1 John 4:7-21

Discussion Questions

1. John returns to the topic of love again in this passage. How does the Agape love referenced here differ from other types of love?
2. One of the tests of authentic faith is “do we love others?” – can you point to evidence of this love in your life? (v. 8, 20)
3. Are you afraid of something right now?  How can you better rely on the “the perfect love of Christ”? (v.17-18)
4. Today’s passage & sermon make it clear that Agape love is a command (v. 21), not a suggested feeling. What can you do later today & throughout the coming week to better follow this command?

Transcript

We study through books of the Bible here at The Village Chapel. We have extra copies here. If you didn’t bring one with you, you’d like one to follow along, raise your hand up real high and somebody will drop one off at your aisle and that way you can follow along with us. There’s also a QR code up on the screen if you would prefer to grab the notes and quotes that we’ll be going over here in the next little bit as we study the last bit of 1 John Chapter 4. It will carry through to the end of the chapter and you can use that QR code if you would like to download those notes.

This book has been so amazing. I love this text, love this short letter. There’s just so much in it—the repeated words over and over again… We hear God’s title, “God.” We hear words like “no” and “love” 36 times. It’s almost as if he’s saying God wants you to know Him and to rejoice in His love for you, express vividly in the person and work of Jesus and then over and over again, of course, he commands us and tells us to love one another, which is just so great.

So, I’m going to call this “God is Love” because that’s mentioned twice in this last little bit of Chapter 4 and we’ll read it in verse 8 and also in verse 16. And most of you are probably familiar with that idea. I want to talk about that in a little bit. But I want to talk more about why it matters that the God of the Bible could be called Love.

Most of us would probably say, “Yes, God loves us.” A lot of us grew up singing “Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible tells me so.” And so, we’ve heard that. It’s universally understood, I would say, that people would think that way unless they have some kind of a fear or some kind of real bad image of who God is. But we’ll ask and try to answer the question, “Why does God love us? Why would God love us? Why should in any way, shape or form we expect that God would love us?” I think that’s an important question to ask and to answer. And why is God’s love for us such an essential, significant aspect of the Christian gospel? Who can and how can we experience this love of God personally?

I think that’s really important, and I’ll be encouraging us as a church and as part of the overall Church to see that God has called and equipped the church to be a living demonstration of the love of God in a world, in a culture that is being choked out by its own selfishness, acrimony and outrage. How can we be the antidote to some of what we see out there in a loving kind of way?

So, turn your eyes to the page here and before I read, I would like to offer up a prayer borrowed from this brilliant old writer of prayers, Benedict of Nursia:

O gracious, holy God, give us diligence to seek You, wisdom to perceive You, patience to wait for You. Grant us, O God, a mind to meditate on You, eyes to behold You, ears to listen for Your word, a heart to love You and each other, and a life to proclaim You. Through the power of Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen and amen.

Be watching for these three evidences, these three tests that we’ve talked about all along our study of 1 John, the theological test, the moral test, and the social test. You could call them the theological evidence, the moral evidence, and the social evidence as well, if you prefer. But the whole idea is he’s trying to help us discern and reassure us that the faith we place in Jesus, that when we place our confidence, hope, and trust in Jesus, that indeed is a saving faith. It’s a biblical concept of faith as opposed to just something that we ourselves have thought up for ourselves. And it’s based on these promises that we read in this scripture here. We have God’s assurance and reassurance that we know Him, that He loves us, that we love Him and that our faith is indeed saving faith.

Verse 7 starts like this. It’s an exhortation. “Beloved, let us love one another for love is from God and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” We could just call that a day, just stop right there and mine that for all it’s worth. There’s so much there, isn’t there? The source of love is mentioned there. Raise your hand if you ever run out of love. That song we mentioned a couple weeks ago… You guys aren’t being very honest today. All right, raise your hand if you ever run out of like… Yeah, a lot of us running out of like… ‘I love you but I don’t like you right now.’ That’s it.

“Beloved, let us love one another for love is from God.” So, there’s the source. Everyone who loves is born of God. So, there’s evidence of the fact that you’ve been born of God and know God. There’s evidence that you know God. This is all right there. That’s such a powerful verse.

