Behold, What Manner Of Love! - Part 1

Back in 1 John, when he says, “when He is revealed” he is referring to what Paul was referring to…the Rapture.

The word “rapture” means “caught up”. The Rapture is that event in Bible prophecy (described in 1 Thessalonians 4) when Jesus returns from heaven and appears in the clouds to grab His church and take them home to heaven. By the way, it could happen at any time.

Back in our text, John says:

…we shall be like Him…

This statement has to do with physical likeness, not spiritual likeness. The Christian’s blessed hope is to be physically like the Lord when He returns. We are going to look at this more next time.

Let’s conclude this message talking about this “out of this world” kind of love, this great love, this sacrificial love, this forgiving love, this pursuing love, this long suffering love…

This love should mark us, define us, impact us and motivate us. Let me share with you a couple of ways this love should touch our lives.

This love should motivate us.

2 Corinthians 5:14 says, “Clearly, Christ's love constrains or moves us…” Paul is saying here, “If Jesus died for me; who am I to say “no” to my obligation as a servant to Him?” The Bible says in 1 John 4:19, “We love Him because He first loved us.”

A missionary in Africa was once asked if he really liked what he was doing. His response was shocking:

“Do I like this work?" he said. "No. My wife and I do not like dirt. We have reasonably refined sensibilities. We do not like crawling into vile huts through goat dung...

…But is a man to do nothing for Christ he does not like? God pity him, if not. Liking or disliking has nothing to do with it. We have orders to ’Go," and we go. Love constrains us.”

The love of Christ motivates us to get out of our comfort zones and do the work of the ministry.

This love captivates our heart.

In Korea right after the Korean War took place, a woman got pregnant by an American soldier. The soldier went back to the United States and she never saw him again. She gave birth to a little girl. But this little girl was very different from the other little girls. Her hair was light colored and curly so she stood out. In that particular culture this meant that the child and the mother would be severely rejected by society.

In fact some mothers in Korea who gave birth to children from American fathers actually killed their babies because they couldn’t stand the humiliation, the rejection, the heartache because of the way they were treated. But this woman kept her baby and she tried her best to raise this child for several years. But the rejection and the humiliation and the taunting and the harassment that she experienced was too much for her. So she did something nobody here could imagine anybody doing. She abandoned her seven-year-old daughter to the streets.

That little girl wasn’t alone though, because there were packs of little children living on the streets. They would live under bridges and in abandoned buildings and they would go outside of town and live in caves. And they would just eat whatever they could find. They would find stuff on the street – bugs and locusts and roots and things like that.