Another Opportunity to Love
Rev. Res Spears
Live in Fellowship • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
0 ratings
· 13 viewsNotes
Transcript
In 1969, a Bowling Green University professor named Lois Cheney wrote a book about faith called God Is No Fool, and in that book of poems and short essays, she told a story that I want to share with you today.
Once upon a time a person was touched by God, and God gave him a priceless gift. This gift was the capacity for love. He was grateful and humble, and he knew what an extraordinary thing had happened to him. He carried it like a jewel and he walked tall and with purpose.
From time to time he would show this gift to others, and they would smile and stroke his jewel. But it seemed that they'd also dirty it up a little.
Now, this was no way to treat such a precious thing, so the man built a box to protect his jewel. And he decided to show it only to those who would treat it with respect and meet it with reverent love of their own.
Even that didn't work, for some tried to break into the box. So he built a bigger, stronger box — one that no one could get into — and the man felt good. At last he was protecting the jewel as it should be.
Upon occasion, when he decided that someone had earned the right to see it, he'd show it proudly. But they sometimes refused, or kind of smudged it, or just glanced at it without much interest.
Time went by, and sometimes when someone would pass by the aging man, he would pat his box and say, "I have the loveliest of jewels in here."
Once or twice he opened the box and offered it saying, "Look and see. I want you to." And the passerby would look and look, and look. And then he would back away from the old man, shaking his head.
The man died, and he went to God, and he said, "You gave me a precious gift many years ago, and I've kept it safe, and it is as lovely as the day you gave it to me."
And he opened the box and held it out to God, and as he did so, he glanced into the box for the first time in many years, and there he saw that the precious jewel he had been given had become an ugly, laughing lizard.
[Cheney, Lois A.. God Is No Fool. United States: Beaufort Books, 2009. pp. 33-34]
Today, as we continue our study of the Book of 1 John, we’re going to take another look at the precious jewel that we who have followed Jesus Christ in faith have received, the jewel of God’s love.
You may recall that John’s message regarding the tests of fellowship with God is presented in three cycles, each of which looks at each of three tests — righteousness, love, and belief.
Last week, we concluded the second cycle by studying true belief in Jesus as very God of very God, who came in the flesh of a man to fulfil God’s promise of a Messiah with the power of salvation and the right to judge mankind.
Today, we will begin the third and final cycle with another look at love — specifically the love of Christians for their brothers and sisters in Christ — as a test of their walk in the light of Jesus.
Turn to 1 John 4:7. As you do so, let me remind you that in Scripture, “love” is not something that just happens. Rather, it is a choice that we make.
And it’s not just a good feeling that you have toward someone else. Love is a set of actions that we take for the benefit of someone else. It’s an intentional setting aside of ourselves — of our rights and preferences and comforts — in order to be a blessing to others.
There are three Greek words for love that appear in the New Testament — storge, phileo, and agape.
Storge refers to familial love — the affection and loyalty that develops among family members. It’s the kind of love that is demonstrated among Mary and Martha and their brother, Lazarus, in John, chapter 11.
Phileo refers to the love among friends. You might recognize this word in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love. Phileo is the word that is used of how Jesus loved Mary, Martha, and Lazarus in that same chapter of John’s Gospel.
Agape love is something different. Agape love is a selfless love in action. It is the kind of love that Paul writes about in the famous Love Chapter of 1 Corinthians, where he writes that love is patient and kind, that love does not boast or envy, that love is not proud or rude or selfish or easily angered.
And “agape” is the word that is behind every instance of the word “love” that we will see in today’s passage.
Let’s pick up our reading today in verse 7 of chapter 4.
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
Now, in the first cycle of this book, we saw that love for our brothers and sisters in Christ is proof of our having fellowship with God. In the second cycle, we saw that it is proof of our sonship of God — proof that we are His children.
Today’s passage presents loving one another as proof of the oneness that we have with God, proof of the reality of our spiritual life in Christ.
Love is from God, John says here, because God is love.
Now, we need to understand that we cannot turn that last statement around and say that love is God. Just because two people love each other does not make their love holy before God. “It has accurately been said that ‘love does not define God, but God defines love.’” [Warren W. Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary, vol. 2 (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1996), 515–516.]
