Because He First Loved Us
God’s love for us produces love in us
God’s love in us, enables us to…
…Love others…
… Sacrificially
… Undeservedly
God’s love for us is received through believing in Jesus
Good morning. You can go ahead and be seated.
We are glad that you are here.
We started a series last week talking about some of the issues that have been raised in the movie Fireproof that came out last weekend. I hope you have had a chance to see it, because it truly is a powerful film.
This morning we are going to be talking about God’s love and how He loved us and how He wants us to love others.
Take a look at this clip from the movie as we prepare to talk about God’s love.
Show video Clip “the Cross”
Slide
One of the things that Caleb’s dad tells him in this clip is
“You can’t love her because you can’t give her what you don’t have.”
I want to ask,
Is that really true?
Is it true that we can’t love because we haven’t received God’s love?
I know many people who appear to love their kids and they are not Christians
I know many people who say they love their spouses who are not Christians.
They have never hit their spouse
They have never physically cheated on their spouse
So is it true that we can’t love because we haven’t received God’s love?
Well that depends on how you describe love.
Our society tends to define love as an emotional feeling.
We are in love so we drift off in our dreams thinking of our wife or fiancée or girlfriend.
Or we love our kids because they are a part of us and they bring us joy.
The Bible doesn’t define love in terms of some feeling however.
The Bible defines love in terms of actions and commitment and choices.
Listen to this passage in 1 Corinthians that we often hear at weddings, and is talking about what love is as God defines it.
1 Corinthians 13:4-8a
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 8 Love never fails.
Those things are all actions and or decisions that are being made.
This is how love is being defined in the Bible.
Now when we stop and look at our lives, we might think that we do those things some of the time.
Caleb thought that too.
But if we stop and think, we will find that we are not always those things.
We do not always choose to be patient
We do not always choose to be kind.
We may do that sometimes, but we fail so many other times.
And the times we do choose to be kind or patient is often time in accordance with how we feel.
I’ll be patient until I don’t feel like it anymore.
I’ll be kind, until that person pushes me too far, then forget it.
I will keep no record of wrongs, until we are fighting and then I will pull out how you wronged me.
To love the way the Bible talks about we can see that it is going to require something or Someone greater than ourselves working through us and helping us to experience love when we fail.
Transition
Turn with me to 1 John 4:7-16 (p.863) It is all the way at the back of your Bibles.
Slide
This morning we are going to be taking a look at what God says about love and how He loved us so we might be able to love others with His kind of love.
1 John 4:7-16
7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
13 We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. 16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.
Pray
Right off the bat we see the Apostle John confirm through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that
God’s love for us produces love in us
Slide
1 John 4:7b-8
“…love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”
God is love and love comes from Him.
If we don’t receive His love, we can’t truly love the way He intends.
What Caleb’s dad said to him was true. When we have received God’s love, then we will be enabled to truly love as God loves.
I want to take a look in this passage further and see how it is that God loves, so we know how we might be enabled to love.
In 1 John 4:7, it tells us what we need to know first about God’s love in us.
It is that
God’s love in us, enables us to …
…Love Others
Slide
1 John 4:7
7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God.
God’s love in us enables us to love others.
This seems so simple and straightforward, but I think this is the point that we fail at.
Because while we say we love others, the truth is that we often don’t love them more than we love ourselves.
Philippians 2:3
3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves.
Loving others means putting our selfish desires behind the needs and desires of someone else.
So often we act in accordance with how things will benefit us.
I hear people all the time say they love others, but they don’t love them ahead of themselves.
“I love my wife, but I am not happy with her.”
“I love my husband, but we don’t have a relationship like we used to.”
“We were in love, but we have just grown apart because it is not providing what I want.”
Is that what God’s love looks like?
Does He love us because of how we make Him feel?
That fact is that God loved before we ever loved Him.
The verses right after Philippians 2:3 tell us this.
Philippians 2:5-7
5 Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
6 Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
7 but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
It is only when we have God’s love, that we are enabled to love like He loves.
1 John 4:11 says this as well
11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
We ought to love one another the way God has loved us.
Now, what does that love look like?
