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*Loving God and Obeying His Commands (1 John 4:19-5:3)*
/Preached by Pastor Phil Layton at Gold Country Baptist Church on February 24, 2008/
www.goldcountrybaptist.org
* *
I’ve been energized and refreshed the last several weeks for many reasons, not only the fruit of so many hours deep in Scripture, but I think your heart and spirit can only be lifted when you are seeking to lift up the Lord.
Doing a series on the glory of God is not difficult to do, it’s not hard to find things to say or texts that proclaim the greatness and glory of God and how that should impact our church.
There is so much glorious truth that can be proclaimed, the difficulty is what /not/ to say, the challenge is there is never enough time to adequately do justice to God’s glory.
For several weeks it’s been a tremendous joy for me to be preaching a series on glorifying God in the church.
-          By our worship
-          By a high view of God and His Word
-          By our prayer
TODAY: by loving God and obeying His commands
 
Each of these ways the church is to glorify God come out of the new constitution we as elders have been drafting and will be presenting to the congregation a few months down the road.
PURPOSE: /This church exists by the grace of God for the glory of God, which shall be the ultimate purpose in all our activities/
/ /
Today we will study together how we can glorify God by loving our Lord and by obeying His commands.
Deuteronomy 30:16 in that I command you today to *love the Lord your God*, to walk in His ways and to *keep His commandments* and His statutes and His judgments, that you may live and multiply, and that the Lord your God may bless you in the land where you are entering to possess it.
\\ … Deuteronomy 30:19 “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse.
So *choose life in order that you may live*, you and your descendants, \\ Deuteronomy 30:20 *by loving the Lord your God, by obeying His voice*, and by holding fast to Him; for this is your life …
 
The life of a believer does not stay with the words of the song “Just as I am” but it also must be balanced with “trust and obey” – or as the OT Jews might have sung it based on Deuteronomy, “/love and trust/ and obey for there’s no better way to see we have life from God.”
Those 3 key words will form our outline: Love-Trust-Obey.
Every Christian knows you must trust Christ.
But mere faith  in facts about Jesus we had at some point in the past does not prove  we are God’s children, I want you to turn to 1 John where we’ll see this message that a born again believer loves, trusts, /and obeys/ his Lord.
We show true love for God /by /obeying His commands.
We don’t earn God’s love when we obey, we obey /because /God’s love has been shed abroad in our regenerated hearts.
And if God’s love is within us, we not only trust in Christ, but we love our brethren.
*/ /*
1 John 5:13 (NASB95) \\ 13 These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life.
\\ *The way we know we have eternal life is not by something we did in the past/, /but it’s by what God is doing in us now          *
 
1 John 4:19-5:3 (NASB95) \\ 19 We love, because He first loved us.
\\ 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.
\\ 21 And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also.
\\ \\ 1 Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and whoever loves the Father loves the child born of Him.
\\ 2 By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and observe His commandments.
\\ 3 For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not burdensome.
\\ \\
Loving God and others and trusting and obeying God’s commands go together – they are like 3 strands of the same cord.
OUTLINE: 3 tests of salvation here.
The first we’ll see is LOVE.
*I.
LOVE FOR GOD AND OTHERS*
 