Verse 8: “The one who does not love does not know God for God is love.” There’s that simple little three words statement there. “By this…” And there are 11 “by this” statements in this first letter of John; there are 11 times he says, “By this, you’ll know this” or “By this, you’ll understand this or you can figure this out.” “By this…” He’s pointing to sort of a warrant or justification for thinking something.

“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.” Christ came to bring you life. Christ came to bring me life. Have we received that life? “In this is love,” verse 10, “not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.” Propitiation means Jesus satisfied the wrath of God against sin. God is at odds; God is against sin.

And remember, who has the right to define what is sin? Is it up to the culture? Is it up to the individual? Or is it God who defines what is sin? Really, really nobody ever thinks about a doctrine of sin or a theology of sin. We hardly ever talk about it anymore because we’re all basically good, aren’t we? So, who decides what has crossed the line with God? What is at odds with God? It’s God that would decide that. And then it’s so wonderful, paradoxical, beautiful that the God who determines what is and isn’t right or wrong is the same God who has now supplied a means by which your sin, my sin can be forgiven. The propitiation, it’s Jesus satisfying God and taking God’s wrath in our place. He’s satisfied all of God’s demands for our holiness.

Verse 11: “Beloved…” And isn’t that a precious word too, “beloved”? Here’s John the Apostle, probably the last alive of the disciples is my guess, and he’s calling his readers beloved ones, little children, things like that all the time through this letter. He’s quite a pastor, has a pastor’s heart, a shepherd’s heart. “Beloved, if God so loved us…” And here’s love that has a duty or a holy obligation, right? “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one’s beheld God at any time. If we…” Here’s a hypothesis, love is a hypothesis. “If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” That is, no one’s seen God, but you can make God visible.  How? By abiding in God and by loving one another you make God visible.

That’s interesting. The life of Christ is seen in the people of God as they behave toward one another, especially in their horizontal relationships that are not perfect, but being reconciled, being redeemed along the way, working it out, working together, drawing on the source of love that is God and loving one another in a world that’s full of acrimony and outrage, okay? Making God visible.

Verse 13. “By this…” Another “by this.” “By this we know that we abide in him and he and us because he has given us his spirit.” So, you’re not alone in this. You’re not just drawing on your own power, your own strength here. The Holy Spirit has taken up residence in the person who trusts Jesus as his savior or her savior. And if that’s the case, the Holy Spirit living within you is the power you have to draw upon to love those who you might not find quite so lovable in the world.

If I were to ask you who’s the most unlovable person you know, most of us could think of more than one person, lots of people. And unlovable in lots of different ways. Perhaps they annoy you, perhaps they’ve treated you unfairly, perhaps they’ve abused you. Perhaps you’re just mad at them because they’re foolish or you hold contempt in your heart for them for some reason, whatever it might be. And those folks are hard to love for you, hard for me to love the ones that I could think of in that same regard, but I have a resource. The Holy Spirit lives within me and as He lives within me, His love can flow through me. “By this we know we abide in him and he in us because he’s given us his spirit.”

Verse 14: “We beheld and bear witness that the father has sent the son to be the savior of the world.” Not the example of love… He’s the best example there is of love, but that’s not the main reason Jesus came. Jesus came to be the savior and that’s what we need, all of us desperately need. Whether we admit it or not, that’s what we need. That’s what we will need on the day that we all stand before God and have to give an answer to Him for our lives.

You have an option. It can be you, that you say, “Well, look, I was pretty good.” Or it can be point to Jesus and say “I just trust him.” I couldn’t do it myself. I couldn’t balance out the moral skill. I trust him. And that’s going to be the good answer. That’s going to be the answer you want to be able to give. “Whoever confesses Jesus is son of God, God abides in him and he in God.”

Verse 16: “We’ve come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love.” There it is again. “And the one who abides in love, abides in God and God abides in him.” The word “abides” shows up 23 times in this 5-chapter letter as well. It’s “meno” in the Greek and it means “to remain, to dwell, to reside in.” So, the word of God abiding in us, the spirit of God abiding in us, us abiding in God, there’s this relationship between believers and God. There’s a union with Christ that we talk about often.