Loving one another with this self-sacrificing agape love is one of the marks of one who has been born of God — one who has been born again, as Jesus put it to Nicodemus.
It is the mark of one who knows God — not just one who knows God in his head by knowing facts about Him or even knowing that He is real, but knowing Him experientially by walking in His light.
Remember that John presents tests of fellowship in this book. He is telling us how to determine if we have a genuine, deep and abiding relationship with God.
And if you have been born of God — if you have, by His grace and through true faith in His Son, Jesus Christ, been reborn into the family of God — then what John says here is that you should demonstrate this foundational characteristic of God, love.
“Up to this point (in John’s message), Love has been regarded as duty rather than as disposition.” [Robert Law, The Tests of Life: A Study of the First Epistle of St. John (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1909), 247.] Here, John tells us that love is the disposition — the basic characteristic — of those who are in fellowship with God in Christ Jesus.
The flip side of that is that if this kind of self-giving agape love for your brothers and sisters in Christ is absent from your life, then you may have a relationship with God, but your fellowship with Him is lacking.
“Because God is light, those who abide in Him walk in His light. Because God is righteous, those who abide in Him practice righteousness. Just so, God is love, and those who abide in Him manifest His loving character.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), 1 Jn 4:8.]
Now, so that we do not miss what it meant for God to love us this way — and so that we do not miss what it means for US to love this way — John describes the fullest expression of God’s love in the next couple of verses.
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. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
God had demonstrated His love for mankind throughout history, but the fullest expression of His love was when He sent His unique and eternal Son into the world to be the propitiation for our sins.
He sent Jesus to live a sinless life as a man and to offer Himself as a sacrifice on a cross at Calvary — taking upon Himself the just punishment for all of mankind’s sins — so that those who put their faith in Him as their only means of reconciliation with God could be forgiven and have eternal life through Him.
And Jesus did not do this because we loved Him or because we loved His Father. Indeed, Scripture tells us that we were reconciled to God in Christ WHILE WE WERE YET HIS ENEMIES.
Now, John says, in verse 11:
Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
If God loved us so sacrificially while we were still his enemies, the so should we love one another.
We might have expected John to write, “If God so loved us, then we should love Him.” And so we should. But what does it look like to love God sacrificially? What can we give God that He does not already have? How could He ever benefit from us? The point here is that the way we demonstrate our love for God is by loving those whom He loves.
That’s the point of what John writes in the first part of verse 12:
No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit.
Since God, who is Spirit, is invisible to us, and since He is completely without need of anything we might give Him, then the best opportunity we have to demonstrate our love for Him is by loving one another. In this way is His love perfected or brought to maturity and fulfillment within us.
Brothers and sisters, let me tell you something this morning that might be life-changing for you — and I hope that it is: Every relationship you have is given to you so that you might demonstrate to them the love of God. Every person you meet — whether they are believers or not — is another chance for you to show God that you love Him.
How will you show the love of God to a church member who is sick or unable to come to church? How will you show the love of God to a fellow Christian who is hurting because she lost her job? How will you show the love of God to your waiter at lunch today? How will you show the love of God to the cashier at the grocery store?
How will you show love to the person who lies about you? How will you show love to the person who steals from you? How will you show love to the person who takes advantage of you? To the person who hates you?
Warren Wiersbe wrote about those kinds of people: “One reason why God permits the world to hate Christians is so that Christians may return love for the world’s hatred.” [Warren W. Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary, vol. 2 (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1996), 520.]
I don’t make a lot of promises, because I don’t want to take the chance of letting people down, but I can promise you this: If you start looking at every person with whom you cross paths as another opportunity to show the love of God, your life will change.
You will find that your relationship with God is deeper and more genuine than you ever could have imagined. You will know God in a way that you could not have fathomed.
“But pastor, it’s hard enough for me to love my HUSBAND that way,” I hear some of you thinking. “How can I love people who hate me like that?”
Well, look at verse 13.
By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. We have come to know and have believed 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.
We can love that way because the source of our love is the Holy Spirit, just as the Spirit is the source of our obedience to God.
And by loving that way, we can have confidence that we are abiding in the God who loved us so much that He sent His only Son to be the Savior of the world.
When you who have followed Jesus in faith repented from your sins and turned to Him, then you came to know the love of God. You came to believe in the power of God’s love to save you from eternal separation from Him in Hell.
