Love Is... The Father, Son & Holy Spirit

Tim Trinkle

Love Is... • Sermon • Submitted 3 years ago

1 John

Love

Relationships

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Our relationship with our earthly parents can shape our view of our Heavenly Father.

Notes

Transcript

Intro

Introduction to Myself.

Introduction to “Love Is...”

This week the Theme is “Love Is...” Love is a tricky thing in the 21st century. The issue is multi faceted, but, at the end of the day. Most people in society do not have a good view of what love actually is. I was curious as to what the masses would say if posed the question “What is Love”, so I went to the only place people still gather even though there is a pandemic. I went to Reddit.

I found a question posted on Reddit asking the people of Reddit to define love. There were tons of definitions and all of them were all over the place. Some of them were close, but all of them missed the mark. I saw things from “love is a feeling where you just can’t not think about a person” to “Love is an unbreakable connection” to “love is when you are only happy when “they” are happy”.

I think if everyone was honest, they would say that they truly don’t have a firm grasp of what love ACTUALLY IS. In fact, I remember when I was working at J.P. Morgan before I got into vocational ministry and I was sitting and eating lunch in the cafe. I was sitting and minding my own business when I overheard someone crying and explaining that her S.O. had cheated on her, she was trying to decide to stay or leave. everyone was trying to offer advice and the oldest and wisest looking of all the ladies in this conversation pipes up and asks “do you love him”, the lady then replied “What even is love?”

Have you ever felt that way before? Love can be difficult to define because it can seem like such an abstract concept but, as Christians, we have a concrete example of perfect love. We have God’s love for us. Perfect Love! God is perfect so his love for us, his love in general is 100% perfect. Tonight’s passage discusses God’s love directly.

1 John 3:1–2 ESV

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.

Unpack

The Passage comes from the book of 1 John. The writer of the book, John, was being written to the churches across Asia Minor (turkey). The purpose of the book was to reaffirm and reassure those churches of the core of Christianity. John was saying that either we as Christians exhibit Love, and obedience to sound doctrine or we are not true Christians. Here in chapter 3 John is specifically reassuring his audience, and now us that God loves them/us perfectly. He is also saying that the world cannot know us, or our love because they don’t know God. Because they do not know who God is, they have no basis or frame work to be able to understand perfect love.

That being said, I want to pull a few things from the text, and then I’m going to talk about what we can do with those things in our everyday life.

God’s Love is Exciting

Look at how John starts this passage. He says “see”. This isn’t a hey would you take a look at this. This was a resounding “HEY YOU YOU SERIOUS LOOK AT THIS AWESOME THING”

I was the same exact way when I found my wife. I met her and was so shaken by the sheer beauty and intelligence that I knew that I had to marry her. That was in 2009. We were in high school. I literally told some random dude that I was gonna marry her. He said “nice”

But God’s Love is something to get excited about. It’s amazing and incredible and it’s ours. Because...

God’s Love is Freely Given to Us

John 3:16 literally says that God loved the world so much that he sent his Son to die for us. Then in romans the bible says that all we have to do to access that love is to believe with our heart and confess with our mouth and we are saved. Thats it.

We don’t deserve it either. We are all a mess. Our natural aptitude is to actually RUN from God. But God loves us so much he draws us unto himself. That doesn’t make sense!

God’s love is above our ability to completely understand.

Where the english here says “what kind” the greek says “Papavous” and it translates to “of what country” originally. Basically, “where did that come from?” I do not possess the words to describe that thing.

Remember earlier when I said that I grew up in Australia? Well that is the land of things that don’t make any sense.

Do we have any car people in here?

Ute

How bout animal lovers?

Bilby

Sports?

Australian Rules Football

All those things are near and dear to my heart, but man are they weird!

John even goes on to say later in this passage that when Jesus comes back to fix the world once and for all, we will be apart of that process and he doesn’t even know what that will look like because it’s a concept he can’t grasp. He just doesn’t know.

So, from this passage we know that God’s love is exciting, freely given to us, so incredible and unique that we don’t even have the ability to understand it. We know that it’s “real Love” - for the rest of the week i’m going to be refering to God’s love for us as real love.

Here is the tension for us.

A part of our ability to interact and discover as human beings comes from our ability to compare.

It’s been said, you don’t know that you’ve had a bad cup of coffee until you’ve had a good one. I had it the other way… I used to live in the cafe capital of the world. I came to america and had a iced dunky and whoah boy. It was just profoundly bad.

So, when we are going about our christian walk, it’s normal to compare the love that God has for us, with the love that those around us have for us. It’s normal for us to learn what the world has for us and apply that to what God has for us. I think when we are navigating our Christian walk there are 3 main lies that we believe.

God will love me if I work at it.

Our world is full of love, that is earned. We love influencers because they make us laugh. We love taylor swift because she makes us “feel”. Sometimes we love the kid at school that has a pool, because these summers do be hot. It’s easy to look at our world and assume that God needs something from us to love us, but that is simply not the case.

Ephesians 1:5–6 ESV

he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.

THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO MAKE GOD LOVE YOU MORE

I am not worth it

It’s easy to look at ourselves and say I’m not worth it. It’s easy to compare ourselves to others and think why would God want me. I’m not even good at anything or look good, or can sing. It’s easy to look inward at all of the things that you have done and say that you’re not worth loving because you feel worthless.

Isaiah 43:1–3 ESV

But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba in exchange for you.

He has called YOU. You Jessica, You Darby, You Mike You Jacob You Tim. You are called and you are his. There is nothing that can change that!

I am not good enough yet

You will never be good enough. We have all sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God. There is this misconception that we need to get to a certain level of spirituality to be able to receive the Love of God. But

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us That’s Romans 5.

We are worth it! and God loves us now, not after we’ve fixed ourselves.

So how do we reconcile the love of the world with the love of Jesus Christ. The love of conditions and difficulty and not being good enough and rejection of the world with the Exciting, free and otherworldly and amazing love of Jesus Christ.

“The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him”

The world just doesn’t know, because they don’t love Jesus.

Even us people that love the Lord. Those of us that know the love of Jesus! We are still not as good nor will we ever be as good as God!

God’s Love, and Human Worldly Love are not comparable.

So what do we do with that?

We Reflect

It’s easy to compare the love of the world and Gods love and end up in a confusing situation. It’s healthy for us to take a step back and consider why we have an unhealthy or untrue view of Gods love.

Maybe it’s a parent - My dad

Maybe it’s a friend

Maybe it’s a teacher or even pastor.

We Reject

What so ever things are true - We are to dwell on these things. Once we see where we are drawing a comparison where there should not be one, we can then reject that notion as an un-true.

I don’t think God loves me because Mr fisher said I am a terrible vocalist

I don’t think God loves me because I gave into pressure to go to far physically with my S.O. My dad is furious, God is even angrier at me.

I dont think I am “saveable” because of what I looked up on the internet - my mother wont look me in the eye anymore how can God.

I dont, I cant he wouldnt. All lies!

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us HE KNEW HE DIED ANYWAY BECAUSE HE LOVES YOU

WE Reject

We Rely

We rely on the truth that We are chosen children of the most high and nothing can touch that.

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