It’s the only faith I know of where the object of our faith actually draws us into union with Him. And this is really powerful when you think about it. “Whoever confesses Jesus as the Son of God, God abides in him and he in God. We’ve come to know and believe the love which God has for us. God is love and the one who abides in love, abides in God and God abides in him.”

Verse 17. “By this…” There it is again. “By this love is perfected/matured/completed/ fulfilled with us that we may have confidence in the Day of Judgment.” Wow, you can have confidence in the day of… When you stand before God, you can stand with confidence. How? Because you’re a good Southerner, because you went to The Village Chapel? No. Because you tithe? No. Because you never said a cuss word or whatever? No. None of that. Because it’s a confidence in Him, not in you. And that’s so different from the way a lot of worldview systems would lead you to believe. We trust in Christ because as He is, so also are we in this world. We’re becoming more and more like Jesus.

Verse 18: “There’s no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear because fear involves punishment and the one who fears is not perfected in love.” I love this verse. Some of you have probably heard that phrase, “There’s no fear in love.” And every time I hear it I go, “All right, well, what am I afraid of? What am I nervous about? What am I anxious about? Where is it in my life?” Even in my prayer life when I go to my knees in some level of anxiety about the outcome of this event or this particular aspect of what’s going on in the world right now or this particular relational conflict or whatever it might be, what bit of that am I nervous about, anxious about?

I love Philippians 4 that says, “Be anxious for nothing,” but in everything, with thanksgiving, in prayer you’re supposed to go to the Lord, just turn it all over to him. And anxiety, it was [Tim] Keller I think that used to say this, ‘Anxiety is believing that God might get this wrong.’ When you think about that, every time you get anxious, ask yourself, “What am I worried about that God, the God who created everything and holds it all in place and is in charge of human history and one day intends to set everything right, what am I thinking He can’t handle in my little life?” Yeah, it’s really powerful when you start to think about that. No fear in love, and if this perfect love of God has been “poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit,” (Romans 5:5), then why wouldn’t I trust him with everything. “We love because he first loved us” verse 19 says.

In other words, God is the initiator. We are the ones who are now motivated by this love that has been initiated by God. We are now motivated to be able to love others. We love because He first loved us. “If someone says, I love God but hates his brother, he’s a liar.” I love the blunt, refreshing, direct, straight up. We just don’t have that in this world anymore. No, you’re a liar. And listen, we have all… Nobody lies to me more than me. I lie to myself all the… “Jim, you’re great.” “Jim, you’re the worst.” I’m telling myself that all the time. You do the same thing. And yet here, what he’s saying is don’t say you love God and then hate your brother because you’re not living consistently.

If you love God, you will love each other. “The one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.” It’s a commandment. verse 21 says, “This commandment.” Here’s love as a commandment. We have from him that “the one who loves God should love his brother also.” Everywhere you read brother, you can also say “and sister” as well, certainly in bounds to do that.

Make no mistake, God’s love is not this shallow, amorphous, no shape, no definition to it, all-affirming love without regard for how naive, how deluded, how reckless and how self-destructive I can sometimes be and you can sometimes be. God’s love is deep enough to distinguish the differences between whatever I want and whatever I actually need and whatever will be for my highest good. And this God of the Bible is the one I trust to do that. Why? Because he’s holy, he’s righteous. He’s proven himself faithful and his love to be steadfast. Matter of fact, how many times in the Bible do we read this phrase, “His love endures forever.” (For example, see Psalm 136) Say that with me. “His love…endures forever.” “His love…endures forever.”

And it says it over and over and over again. If we just did it that many times, some of us would drop out at some point, but he wants to drive it home that God’s love for you is not just so huge that you don’t ever feel it or know it in particular, with specificity.

In other words, if there are 300 so or so chairs in this room, each chair is filled with the soul whom God loves forever. Do you understand that? We can talk about it as a concept and as a theory and as a doctrine even and it’s rich and deep and wonderful, but if you don’t know it experientially yourself that God actually loves you. Foolish as you may have been, rebellious as you may have been or even are. The declaration of the Bible and the scriptures is that God loves us no matter how deep our foolishness. It’s a really beautiful, wonderful thing.