You came to truly EXPERIENCE God’s love as demonstrated in that sacrificial act of His Son on the cross.
Jesus did not just come preaching love; He came to show the very extent of it as He stretched out His arms on that cross.
And so, John says here, we who have followed Jesus in faith should also be people who not only preach love but people who show it in our daily lives — not out of obligation, but because it is the defining characteristic of the God who abides within us.
And as we do so, John says, we are then blessed with confidence before God. Look at verse 17.
By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.
“Here John said God’s love reaches perfection ‘with us,’ whereas in 4:12 he wrote that His love reaches perfection ‘in us.’ When [love] reaches perfection in us, a proper relationship to other people exists, namely, no hate. When it reaches perfection with us, a proper relationship to God exists, namely, no fear.” [Tom Constable, Tom Constable’s Expository Notes on the Bible (Galaxie Software, 2003), 1 Jn 4:17.]
If you are loving others as Christ loved us, then you will have no reason to fear the judgment seat of Christ, because you will have become like like the judge — you will be someone who demonstrates His defining characteristic.
“A believer who experiences perfecting love grows in his confidence toward God. He has a reverential fear of God, not a tormenting fear. He is a son who respects his Father, not a prisoner who cringes before a judge.” [Warren W. Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary, vol. 2 (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1996), 521.]
For believers, all of God’s judgment was meted out upon Jesus on that cross. Judgment is in the past, not the future.
We who have followed Jesus Christ in faith can have confidence in the day of judgment, because Jesus loved us so much that He gave His life for us, and because His Father loved Jesus so much that He raised He raised Him from the dead.
And because of that great love — the love of the Father and the Son — we can now love in a way that was never possible for us before. As John puts it in verse 19:
We love, because He first loved us.
“An immature Christian is tossed between fear and love; a mature Christian rests in God’s love.” [Warren W. Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary, vol. 2 (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1996), 522.]
But what about the Christian who just cannot find it in his heart to love some other person, especially some other Christian? What about the Christian who can’t work out a way to love the person who has lied about her, the person who gossips about him, the person who has broken promise after promise, the person who seems determined to ruin his life?
Look at verse 20.
If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also.
Actions speak louder than words.
I used to know a man at a church we attended. His name was Kenny, and I think he was Miss Glenda’s uncle. Now, anybody who knew Kenny knew that he loved the Lord dearly. He knew and understood Scripture. He was faithful to his church, and he was a prayer warrior.
But anybody could do those things and not have a true relationship with God. In fact, lots of people do so. We call them nominal Christians. They are Christians in name only.
You could tell how much Kenny loved the Lord by the way Kenny loved others — both believers and lost people. Even into his old age, Kenny would ride his bicycle to church early on Sunday to ride in the van to pick up people who did not have a way to get there.
I drove that van for a while, and I had no idea where we were headed most of the time, but Kenny always knew where they lived and who needed a ride this week and whose parents were in dire straits and whose children needed special attention because they were not getting it at home.
Kenny truly loved people, and there was never any doubt that he loved the Lord.
What I remember best about Kenny was how he would respond whenever I asked how he was doing.
“How’s it going, Kenny?” “Jesus loves me.”
Kenny loved others, because God had loved him first.
And I can assure you that when Kenny stood before God and opened the box with the precious jewel he had been given when he put his faith in Christ, there was no ugly, laughing lizard inside.
What Kenny saw when he opened that box was a jewel that shined even more brightly than when he had received it.
Brothers and sisters, we are not given the love of God to keep locked away in a box.
That jewel is meant to be shared at every opportunity. That jewel is meant to be put on display for all to see, for all to touch and experience, for all to be blessed by, and especially within the church.
Do you want to experience true fellowship with God? Do you want to have abundant, eternal life even in your time here on earth? Then love one another, even as Jesus loved us. Love one another sacrificially, whether the others deserve it or not.
How will you do that today? How will you do it this week?
How will you love that waitress at the restaurant? How will you love that cashier at the grocery store? How will you love that person who has done nothing but take advantage of everything you have ever done for them? How will you love the liar or the gossip or the thief?
Every person you will meet today and every person you meet this week and every relationship you have been given is one more opportunity for you to grow in the love of God, to grow in the knowledge of God, and to grow in your fellowship with God.
So what are you going to do?