TITLE: Celebrate God’s Love
Text: 1 John 4:7-12
Date: 9/07/08
Location: Sulphur Spring Baptist
Introduction: As I mentioned earlier this is the week of prayer for State Missions and we will be having our special mission study tonight. The Theme of this year’s study is “Celebrate God’s Love.”
God’s Love has inspired many songwriters to write hundreds of beautiful songs, including “Love is the Theme, and Oh How He Loves You and Me” which we sang earlier. Albert Fisher, the author of “Love is the Theme” describes God’s love as “Wonderful.”
William Reynolds, used these words to describe God’s Love in the Hymn “Share His Love…”
“The Love of God is broader than earth’s vast expanse,
Tis deeper and wider than the sea.
Love reaches out to all to bring abundant life,
For God so loved the world His only son He gave.”
This morning I want you to think about God’s Love, about How Great, and How Wonderful it really is.
The First thing I want you to remember about God’s Love is that it is…
I. PERSONAL.
Look back at verses 7-8 of our text:
"Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” 1 John 4:7-8 (NIV)
The Apostle John reminds us in these two verses that God’s love is personal. He says those of us who are Christians know God and love God, while unbelievers neither know him or love him.
The Holy Spririt draws us into what Henry Blackaby, the Author of Experiencing God calls an “Intimate love relationship with Him that is real and personal.”
God’s love causes us to know Him, and Him to know us.
A.W. Tozer said it like this: "The love of God is one of the great realities of the universe, a pillar upon which the hope of the world rests. But it is a personal, intimate thing too. God does not love populations, He loves people. He loves not masses, but men."
People all over the world are searching for someone to love. Millions of people use dating services like “It’s Just Lunch, or E-Harmony.com to try to find that person that they can love and be loved by.
The most important and one of the most powerful messages that we can share with people today is that God loves them. Every person in this auditorium is important to God, and He loves each and every one of us.
Jesus was trying to teach His Disciples this concept when He said, "Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows." (Luke 12:6-7).
Isn’t that amazing, nothing takes God by surprise, He knows when a single bird falls out of the sky!
Which reminds me a little of going dove hunting the other day with Eric and Alvin, because there weren’t many doves falling out of the sky around me or Eric.
But the point that Jesus is making here is that we are so much more import to God than a sparrow or a dove. In fact He says we are so important to God that He knows everything there is to know us, down to the very hairs we have on our heads
God’s love for us is personal.
Jesus illustrated this in John 10:14-15, when He said, "I am the good shepherd, I know my sheep and my sheep know me- just as the Father knows me and I know the Father – and I lay down my life for the sheep."
The image of shepherding is lost on many American’s today, but when Jesus walked the streets of Jerusalem, shepherding was as common as farming is in this part of the country. One of the outstanding characteristics of a good shepherd was that they knew each one of their sheep by sight and often by name. And so Jesus says, "I know my sheep and my sheep know me.”
Which brings us back to our first point, and that is God’s love is Personal.
The Second thing I want you to remember this morning about God’s Love is that not only is it Personal, but it is also….
II. UNCONDITIONAL.
A teenager girl grew up on a farm not far from the small city of Traverse City, Michigan. Like many teenagers today, she thought her parents were a little old-fashioned.
Maybe they did overreact a little when it came to the music she listened to, or the style of clothing she chose to wear but they loved her and were doing the best they could to raise her properly.
Like most parents they were forced to punish her a few times by ‘grounding’ her and not allowing her to do what she wanted to do, when she wanted to do it. She wanted to yell and scream at them but instead she chose to keep all of that anger and bitterness bottled up insider of her.
But one night after another heated argument with her father she slammed the door of her room in her father’s face and screamed "I hate you!" Later that night, she decided to do something that she had thought about doing several times before but had never actually done. She decided to run away.
She had only been to Detroit once, and that was when she went with the church youth group to see the Detroit Tigers play baseball. But despite that she decided that Detroit was the best place for her to go. She figured that it would be the last place on earth that her parents would expect her to go because it had such a bad reputation for drugs, gang violence and anything and everything else you can imagine.
I’m not sure how she got there, maybe she had enough money to get a bus ticket or maybe she hitch hiked but somehow she managed to get to Detroit.
The second day she was there she met a man who drove the biggest car she had ever seen. He offered her a ride, bought her lunch, and arranged for a place for her to stay. He gave her some pills that made her feel better than she’d ever felt in her life.
She concluded that she had been right all along, that her parents didn’t really love her because they had kept her from having all this fun.
She lived it up for a month or two and then before she knew it she’d been in Detroit for a year.
The man with the big car—the man she now called "Boss"—taught her a few things that men like.
He told her since she was underage that many men would pay big bucks to be with her.
She lived in a penthouse and ordered room service whenever she wanted it.
Every now and then she would think about her parent’s back home, but their lives seemed so boring and old fashioned when compared to the life she was now living, that she had trouble believing that she grew up there.