All right, so God’s love. He is love and why does that matter? I’m going to throw a few slides up. These are all, again, available on the QR code or on the website. You’re welcome to it. I’m going to fly through a lot of this and a lot of it’s just going to be up on the screen. I won’t do a whole lot of commentary on it.

The Bible speaks to love of God, love for God and the love we are to have for one another. So, there’s these different aspects of love, these different directions that love flows. It flows from God to us. Love flows from us to God, hopefully, where we’re saying, “We love you, Lord.” We just sang that. And then there’s this love that’s supposed to flow between believers.

The Bible spends precious little time on the subject of loving self. This is remarkable about the Bible when you read it in the contemporary world in which we live right now. The contemporary world in which we live right now is obsessed with the self. It’s all about you becoming your own little-G god and you having the last word and the final word and you don’t have to answer anybody. It’s sort of autonomy and I call it the “altar of autonomy.” We’re worshiping the self, basically. And yet the Bible spends precious little time trying to prop up little Jimmy’s self-image. Just doesn’t spend a lot of time on it.

I don’t know. When we all get home, I’m going to ask that question. I’m just going to say, “Hey, listen, in the day and age in which we live, that was really important. Why isn’t there a whole lot more in the Bible about loving self?” There’s some inferences. There’s a couple little things about a proper understanding of one’s self and all that sort of thing. But man, as obsessed as we are in our culture with it, it’s remarkable to me. I find it honestly refreshing.

Since God’s the ultimate source of love (as we saw there in verse 7, love is from God), and since Christ is the ultimate expression of God’s love as Christ lives in us more and more, we draw on the love of God more and more. As we learn to depend on Jesus to love others and even have a proper understanding of what it means to be a self in this world. God’s love is not selfish and cheap. God’s love is selfless and deep. It’s not self-seeking, never volatile, never capricious or moody. God’s love is consistent and steadfast and his love endures forever. It’s so beautiful when you think about it. There’s so much more to it than just the Hallmark card phrase.

What do we learn about love itself? How do we move from being just talking about something that is coming down to us from the vertical, from God to us, and actually experience that now? Yes, it is a great and wonderful doctrine, but here are a couple summary statements that I’d throw out from this specific bit of Scripture. It’s kind of like what we did a couple weeks ago when I felt like it’s a patchwork quilt, could we look at each of the little frames and just draw one conclusion from each one. And I’ll try and do that real quick for us in this passage as well.

