit is alive in us through faith in Christ, then we will, then His spirit will, in some mysterious way, communicate with our spirit that we are indeed His children, and that fuels the cycle of love as well within us.
But John takes a moment to remind us how the love of God is applied to us, and this is very important. Verses 14 through 16 seem like somewhat of a side note, and yet they are central to our understanding because, how many of you think that, okay, I can talk about God being loving all day long, but if I end right here, right now, and we close up, shop, and pray, all I've talked about is how loving God is, but I haven't talked for a moment about how you get that love.
How do you obtain the love of God? Is it just equally, uniformly, patternly given to all humanity across the face of the planet, and God is just loving and everybody's under His love, and kind of like this notion, everybody's gonna get to heaven, everybody is in His love.
Well, John, in verses 14 through 16, he's gonna highlight that something is necessary for us to come into His love. In verse 14, John testifies to the incarnation. He says, this is key. You must believe that Jesus came in flesh.
In 15, he explicitly states that confession of Jesus as the Son of God is necessary to receive this love from God, and then lastly, in verse 16, it says, belief that God has love for you, that He came in flesh through Christ, that Jesus is His Son, and that He loves you as evidenced by His incarnation and His atoning work for you, His death on the cross, His sacrifice for you.
Those are the essentials, and that's the way that we know that He abides in us. Verses 14 through 16 are essential to keeping us from thinking that God just loves all people and that all abide in Him.
Confession and belief in the Son of God and His atoning work on the cross are necessary to receive the love of God. They're necessary. Now, whenever I see circular reasoning, I become concerned, and really, at first glance, verse 16 looks like it has circular reasoning in it, which is a really bad pattern of argumentation to say, this is true, and the way I know this is true is because this is true, and the way I know that this is true is because this is true, and you just get this cycle going of self-evident things.
Do you guys know what I'm talking about when I say circular reasoning? Verse 16 at the very end, so we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in Him, so all of this business about abiding in looks like circular reasoning.
How do I know that I abide in Him? Because I abide in His love. How do I know I abide in His love? Because I abide in Him. Does that sound like a circle to you? And I would suggest to you that it is a circle, but I don't believe it's circular reasoning.
Whoever abides in God abides in love. How do you know you abide in God? You abide in love. How do you know you abide in love? You abide in God, and it's a circle, but I wanna suggest to you that it is a cycle of the Christian life that has a starting point that He has been very, very clear in trying to communicate to us that there's an entry point to the cycle that is evidence, and this cycle is the engine that fuels the healthy Christian life, and it begins, the beginning point of entrance into the cycle that fuels the Christian life begins with God's love for us.
That is the starting point. His love for us demonstrated by the incarnation and substitutionary atonement received by confession and faith, which means it is trusted as a true and honest expression of love and compassion from the Almighty, the Almighty just God of the universe towards sinful, broken, jacked-up, unworthy people like you and me.
What I'm saying by that is do you believe that He loves you? Do you believe that He loves you and has compassion toward you? The source of love is the good news that God loves you and that God loves me, and that is the source of the power that is gonna drive this cycle of confidence forward in our lives.
Like the source of the power plant that fuels your home, how many of you really think, you've spent time thinking, when you plug in your phone to charge it at night, you're like, I wonder where this power comes from?
Do you really meditate on that? Is it coal? Is it natural gas? Is it the nuclear power plant over on, what's, does anybody know the name of the nuclear power plant over there? Palisades, okay, so over at Palisades, is that, you know, where does our power come from?
Well, there's a source to it, and it might turn out poorly for us if, you know, that thing melts down or whatever, but at this point, where does the source of the power come from for the Christian life?
As we're conduits, it comes from the love of God. And hear me carefully. Actually, hear John carefully. Hear carefully what John is trying to communicate to you and me in verse 18. You can look down at it.
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. Fear is not the source of power in the Christian life. Do you hear me?
Do you hear John? Do you hear the Holy Spirit telling you that fear is not to be your motivation to walk with Christ? Have you ever heard that before? I think a lot of churches have preached fear as the motivation for the Christian life.
Have any of you ever attended that church? Have you been there? I think many of us have been to the same church, okay? And fear has been the motivation for the Christian life, and John says, by no means.