One night she walked into a convenience store, probably to buy some beer, when she was shocked to see her picture printed on the back of a milk carton with the headline, "Have you seen this child”"
Of course she had dyed her hair blond and with all the makeup she wore and all of the body-piercings she had nobody would ever recognize her. Besides, most of her friends were runaways, and nobody squeals in Detroit, or at least that’s what she thought. But somehow or another the boss found out about her picture on the milk carton and before she knew what was going on she found herself out on the street without a penny to her name.
She still managed to turn a couple of tricks a night, but what little money she made went toward supporting her drug habit.
When winter arrived she found herself sleeping on metal grates outside of the big department stores. Although she never managed to get much sleep because she could never relax, or let her guard down for fear of getting mugged or beaten up or worse.
One night, as she was lying there listening for footsteps, all of a sudden she woke up and came to her senses. She no longer felt like a woman of the world. Instead, she felt like a little girl, lost in a cold and frightening city. She began to whimper. Her pockets were empty and she was very hungry and needed a fix.
She pulled her legs as close to her as she could get them, but she was still shivering underneath the newspapers that she had piled on top of her in an attempt to stay warm.
All of a sudden a single memory flooded her mind. She was back on the farm, outside of Traverse City, it was springtime and the cherry trees were in full bloom. She was in the orchard tossing a tennis ball, watching her golden retriever go get it and bring it back to her.
“God, why did I leave home,” she says to herself, “My dog back home eats better than I do now.”
She began to cry and realized that more than anything else in the world she wanted to go back home.
She found a pay phone and made three phone calls to her parents. Unfortunately they weren’t home and the first two times she chose not to leave a message on the answering machine. But the third time, she left the following message. "Mom, Dad, it’s me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I’m going to catch a bus and head that way, I’ll get to the bus station there about midnight tomorrow. If you’re not there to meet me, I guess I’ll just stay on the bus and go to Canada."
It takes about seven hours for a bus to make all the stops between Detroit and Traverse City, and during that time she realized that there were a few flaws in her plan.
What if her parents were out of town and didn’t get her message”
Shouldn’t she have waited another day or two until she could have talked to them.” Even if they were home, they had probably written her off as dead long ago. At least if she had been able to talk with them it would have given them a chance to get over the shock before they met her at the bus terminal. Her mind went back and forth between those worries and the speech that she was preparing to give to her father.
"Dad, I’m sorry. I know I was wrong. It’s not your fault, it’s all mine. Dad, can you ever forgive me”"
She repeated those words over and over. Her throat tightened and her mouth got drier the more she rehearsed the speech. She suddenly realized that she hadn’t apologized to anyone in years.
When the bus finally rolled into the station at Traverse city, the driver announced that they would only be stopping for 15 minutes.
Fifteen minutes was all the time she had to decide what she was going to do with the rest of her life.
She opened her purse and took out a compact mirror and looked at her face. She did her best to smooth and straighten her hair. She noticed the tobacco stains on her fingertips, and wondered if her mom and dad would notice – then she wonders if they’re even there.
She got off the bus and walked into the bus terminal not knowing what to expect, although she had played out several different scenarios in her mind during the past 7 or 8 hours she certainly wasn’t expecting to see what she now saw.
There, in the bus terminal in Traverse City stood her entire family. Not just her mom and dad, but her brothers and sisters, her Aunts and Uncles, Her cousins and even her grandmother and great-grandmother.
Not only were they there, but they were all wearing those ridiculous-looking party hats and blowing noisemakers. To top it all off they had taped a “Welcome Home sign” across the entire back wall of the terminal.
Out of this crowd of well-wishers walked her dad. She looked through her tears and began repeating the speech that she had memorized "Dad, I’m sorry. I know . . . " But He interrupted her, took her in his arms and said, "Hush, child, now is not the time for apologies. You’ll be late for the party. A banquet’s waiting for you at home."
Jesus told a story much like this in the 15th chapter of Luke. We usually refer to it as the Parable of the Prodigal Son, although it could just as easily be called the Parable of the Loving Father. Because in that story, just as in this one, the Father forgives His son, throws a banquet for him and welcomes him back into the family.
One of the spiritual applications that we can take from that parable and from the story I just shared with you is that it doesn’t matter what we’ve done, God still loves us, because His Love is Unconditional.
Now look back with me if you will at verse 10 of our text.
“This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent His son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
That’s the next thing I want you to remember about God’s love it is….
III. SACRIFICIAL IN NATURE.
John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that He gave his only Begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
God’s love is Personal, It is Unconditonal, and it is sacrificial in nature. But there’s one more thing I want you to remember about God’s love this morning.
IV. GOD’S LOVE IS ETERNAL.
Jeremiah 31:3 says, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”
Now what does that mean? I believe it means that no matter how many times we reject His love, He continues to pursue us, and He continues to love us, even though we give him no reason to do so.
I want to close this message this morning with a film clip from the movie, “Fireproof, which opens in theaters on September 26th, because I believe it illustrates this point better than anything I could say.
Show the film clip “Cross” from the Fireproof Resource CD
