Impossible Love Part Six Series

Chico Alliance Church

Pastor David Welch

Impossible Love Part 6

INTRODUCTION

We have examined the characteristics of genuine love like the pedals on a beautiful rose. Whatever does not match the lofty descriptions revealed by Scripture falls short of the real thing. We may call it love but without the accompanying characterizes is simply is not genuine love. The short version:

Love is a desire and decision to meaningfully connect with others

evidenced by sacrificial deeds.

1 Corinthians 13 outlines an impossible love.

Romans 12-15 holds up an unhypocritical love.

I. Terms of Endearment

II. A better way to go

1. Inadequate love

2. Humanly impossible love from 1 Corinthians 13

3. Divinely imparted love

a) Realize His Unimaginable Love

(1) God is love

The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. 1 John 4:8

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. 1 John 4:16

God always loves. It is His nature to desire and decide to connect with us.Everything he does is motivated by love.

(2) Love comes from God and is taught by God.

In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation (satisfactory payment) for our sins…We love, because He first loved us. 1 John 10,19

Peace be to the brethren, and love with faith, from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Ephes. 6:23

God’s love motivates and is the basis of our capacity to love.

God created us with the capacity and the inclination to connect with Him and others.

Because we were created in the image of God who is love, love is at the core of human experience. Even the secular “experts” admit that the core longing of man is to love and be loved. The fall twisted that desire to love and serve others into self-love. Only through a supernatural transformation can that diminished capacity to love God and others be restored to its original capacity.

Now as to the love of the brethren, you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves are continually taught by God to love one another 1 Thess 4:9-12

Paul doesn’t specify just how God teaches us. He is active in our learning process. Even though His love indwells us, there is a continual learning and growing process. Since love is so humanly impossible, it is obviously a God thing.

For God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power and love and discipline (self-control).

Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart, for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and abiding word of God. 1 Peter 1:22-23

When we respond to the truth of the word of God there is a new birth. The old heart, no longer capable of genuinely loving God or others, is purified and renewed with a new capacity to love like God. A new desire to meaningfully connect with others becomes instilled in the new believer.

Peter urges us to then demonstrate this heart change by actually loving one another.

Love is because of God. Love is from God.

hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out (spilled, gushed out – perfect tense verb indicating a past action with continuing results i.e. poured out and still there!) within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. Rom 5:8

At the moment of salvation, God filled our empty relational reservoir with his undiminished love. That includes both the personal realization of it and the practical release of it. Within every believer is a reservoir of God’s love waiting to be released by the Holy Spirit. Jesus said out of your inner most being will flow rivers of living water by the Holy Spirit. Selfishness blocks the flow of the rivers. Our damaged soul fails to personally perceive the wonder of His love for us and realize the satisfaction of sharing that love with others. We make the choice to share His love or squelch it but the desire is there. Sickness blocks desire. Overindulgence blocks desire.

(3) Love for God and others is the central point of the entire Bible.

And He said to him, " 'YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND.' "This is the great and foremost commandment. "The second is like it, 'YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.' "On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets." Matthew 22:37-40