There's no room for fear in the Christian life. It is love in the Christian life. Love is the motivation. Love, power for you and me to walk with God and to love others. The one who has truly encountered the radical, glorious, amazing, undeserved love of God in Christ through the gospel will have confidence on the final day of judgment, because just as he is at work to love this world, just as Jesus is involved in this world loving it, we are with him in that love for others.
We live like Jesus in the world. And the end of verse 17, in essence, says, we are his hands and feet. Like Jesus came as a manifestation of the love of God to the world, we are now sent out as manifestations of Jesus' love to this world, and our love for God and others fuels our confidence before him.
As we see him loving others through us, that provides confidence. But John states definitively that fear doesn't have room in this cycle of the love of God and confidence, so there's no room for fear.
And by the way, it's very, very important for us to define what this brand of fear is. I remember as a child, I had, I struggled through this text a little bit, and I don't know if it was in high school I had read it or whatever, but I had some fears in my life.
One in particular, by the way, just to be transparent, I'm not a dog person, and so if I come over to your house and you have a dog, just know that I'm not gonna be super friendly with your dog. I had a friend when I was a kid who was drug off of a bike in my neighborhood by a Doberman and mauled and had to have umpteen stitches and he's still maimed to this day because of it.
And as a young child who was always afraid of that Doberman that finally got off its chain, I was traumatized, and so I'm not, just not a dog person, forgive me. But I might even call you and ask you to put your dog away before I come and visit.
That's just me, and it doesn't matter how big it is. I know, that's just silly. How many of you know a lot of our fears are illogical? But so I actually worried about that. I actually was concerned. Reading 1 John, I was like, well, maybe I'm not a Christian.
Maybe I'm not in with Christ because I have fear in my life. I mean, legitimate fear. Maybe if you're honest, you're like, I don't really like spiders. I have arachnophobia or claustrophobia. I don't like tight spaces or I have fear of large crowds of people.
Is that what he's getting at here? You won't have any fear, you won't have any phobias, nothing's gonna shake you, nothing's gonna trouble you because you're in Christ and so everything's all good. Is that what he's saying here?
There's a specific brand of fear that I believe John is driving towards here in the text. By the way, I don't even think the brand of fear that he has in mind is the brand that is the austere reverence that we would have in the presence of God.
I believe that still exists for the believer. There is a sense of fear when it is used in scripture in the context of reverence and awe. When we meet Jesus face to face, will we have reverence? I believe we will.
When we meet the God who created everything, will we be in awe? Yes. Is there room for us to fall on our face before a holy and just and righteous God? Yes, but not out of fear of condemnation, not out of fear of judgment, but out of awe of his majesty and his love and his grace and his mercy and his power and his authority.
Are you getting what I'm saying in that? So the brand of fear that John is saying has no room in your life is fear of judgment, if you are in Christ. And that is often the brand of fear that is most often preached, the fear of judgment.
Well, I think there's a problem here and somebody between the services kind of identified this for me. I think there's an issue of preaching to unbelievers and preaching to believers. Is there room in our world for fear of judgment?
Absolutely. Should I be proclaiming fear of judgment for those who are not in Christ, those who have not come by the confession, those who have not believed in the incarnation, those who have not believed in the atonement?
Is there room for fear there? Absolutely. But then what happens as believers when we sit under that teaching, we sit under that preaching and apply it to ourselves? We're going counter to what John is saying here.
For those who are in Christ, there is therefore now no what? Condemnation, glory, amazing truth that we can have confidence before God because of what Jesus Christ has done for us, because of his great love.
John is saying that fear of judgment has no room in the Christian life. And we have truly come to know and understand the good news of Christmas and Easter. If we see the immense life transforming love for us through the incarnation and the bloody sacrifice of Jesus, fear of judgment, according to verse 18, will be cast out.
Will we be disappointed with ourselves when we sin? Yeah, we should be. Will we strive to battle sin wherever it is found in our lives? Yeah, starting with us. Will we fear the judgment of God? No, no, because as I said, there is no condemnation.
In case there's any doubt about the order of this cycle, John recognizes our propensity to probably get this wrong. And as he's going through the argument, he's kind of like, I wanna make sure you're getting the order correct here.
So he throws in verse 19 here at the end of his section. We love, why? Because he first loved us. Do you understand why that order might be important? Because how many religious people, how many religions have been launched on the notion that if I love others and treat others well, then I'll be acceptable to God?