1. Love exhorted flows from the love sourced in God manifested by our new life in Christ. (Verse 7) Here’s where it comes from: God. And so, if he exhorts, “Let us love one another,” if we get that exhortation, God is also providing everything we need to be able to respond to that exhortation. That’s pretty good. I like that. I like that God isn’t asking me to do something, pushing me out into the world and saying, ‘Just go on there, little Jimmy. Go on out there and love everybody, but I’m not going to give you any love to give them. You just got to drum it up yourself.’ I’m so glad that’s not the case.
2. Love’s absence reveals a lack of the knowledge of God. (Verse 8) There’s a real connection. You say, “I believe in God,” and don’t love your brothers and sisters, don’t love others. He’s saying you can’t. Yeah, there’s a real connection between that. And that includes all of them, not just the ones that you happen to get along with. So that’s the part that is the tricky part of the whole thing, isn’t it? Yeah. And they are thinking that about you, by the way, so…
3. Love made manifest in us was the incarnation of Christ, when Jesus (the embodiment of love) came on a life-saving rescue mission for us. (Verse 9) Didn’t have to, we didn’t deserve it, we had no claim on Him. We couldn’t look up to heaven to go, “We deserve for you to come and fix all this stuff that’s wrong down here.” God is not a cosmic concierge just at our bidding. We rebelled. God took the initiative and came here in spite of our rebellion. And that’s really powerful when you think about it. And Christ manifests the love of God so beautifully when He hung on the cross for us. That’s what drove Him. The love of God drove Him to come and die for us. Really, really, really powerful.
4. For love originated with and has reached its pinnacle in the person and work of Jesus. (Verse 10)
5. Loving one another becomes the duty (the “ought”, if you will) of those who have received the love of God. (Verse 11)
6. Loving one another is a primary evidence of authentic saving faith. (Verse 12-16) You just need to cruise there and you’ll see that that that really could work as a good summary for that.
7. The perfect love of Christ casts out all fear. (Verse 17-18) When the One to whom I must give an answer someday for my life, when I stand before Christ at the judgment seat, when He’s the one that took the initiative to love me, I can rest in His love for me. If the guy in the judgment seat isn’t the same guy that died for me, I’m in trouble. I’m uncertain, I’m unsure. And John is trying to say, ‘Little children, my beloved ones, he really loves you.’ And not just you collectively and only collectively, but you collectively and you individually. And so again, I bring it home to you as an individual in this room right now: Do you know He loves you? Do you know that? Do you believe that He loves you? Have you experienced that He loves you? It needs to become personal for us.
8. Being loved by God sets us free to love one another. (Verse 19) In other words, when I know and can rest in the love of God for me and I draw upon that love, it really does set me free to go over here now and love annoying person A, annoying person B. And for me, the alphabet runs pretty full. Maybe for you as well. I don’t know. Maybe some of you would go, “And double-A and double…” Yeah, all that. All of that as well. I’m going to keep going. But there is this unlimited supply of love from a God who looked down on the earth and said, “You, you, you. I love you.” And we can think through history of some of the most unlovables. Some of you can think of that really quickly. You know because you haven’t loved them and don’t love them still. And you can’t imagine that God would love them.My goodness, that weird aunt you have. That strange person down the street with a barking dog that won’t shut up. The person that treated you mean. The injustice you might have suffered. That person too. The person that committed the most egregious act of violence that you can think of right now. All of the people that fought a war ever. All of the people that are going to vote the other way in a year and a half. God loves the world. They don’t all love him, but we are supposed to love all of them. Why? Because we’ve received the love of God and experienced it and we know we didn’t deserve it ourselves, and so we are grateful that he loves sinners.
9. Agape is a command for Christians but only a feeling or some kind of behavior modification for unbelievers and others. (Verse 20-21) What I’m saying here is, verse 20 and 21, love can be a command when it’s agape love. That is, it’s unconditional love. It can be a command from God. Why? Because God himself has loved me. Now he can tell me, “I’ve poured this love out in your heart.” Romans Chapter 5:5. “Holy Spirit’s done that. Now go out there and give that love of mine,” God’s saying to me, “Go give that love away out there in the world of people that annoy you.” And that’s really essentially what the command is. It’s ‘Go love others, regardless of how they treat you or how you feel about them or what color their skin is or what their lifestyle might be that you disapprove of or what their lifestyle might be that even God disapproves of. You are to love them.’ That’s mind-blowing. I don’t know of any other system that demands that sort of thing.

For Bible-believing Christians, agape love is not trivial “luv.” “Luv” is merely a consumer love, a pretend love, or a because love or an if love. I love you because you agree with me on this or that or whatever. I love you if you’ll do this for me. Those are consumer-based loves. Love is a transaction at that point. And God says, ‘No, we’re gutting love of any sense of transactions.’ It’s a gift from God. Agape is unconditional love. It’s what this word “love” that’s being used here is not storge, it’s not eros, it’s not philia in the Greek, it’s agape. And he’s saying over and over and over and over again, “God loves you unconditionally. You go love everyone else unconditionally.”

And wow, that’s a big, big, big order for us and a command. But He supplies the resources and He says He’ll be with us if we abide in Him and abide in His love, then we’re moving and walking in that love and we’re growing in that love because it’s God’s love and not ours.

John says, “If I harbor ill will or contempt for another believer, the love of God must not be in me and I’m not loving God by obeying God’s command to love one another from the heart.” What does it look like? Again, so many different things, but I can’t mechanically simply coexist and let it just be a religious rule I follow. God wants it to be more than that. He actually wants us to love even, Jesus said, our enemies. Again, there’s not very many systems that would preach that kind of thing.

How is this agape love of God different from the love of this world? It’s more than the feelings-based disposition of heart. It is not fickle, fragile, and fleeting, and ultimately self-centered. It may be about self-promotion sometimes that we try to love others, or self-protection sometimes that we try to love others. We might really be just attempting to assert ourselves from time to time. And so, we have to sift through all of that and be self-aware enough and have prayed enough to be able to sort through what our motive is when we’re interacting with somebody or responding to somebody who’s communicated to us or who’s done something that has affected us.