A brother in the Lord gave me a book recently by Clyde Cranford entitled /Because We Love Him.
/I think his introduction is a good one before we talk about biblical love, selfless love that’s grounded in love of God and from God, we need to recognize that there’s a big barrier to us understanding this message.
There’s a major roadblock to us truly loving God and others: Self.
We live in a self-centered, self-absorbed society in which self is nurtured, pampered, indulged, and even worshiped.
Self-obsession has so engulfed the church that the biblical concept of self-denial, which is simply saying /no /to self, seems strange and unfamiliar to most, even though this is the very entrance into the Christian life …
God Himself is the center of the universe.
Even God’s command to be holy is a God-centered command.
God does not say, “Be holy because of what it will do for you,” but rather, “Be holy because I am holy.”
Yet God, in expressing His infinite [condescension], has made man the object of His infinite love and has called him to share in God’s own holiness.
This is what man was created for to begin with; thus it remains his only true source of joy and fulfillment …
But instead, pride … self-exaltation … has dulled our influence on the world.
The church of America was once salt and light.
Now, rather than having any real impact on the world around us, we have become more affected than effective.
Rather than being set apart from the world, we have sought to be like the world, conforming to its image rather than the image of Christ.
We argue that by doing so we will win the world for God.
Instead, the world and its values have rendered the church virtually impotent.
By imitating the world we have lost not only our influence but also our credibility.
We are no longer a clear beacon pointing men to God.
The world looks at the church and sees a cheap, amateurish imitation of itself, so it concludes quite reasonably that the church has nothing special to offer.
The church has only one thing that the world does not have but desperately needs – Jesus.
And He is everything … We must lift Christ up to a lost and dying world.
But how can we lift Christ up if our focus is on ourselves?
How can we lift Christ up if we are not living holy [set apart] lives that illustrate the difference Christ can make?’
(p.
15)
Jesus made very clear how we should be set apart, what should be different about His disciples.
One of the major ways we glorify and lift up Jesus is by our love for each other, especially in the church.
Jesus said to His followers “love one another, even as I have loved you [he said this right after washing their feet in John 13] … By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”
In the six verses we just read, the word “love” appears 12x, making it the obvious dominant subject of this text.
If you count the 3 verses before our text, the word “love” appears nearly 20x in just a few verses.
The love that 1 John speaks of - love of God and toward others - is the opposite of self-centeredness.
It is the cure for self-focus, the liberation from self.
The message of our passage in 1 John is that God’s love /does /make a difference in our lives, if we are truly in Christ.
Being born again, as chapter 5 verse 1 refers to, does not just impact where you go /in the future after you die/, it radically impacts /how you live today/.
Genuine salvation does not just give you a new eternal /destination/, it turns sinners into /a whole new creation/ in Christ where old things have passed away and new things have come as the Apostle Paul says (2 Cor.
5:17).
Salvation is no small thing.
As pastor Adrian Rogers said it’s not just getting man out of hell and into heaven, it is God coming down out from heaven and into man, or as the Puritan Henry Scougal wrote “the life of God in the soul of a man.”
God’s love in the work of regeneration is a mighty merciful miracle, causing us to be born again by a work of God alone, not a joint effort.
This work of God implants in us a new nature and transforms us and gives us the capacity and desire to love God and to love our brother.
We don’t do these things or anything in order to become born again, John argues that we do these things in this passage because we /are/ born again (/if we are/).
Regeneration precedes and produces our love for God as 4:19 says “because He first loved us.”
Being born again as chapter 5 speaks about takes place when there is divine life from God imparted to our formerly spiritually dead self, we have a new heart, and we respond in faith and love and obedience not in order to be saved, but in response to God’s sovereign saving grace that was first shed abroad in our hearts.
* *
*1 John 4:19 says “we love because He first loved us”*
 
“First” is emphatic in Greek.
It’s not that the reason God chose to love us as His children is because He knew we would choose and love Him in the future and that’s what caused His love for us.
No, first and foremost it was God’s love, God’s particular love, God’s preemptive love, God’s prior love that enables a naturally sinful selfish man to love God or others with true selfless/ /love.
God’s effectual electing love to us causes our love to Him, not the other way around.
As Jesus told His disciples in John 15:16 “you did not choose me, but I chose you” – His was the decisive choice, His choice preceded and produced ours.
The same is true in love.
This is the truth that makes us sing “O how I love Jesus, O how I love Jesus, O how /I love Jesus because He first loved me/”
 
Or another hymn we sing sometimes at communion: “I love thee /because thou hast first loved me/ and purchased my pardon on Calvary’s tree, I love thee for wearing the thorns on thy brow, if ever I loved thee my Jesus ‘tis now.”
Some of the manuscripts for 1 John 4:19 have “we love Him” – others have “we love God” – others leave it open or general (“we love”).
Whichever text you have, the context and text of the next verse contains both – v. 20 begins with those who say “I love God” but then the verse also talks about loving one’s brother.
Whichever way, the truth applies to all - the principle is that we love God or anyone, simply because and solely because God first loved us.
And in John’s mind, love for God and love for our brother can hardly be separated.
*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.
\\ \\ *
This first point is that love is a test of salvation.
It’s not what we /say/ (anyone can say “I love God” – many do).
The question is whether in your heart and life you truly love.
God is the source of all true love and if God’s love is in us, we can and will love others.
 
1 John 4:7-10 (NASB95) \\ 7 Beloved, let us love one another, for *love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.* \\ 8 *The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.*
\\ 9 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.
\\ 10 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.
\\ \\
It’s important to note that John is not using the word for mere human love or the weakened watered-down understanding of love that our culture has.
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