As long as I love others, if I put that cart first and I throw that out there and I say, you know what? I love others and I'm gonna work hard to love others so that God will like me. Is that what John is saying here?
No, he's saying God is the initiator of this business of salvation. He's the one who first loved us. And out of receiving the love of God, then we are empowered to go out and show love to others. John goes on to say, if anyone says with their mouth that they love God, but hates his brother, he's a liar.
That's been a while since John called someone a liar. And so you had to know that was coming, right? I mean, has it been a while? John likes to call people liar and he's done that multiple times. He's a brash individual.
He's called a son of thunder by Jesus Christ himself. And I picture him just saying what he thinks. And he says, if you say you love God, but you don't show love to each other, liar. Liar, pants on fire.
I've milked that. I've used that several times now. But the one who cannot love his brother, who they can see, John makes an argument. You can't love the God that you don't see if you don't love the person that you do see in need in front of you.
Here in verses 20 through 21, John summarizes what Jesus called the greatest commandment. By the way, John present there as a disciple, a follower of Jesus. He was there when the religious leader approached Jesus and said, good teacher, good master, good rabbi.
What is the greatest commandment? And Jesus didn't, ultimately he couldn't come up with just one, he came up with two, right? I mean, the question was, which is the greatest commandment? And he responds, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.
By the way, what I do not believe are two separate commandments. According to John's interpretation and his understanding, he being present there when Jesus said that terms, he basically says, you can't love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength without loving your neighbor as yourself.
How do I love the Lord my God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength? By helping others, by being compassionate and loving towards those immediately here in my sphere of influence. You get it? This is radical, this is profound.
What is ultimately happening here is, John is dispelling the notion that any spirituality can be devoid of tangible acts of love. If you have a spirituality, you say, I love God and boy, I'm just connected with God, but you don't have love for others, it's smoke and mirrors.
You're lying. That's what he's saying here. You're lying if you say, I love God. Oh, and I mean, can you imagine maybe someone who would be pious enough to say, I love God, but not care for others around them?
Have we been guilty of that at times in our lives? I think we all have, we have. In the church, we've often pressed so hard for spiritual preparation that we neglect kindness and love. That's reality.
We're always getting ready to serve others. Have you noticed that in churches in America? We're getting ready, we're getting prepared, we're growing in faith, we're growing in community, growing in service.
One day we can actually get out and do something about it, right? And is that, how much of our teaching, how much of our focus in our growth spiritually, I mean, I know that there's all different kinds of levels here, some of you are new believers, some of you have been with Christ for a long time, but however long, how much have you really identified as being time of preparation for something versus loving others?
I was raised to believe, and I know I'm gonna maybe step on some toes and break up some sacred cows here to some people, and this is gonna rub some people the wrong way, but I was raised to believe that my quiet time, prayer, and reading my Bible was the most important part of my day.
Raise your hand if you've been taught that, you were raised that way. A handful of us, some of you weren't even raised in the church, but a lot of us were raised to think that the most important part of my day, and is it valuable?
Is it important that we read our Bibles? Is that key to reconnect with God? He's invisible, but it's key, it is important, but is it the most important part of my day? Well, we are supposed to be Christ followers, right?
Did Jesus get up at times in the morning to spend time alone with his Father? Yeah, he sure did, but what did he spend the bulk of his time doing? Loving people, acts of compassion, out in his community making change for people who are suffering around him.
Do you think maybe we've got some things backwards in the sense of saying the most important part is this silent connection versus the actual going out and living it, and I'm suggesting that the whole thing is important, not that, I'm not putting love, acts of love above connection with God.
Connection with God, it's vital to have right love for others, so both are important, but to say this is, oh, this is when I'm spiritual is when I'm reading my Bible and praying. How about, what about a spirituality that follows us to our workplace and gives to those who are mean to us?
That's a little bit harder, isn't it? So how many of you would just say, boy, when it comes down to that choice, sign me up for the Bible study, right? Sign me up for the Bible study, I don't, I mean, this whole business of loving people who don't love me back, come on now, okay?
It's no wonder that the church has struggled in that area of outreach for years. John says, if you want to love God, get alone with him. Were you guys paying attention? That was a joke, that was a trick.