But I know this, at the end of the day, Galatians 2:20, the apostle Paul, he said, “I’ve been crucified with Christ and it’s no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. And the life that I now live, I live by faith in the son of God who loved me.” Notice how he’s attaching that love of God, the love of Jesus as he’s talking about himself literally being crucified. He’s saying it’s because God loved me, I can now deliver myself over to Jesus and I can go out and love with the love of God.

So, His command for us to love one another is not just about drumming up feelings or fake emotions. It’s actually the command to love. And if you don’t have the feelings to come with it, as Lewis says… Lewis is brilliant in this. He says, ‘Look, just act as if you had the feelings and pretty soon the feelings will follow.’ Now, I see some heads going up and down. You understand you. You’ve either read that passage in Lewis or you understand what that means and you’ve felt that sort of thing before.

Here’s a friend of ours, Trevin Wax. He wrote this. He said,

“The only way you’ll ever be able to withstand the hatred of the world is if you’re immersed in the love of God. The only way you’ll ever be able to live without the approval of others is if you are assured of God’s approval of you in Christ. The only way you can stand against a world when everyone else is jeering you is when you know God is there cheering you on, calling you his beloved child. Unless we are overcome by the love of God, we will be overcome by the fear of man.”
Trevin Wax

And our conflict with others so often is fear-based. It’s somebody afraid it’s going to go one way or the other. And sometimes it’s pride. It’s that root of all my sin, how you’ve offended me. How dare you? Who do you think you are? All that kind of thing.

And we need to get to the place—that last sentence is so powerful up there on the screen—where we understand unless we’re overcome by the love of God, not overcome by rage for man, not overcome by revenge or vengeance, no, overcome by the love of God, you’ve got to turn your eyes away from those people that annoy you. You’ve got to turn your ears away from all those little voices in your head that tell you, “Oh, I used to stand up for myself in all these ways.” No, no, no.

Be overcome by the love of God for you. Be so blown away by that that you just maybe… You might even look a little… Your hair might look a little random and you might be standing there a little shell-shocked, but you’re just so overwhelmed by the love of God that it’s sort of like, “Well, okay. I could love you.” Because I’ve been crucified with Christ and it’s Christ living in me, not Jim living in me, not my pride living in me. It’s Christ living in me. It allows me to lay down my rights and pick up His power, receive His love and allow His love to flow through me to others.

The world in which we live seems exhausted in anxiety, overcharged with anger, incapable of accommodating reasonable dissent on differences of pretty important issues, especially ones that affect our children. How do we remain faithful to the Scriptures and to the God of the Bible in a culture that demands unconditional affirmation and condemns all efforts to speak truth to power of its reckless, unbridled indulgences? How do we love those who want us to do or think or be something that we are not? Is that possible?

John says, ‘Yes, it is.’ John says, ‘Stop leaning on your own resources.’ John says, “Love one another.” Be the antidote to all the problems that you see out there. Don’t fixate on those. Don’t fixate on the doing of somebody else. Fixate on the fact that you’ve been loved by God and be overcome with his love for you. Rest in that and then you can begin to respond from that as well.

John’s not talking about love or the power of love rather as if it was just a force. He’s talking about the source of love. When we behold the love of God, when we rely on the Spirit of God and trust in Jesus, we have the reassurance of a bold confidence even on the Day of Judgment. I mean, forget about all just the approval junkie part of us that’s “I got to have a certain number of likes or repeats or follows or whatever it is on social media,” all the way the affirmation junkie gets fed. Forget about all of that. The one thing in all of eternity that is ultimately going to matter is when you stand before the judgment seat of Christ and to hear from him, the only lips that matter, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant, I loved you. I love you, and my love flowed through you. Well done.’ That’s going to be amazing. That’s going to be a beautiful, beautiful thing.