Well, we see that
God’s love in us enables us to
Love others…Sacrificially
Slide
Look how God showed us His love.
1 John 4:9
9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.
God sacrificed His Son for us because of His love
John 3:16
16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (from New International Version)
God sacrificed for us and His love in us enables us to love others sacrificially.
Ultimately this is how others know that we are loving them ahead of ourselves, when we sacrifice our wants, our desires, our needs, for their wants or desires or needs
When I put someone else ahead of me, that person knows that I care about them.
When I refuse to put what they want ahead of what I want, I am acknowledging to them that I care more about what I want than what they want.
I am enabled to truly sacrifice when I have better understood the sacrifice and the love that has been poured out on me through Jesus Christ.
As I learn and understand that, I can better sacrifice.
Well, Scott, I know Christians who are anything but sacrificial. They are all about themselves and what they want.
I want to tell you one of two things are going on.
Not Really Christians
One is that they only profess Christianity…They aren’t really Christians.
Jesus said we will be able to recognize true believers by their love for each other
John 13:34-35
34 "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."
Now this says that people won’t recognize you as disciples, not that they really aren’t disciples, but if others are not recognizing you as a Christian by your love for one another, then there is a problem.
You are either an unbeliever or
You are a very immature Christian
Immature Christian
As we grow in our Christian walk, there is a process of maturing that takes place as we grow in our knowledge of the Lord and are strengthened by Him. It is as we follow His leading that we worship Him and this transformation continues.
Romans 12:2
2 Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, (selfishness) but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
We need to keep our eyes and our mind upon Christ so we can grow up in our salvation and love others the way God intended.
And He intends us to love sacrificially as He loved us.
Secondly,
God’s love in us enables us to
Love others…Undeservedly
Slide
1 John 4:10
10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Romans 5:8 - God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
We did not in any sense of the word, deserve God’s love, and yet He gave it to us.
In fact, not only did we not do anything to deserve it, Romans 5:10 tells us that we were in fact “God’s enemies.”
Ephesians 2:3 says we were “by nature objects of His wrath”
But Ephesians 2:4-5 goes on to say
4 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions-it is by grace you have been saved.
Oh, how God has loved us!
Look at what Jesus said when they were crucifying him.
Luke 23:34 - "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing."
In Luke 6:27, Jesus tells us to “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you”
Love undeservedly.
Stephen when they were stoning him said
Acts 7:60 - "Lord, do not hold this sin against them."
How do you do that?
How do you have that kind of love?
It seems impossible.
It is impossible apart from having God’s love in us.
How do we receive God’s love for us?
God’s love for us is received through believing in Jesus
Slide
1 John 4:13-16
13 We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. 16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
We can only know and rely upon God’s love for us and have God’s love in us, when we believe in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God.
That means more than believing that He was an actual person.
That means more than believing He was a great prophet or a good person or a great teacher.
It means believing that He is God’s Son which means that He is God in the flesh.
John 5:18
18 For this reason the Jews tried all the harder to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.
The Jews recognized what Jesus was saying.
He is God who put on flesh and became a man to be able to pay for the sins of the world by shedding his blood upon the cross.
He proved that He is God by rising from the dead to never die again.
Have you received God’s love?
Have you received Jesus as your Savior?
John 1:12
12 Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God
Lead your heart
There is a line in the movie when Caleb is talking to Michael, his friend, and he says that you shouldn’t follow your heart, basically saying don’t just do what you feel you should do, because your heart, your feelings, can lead you astray and down a wrong path.
But he says to “lead your heart.”
Lead your heart in the direction the Lord is leading you.
Do what the Lord says is right.
If you have never received Jesus as Savior, then you have never received the fullness of God’s love and you will never be able to love as God intends you to.
You will never fully know the love that God has for you and you will never be able to fully reflect that love to others.
Won’t you lead your heart this morning to believe in Jesus as your Savior?
Acknowledge the truth of who Jesus is
Romans 10:9 - confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
1 John 4:15-16
15 If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. 16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
Acknowledge who Jesus is and what he has done and receive His love and His salvation.
Pray.
closing Song: Salvation is here