Everybody was like, what, what? I said, if you wanna love God, get alone with him. No, he says, get together with those in need. That wasn't fair, I just totally, in the transition, totally juked you guys, I'm sorry.
But no, he's not saying, if you love me, get alone with me, he says, if you love me, go serve others, go show love. And so let's pull all this together into what I wanna just show you is a graphic representation of what I would call the confidence cycle that's seen in this text.
It rests, it is to be the engine and the fuel, the operating factor in all of our lives to build confidence and love for others in the Christian life. The first, if you can pull that up there, Brian, is God's love for us, which is shown through Jesus Christ.
This is his incarnation and his propitiation, his sacrifice on the cross that shows ultimate love to us. We enter this cycle only by confessing Jesus as the son of God and believing his sacrificial love for us.
This is pure love, this is the source of love, this is first love, and it comes only from God. But then that leads to the next thing in our lives, and that is our love for God. If you come to the place where you actually recognize what he has done for you and that he loves you genuinely, compassionately, loves you, then are you not going to, in turn, reciprocate?
It's a pretty natural response, right? And when we come to realize all that he has done for us, and so experiencing his love motivates our love for him. And have you ever asked yourself this? Think in these terms, okay, the command that we just talked about.
To love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. How is that possible? When my natural tendency, my natural bent, what comes natural to me when I think about being in the presence of God is fear the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Is that not more natural to you and me? If you're honest, to think about stepping into the presence of God and knowing, how many of you have a little bit of an assessment of your own crud and sin and messed up life?
Do you have some sense in you that you are not holy, that you are not righteous, that you sin? We all have that, right? And so what would be natural for me is to say, what's easy is fear the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
And how do we move from fear the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength? Well, I would suggest that the concept of adoption, of coming into his family, that John has woven through his letter is the key in understanding this.
Think about it in these terms. We don't have a king in America yet, but if you can imagine having a king who always gets his way and everything that he says is the rule of the land. If you can imagine having a king, okay, with like Alice in Wonderland off with her head, right?
Off with her head. And so anything that that king wants, I mean, can you picture a monarchy in your mind, a legitimate, true, pure monarchy where the king or the queen gets their way. They can take your property from you.
Did you know that in a kingdom, the king owns your property, and if he wants it for himself, he takes it for himself. If he wants to make you work in his kitchen, you're gonna start working in his kitchen.
Welcome, right? So do you get what I'm saying? I mean, so would it be legitimate and reasonable to fear somebody like that, to fear a king? Now imagine that you live in a kingdom and you get summoned into the king's presence.
You have a little bit of fear, a little bit of worry. He pays for your trip there. At his own expense, he brings you into his palace. And as you take a knee in reverence before him, he comes out and takes you by the hand and embraces you and says, I want to adopt you as my own.
I want you to be my son. I want you to be my daughter. Okay, so that which has been terrifying to you, has that shifted? Has that changed? He says, I want you to come and live in my palace. I've already sent for your stuff and it's being moved here now.
And you have the privileges of prince or princess in my kingdom. All it is at my disposal is to your benefit. And one day, I will welcome you as an heir with me. No longer big scary king, but by adoption through Jesus Christ, he has become daddy.
That is the picture that infuses us with love. We are adopted into his family. Is there room for fear prior to coming to an understanding of his adoption of us? Yeah, you better believe that you would take that trip to the palace in fear, your knees knocking.
What does the king want from me? But can you imagine that relief, that recognition of his love towards you? John makes a case that our love for the invisible God will be demonstrated though, through our love for those we cannot, I mean that we can see.
So we experience this love from him, we reciprocate it to him, but the only way we can possibly reciprocate that towards him is when we manifest our love for God by sacrificing for those around us, just like Jesus sacrificed for us.
Look at the end of our text here, verse 21, look at it with me for a second. And this commandment we have from him, whoever loves God must also love his brother. It's a necessary step in the process. And so our love for God is expressed and our love for others is up there.
We know his benevolence and that moves us to love him and in turn others. And the love of God for others must have two prongs to it. Yeah, you might ask yourself, you might be sitting there asking, how do I show love, the love of God to others?
I'm glad you asked. It is, it's giving and sacrificing for those around us, yes, but it's also bringing the reality of the love of God into their life through words. Love is not always giving people what they think they want.