Martyn Lloyd-Jones says this,

“‘Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.’ Never separate these two things. They belong together.”
Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Life in Christ: Studies in 1 John

All right, so what does he say? What are the two things? God loves you. Dig deep into that, experience that, meditate on that in your prayers. No, God actually loves you. Some of you are thinking of your older brother, your younger sister. No, you. Some of you are thinking of your parents who are really holy. Some of you are not thinking of your parents who are really old. But God loves you, each one of you, and He knows your DNA even. He knows us individually as well as collectively. And then He tells us to go love each other after we’ve received this love of God. That’s a beautiful thing. Jones is right. Don’t separate those two.

Eugene Peterson:

“We can’t hear God’s love being spoken to us without at the same time looking into the faces of our neighbors whom God also loves and commands us to love….”

[Oh, by the way, who’s your neighbor? Whomever you cross paths with. The Good Samaritan story is a story about people that hadn’t met each other. They just happened to cross paths. So who was his neighbor? Jesus said, “The one who loved him.” The surprising answer comes back, right? So we can’t hear God’s love being spoken to us without at the same time looking into the faces of our neighbors whom God loves also and commands us to love.]

“…When we come to worship, we’re not isolated individuals, but a family of God. We come to worship not just to see and hear, but to pray and praise God with one another.”
Eugene Peterson, The Pastor

I love that so much. It’s so beautiful, so well said.

You can think about love a couple different ways, self-centeredness, self-assertion, self-conceit. I didn’t play this for you already, did I? I don’t think so. Self-indulgence, self-pleasing, self-seeking, self-pity, self-sensitiveness, self-defense, self-sufficiency, self-consciousness, self-righteousness, self-obsession, self-absorption, self-serving, self-glorifying. No wonder they call us the selfie generation. And I’ve taken selfies. I’m okay with you taking selfies. We’re not saying that. Just we are clearly self-obsessed. We’ve got so many hyphenated words. And Jesus says, ‘what do you do with yourself? Deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me. It is unconditional, self-sacrificing, Christ-glorifying, others-benefiting love.’

Now we’ll start to show ourselves to be the antidote to what’s wrong with the world when we have this kind of love, when we love our God who has loved us perfectly, and then we go out and reflect His love out into the community at large.

How can I do that? I can’t do that. Well, I’ll go to Lewis for just two more quotes for you.

“When you teach a child writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters. That is, it forms the letters because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it.”
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

It’s beautiful. God, our father, putting His hand around my hand and showing me how to… Or my feet, and show me how to walk in the ways of love. My eyes, show me how to see with his eyes. My heart, breaking over what His heart breaks over, delighting in what His heart delights in, and not being fooled by the deception that’s out there that would lead me to self-destruction or would lead me to those things that aren’t good in God’s eyes. Really beautiful image that Lewis has given us right there when you think about it.

Let’s close with Yancey:

“The more we love and the more unlikely people we love, the more we resemble God, who after all loves ornery creatures like us.”
Philip Yancey, Vanishing Grace Study Guide: Whatever Happened to the Good News? 

It’s worth a Methodist amen, come on. Amen.

He loves you. You ornery creature, you. Isn’t that beautiful? I love that about that. The more we love and the more unlikely people we love, some of you can think of two or three unlikely people for you to have loved or for you to hold in your heart not with contempt, but with love.

Let’s pray the Lord will give us his eyes to see others the way he sees them, and to change us and transform us that we might continue to be ambassadors for him, for the glory of Christ, loving others, and loving God as we go.

Let’s pray.

“Christ, your love constrains us,” the apostle Paul wrote. Your love controls us. We want that more and more. Jesus, we don’t want to just think of love as this big cosmic thing. We would like for it to be very specific, both in the way we think about your love for us, as well as your love for the world. And also, Lord, in the way that we think about loving others, not just as a general Hallmark card way, but Lord, that we might actually love the others that are in our life, the others that we’ll meet this week, the others that we’ve walked with for a number of years have been difficult to love. We want you, Lord, to pour out in our hearts the love of God that we might now be able to rise in newness of life with a fresh heart and be able to love those who are difficult to love.

And Lord, for some of us too, I pray for us. Some of us resist being loved by you and some of us resist being loved by others. So I pray that you’d break through those walls as well. So help us, Lord, to be compelled and transformed by your love in such a way that we begin to grow in it, abide in it, live in it, and walk in it. We pray in Jesus’ name and for his sake, for his glory. Amen and amen.

(Edited for reading)