Like if your kids wanted to play in a mud puddle with a live electric wire, would you let them? Well, that wouldn't be very loving, right? But it's that the notion of giving them what they want. No, I'm not everything that they want.
But I believe that acts of kindness and compassion have indeed been lacking from the church. I wanna commend you, Recast. I've seen some awesome acts of kindness and love being displayed here at our church and I love to see that.
And I would just love to see more and more. It seems to me like many churches who think they get the gospel, show that they do not by this lack of tangible love to others around them. They are stingy with their acts of kindness.
They are self-serving in their motives for healing others. They speak the gospel without meeting the needs, the real legitimate needs of people. And we could go there, Recast. We could slide there without embracing the love of God in Christ.
But loving others does also require communication of the love of God found through the gospel of Jesus Christ. And so as a church, Recast, I wanna perform a balancing act of loving in deeds and loving in words.
Are you getting the tension that I'm talking about here? It's like a tightrope walk. And the fall on one side is only loving others in deeds without ever speaking the gospel. Is that dangerous? Is that problematic?
Yeah. The other side of the fall is only speaking the gospel but never meeting anybody's needs. And so it becomes an empty love that has no tangible acts to it. Is that dangerous? Yeah, and so it's a tightrope walk as a church.
But according to John, as we go out and genuinely become the hands and feet of Christ to a hurting world, we grow in confidence that he abides in us. And so the last step in the process here is confidence that he abides in us.
We see him living and loving through us and we become animated and excited to see his love working its way out of us in actions and speech. His love, by the power of his Holy Spirit alive in us, oozing out of us.
And in this state of confidence, we are moved to the love of God out of gratitude because he first loved us. And the cycle begins again. Put that last arrow up there. And this is the process by which his love is being perfected in the church and in the world and in our hearts through faith in Christ.
God first loved us. So we in turn love God. How do we show our love for God? By loving others. Love of others produces confidence within us that he indeed abides in us. And then that in turn reminds us that God first loved us and our love for God and the cycle keeps continuing.
That is the engine, that is the fuel of a healthy, successful Christian life. Not that we're perfect. Not that we nail this every time. But that we have confidence in Christ because he has loved us. And so my question to you is where are you at on this cycle?
It's the first application to think through. Where are you at on the cycle? Have you entered the cycle through faith in the love of God through Jesus Christ? I wonder how many of us have thought that we knew the good news and really we have not received good news at all.
It's almost sounded like bad news and we've been living like it's bad news. If we don't take on verse 18 and we're motivated by fear, John is suggesting that we need to come back to the origin of this confidence cycle.
There is no fear in love but perfect love casts out fear for fear has to do with punishment and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. Go back to that perfect love if you find that your life is primarily motivated by fear.
I believe that many who identify themselves as Christians are motivated on a different cycle altogether than this confidence cycle. I would call it the fear cycle. The fear cycle starts with a fear of hell.
Is that a reasonable fear, by the way? Is it reasonable that we would fear hell before we were in with Christ? Yeah, our condemnation was sure until Christ rescued us. And so without faith in Christ, there's fear in our lives and there should be fear in our lives and that's reality.
But now what I think has been missing from a lot of gospel presentations is the notion of this adoption into his family. You're welcomed by his love and you are now one of him and you're his child, you're his son, you're his daughter and he loves you.
He loves you once you're in with Christ. And so what I think we have a tendency to do is think of it like God has, we've entered his throne room and we've knelt down before him and he has reached out a pardon that says get out of hell and he's reached it out to us and we've kind of in a very timid and shy way snatched this out of his hand and slowly backed out of the room in fear.
And we still have a sense, we still have not embraced that sense of adoption and we still operate with our father as if it is fear-based. You're getting what I'm saying? And so it's possible to get on this cycle of fear.
We didn't come to see his great love at our conversion but instead we saw him in his austerity and we accepted his pardon but it's like he was still stern and angry at us and like, well, just don't do it again, right?
Or I'm gonna get you and I'm gonna come and take your pardon away. And that's the way that a lot of people who call themselves Christians live. And if my starting point is fear and I operate based on fear, then I learn to relate to God primarily out of fear.
I then proceed to try to clean up my act and love others for fear of condemnation. When I fail in loving others, terror of final judgment sets in and that drives me to make new commitments to love others better.
And that cycle continues to roll from fear to effort to fear to effort to fear to effort. And that is a scary cycle for a person to be caught in. If you're here and you recognize that fear cycle and you go, that rings a bell, that's me.
Then I'd encourage you to come to the immense and deep love of God found through his son, Jesus Christ at the cross and recognize that adoption is available to you in the family of God. The last application to this and before we wrap up is I think I'd be remiss to not ask this question.
Is there anybody that you are struggling to love? Is there anybody in your life that you're struggling to love? I believe that the power to love others comes through the love of God and it is a miraculous and supernatural thing that I'm talking about.
I'm not talking about you just blowing over people's sins against you and the way that they've harmed you. So it's a supernatural thing. And I know that many of us have people in our lives that it seems impossible for us to love.
And yet I am confident that in considering how unlovely and how unlovable we looked in our brokenness and sin that Jesus still showed his love for us by dying for us while we were his enemies, while we were in rebellion against him, he loved us.
How many of you are glad that God loved you even when you didn't deserve it? Anybody grateful for that? I am so glad that Jesus didn't cop an attitude like I can at times, okay? But Father, do you see what they're doing right there?
Don't you see how they treat me? Don't you see how they act? Father, don't you see their rebellion against us? You imagine Jesus saying that to the Father? They're rebelling against us. Look at them build idols that are worthless and chintzy without even giving a nod in our direction and we created them.
You're glad that Jesus didn't cop an attitude? I am, because there hangs Jesus on the cross full of love and compassion toward me and toward you. If the love of God expressed in the incarnation in the cross are the starting points, we will have power to love him by loving others.
If you're on the cycle by faith, by faith in the love of God through Jesus, then I would encourage you to remember his atoning sacrifice by taking the juice that represents his blood and the cracker that represents his body that was broken for us.
But I wanna add a caveat this morning. I don't do this very often. I've done it in the past. But if you're here and you've been saying, I love God, but you are hating your brother or your sister, and I'm not talking biologically.
John is not talking biologically. But you have hatred in your heart towards others. I'd encourage you to pass this communion by and plan a road trip. Some of you, it might entail physically getting up out of your chair, stepping out into the parking lot and making a phone call to express an extension of forgiveness or love towards somebody that you have been hating on.
But I'd encourage you to skip communion as you think through this, not as a way of saying you're unworthy, but as a way in saying you have unfinished business. That's what you'd be saying by skipping it this morning.
If you are hating on people, go make an effort to set that right. And I recognize that what I'm talking about is in as much as it is up to you, all of us have at some point sought to reconcile with somebody who refused to reconcile with us, but as much as it's up to you, stop hating on people.
Might be a road trip or a phone call, might be a text, might be jumping on Facebook and messaging somebody, but show love to that person that you've been hating. I know that life gets complicated and some of you may need help walking through forgiveness and love.
I'd encourage you to come and see me if you need help in applying the love of God in your life. I recognize that, again, it's a supernatural thing that we're talking about. But the celebration of the love of God presented to us through Jesus is a glorious thing.
And I hope that the realization of the great love of God propels us all to new heights this week. Remember, we love, we love each other because he first loved us. Let's pray. Father, I am so unworthy of your love.
And I know many of us feel that way even now as we get an opportunity to take communion and as we embrace the image of Christ bleeding and dying on our behalf on that cross 2 ,000 years ago. Father, real man in real flesh and your son paying the penalty for us, turning the wrath that was deserved towards us on himself that we might be adopted into your family and be called sons of a living God.
Father, I pray that as we get an opportunity to take this juice and take this cracker that we would contemplate and consider the depth of the richness of your love toward us. And Father, for those who have said with their mouth that they love you, but are in a state of hatred towards somebody else, Father, I pray that you would help them by the power of your spirit to do business with you even today and to ultimately reconcile as much as is possible.
Father, I pray that even the notion of not taking communion this morning would not feel like punishment to anyone, but would ultimately resonate in the severity and the necessity of love in their lives.
Father, I pray for reconciliations. I pray for healings. I pray for our love and testimony to the world around us and acts of kindness. I thank you for John and for this testimony that he shared with us that you indeed are loved.
And we pray in your name, amen.