KNOWING THE GOD WHO LOVES YOU
Ask anyone what they know of God and you will receive a common answer: God is love. And when I say “ask anyone” I literally mean “anyone.” Do a survey at Portage and Main in Winnipeg and ask people what they think of God and chances are pretty good most people will say God is love.
It is the most simple and profound statement that we can make concerning God. One of the greatest theologians of the 20th century, Karl Barth, was asked what the greatest theological truth was he had yet discovered. Expecting a deep and lofty answer, Barth surprised everyone when he answered, “Jesus loves me.”
Unfortunately this profession of God’s love is also easily misunderstood. Many of those people on the street who say “God is love” will not be able to equate this statement with a God who hates sin or judges sinners. They cannot fathom a loving God sending his own Son to the Cross. So false ideas have grown up around this simple truth hiding its real meaning from view. To hack through this thorny undergrowth is no small thing.
For those of us who have done so we find that grasping God’s love for us is a marvelous and heavenly experience. To know this love is the common experience of the believer. To know God and to grasp just a fraction of his immense love for you and me is to know the greatest mystery of life. Such knowledge opens up incredible possibilities for you as a person.
The question that arises then is: How well do we know the God who loves us? If you are like me then you need reminding. We are continually hacking through that bush of misconceptions to discover the truth about God’s love. In this simple study of 1 John 4:7-12 let’s embrace once again the nature of his love and what it means for us. For to receive such knowledge comes with responsibilities. Or shall we say, to know God’s love truly, will change who you are.
1. Understanding the Nature of God’s love
a) “love comes from God” – To begin to understand the nature of God’s love let’s take two statements from John’s letter. The first has to do with the source of love. John says, “love comes from God” (v. 7).
The capacity to love is known among all peoples from all walks of faith and life. It is easy to see that anyone can love or show signs of loving whether they are Christian or not. This is partly explained by what we call God’s common grace. For instance, a woman with an unwanted pregnancy is often changed in heart when the child is born and she is overwhelmed with the natural urge to care for her child. Does this mean, however, that this love comes from God? Yes, in the sense of common grace that God showers on all of us.
John is speaking in this context of something else, for he says “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God” (v. 7). Has the young mother suddenly been born of God because she discovered the capacity to love someone else? John would say categorically “no.” What John is speaking of here is the divine love of God manifested in you and me. He is speaking to believers in this letter and so this love applies to believers only. The love that comes from God is very much His own. It is agape love; it is not a romantic love of TV; it is not a love for what you do for me; it is agape love that loves for the sake of loving. This love comes from God alone.
b) “God is love” – The second statement tells us more intently about the nature of God: God is love. God is by his very nature love. But this is where we begin to misunderstand this love if we simply examine by our own understanding.
Arthur Pink said, “There are many who talk about the love of God, who are total strangers to the God of love. The divine love is commonly regarded as a species of amiable weakness, a sort of good-natured indulgence; it is reduced to a mere sickly sentiment, patterned after human emotion. The truth is that on this, as on everything else, our thoughts need to be formed and regulated by what is revealed in Scripture.”
So consider the nature of God’s love according to his Word. In Scripture we see…
God’s love is limitless: “Your love, O LORD, reaches to the heavens, your faithfulness to the skies…How priceless is your unfailing love” (Ps 36:5, 7). This is but a small taste of the Psalms and how God is praised for his love.
God’s love is everlasting: “Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good. His love endures forever. Give thanks to the God of gods. His love endures forever” (Ps 136:1-2).
God’s love is invincible: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38-39).
Now return to John’s statement that God is love. John is not saying that God possesses love; he is saying something about God’s very essence. It is not simply that God loves, but that he is love. So to say that God doesn’t love me, when we are in our dark times of despair, is to say that God isn’t really God. Harsh as that sounds it is the truth. We are denying him his true nature to say that he doesn’t love us.
To say in our ugly times that God doesn’t love us is misunderstanding of his love. It says that his love depends upon the attractiveness or worthiness of our persons to be exercised. We humanize God’s love by putting such restrictions on him. His love is divine and totally unique. It cannot be earned and it will not be deserved. God loves us because it is his very nature to love us. He can’t help but love us.
This is the nature of God’s love. Whether you are running to him or away from him, he loves you. If you are running from him, his heart’s desire is to bring you back and forgive you. So great is the love of God for you and me.
2. Reviewing God’s demonstration of love
a) How God showed his love – Love can be construed sentimentally and selfishly when we feel we are not getting it. How does God really show his love? In times of doubt we crave a display, a reaffirmation. It is then that we need to take the blinders off.
John said, “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” (v. 9). This is very definitive and conclusive. God’s love is clearly the motivation for sending Jesus into the world and offering us life through him.
The love of God is the basis for God’s great acts in all of history. Psalm 136, which we quoted earlier, praises God for his loving kindness in two great acts: Creation and the Deliverance of Israel from Egypt. During Israel’s dark days, the prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah would remind the people of God’s love by pointing to these two acts. In the NT we see a greater demonstration in the person and work of Jesus. This great act of deliverance on the Cross is the supreme demonstration of God’s love.
We remind ourselves that God is love by reviewing the work of Christ on the Cross. If, however, we say that God is love and consider that this is all we need to know about God we shortchange ourselves of the whole story. We cannot forget that the God whom John is speaking of is the God who made the world, who judged it by the Flood, who called Abraham and made him a nation, who then punished his people Israel with conquest, captivity and exile, and who sent his Son to save the world. It is this God, John says, who is love. It is twisted to say God is love and at the same time say it is impossible for him to judge the world and condemn sinners, because it is exactly this God who John is speaking of.
To understand this demonstration of God’s love in the Cross we cannot ignore that there is more to God than one dimensional love.
b) This is love – It is precisely in the face of an awesome and terrible God who brings judgment on sin that we discover also the immense love of God in Christ.
John said, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (v.10). Not that we loved God…This is no reciprocation by God, nor a meeting halfway because we showed some desire to repent or come to God. The initiative is entirely God’s. This is the common misunderstanding of the parable of the Prodigal Son: the son appears repentant so the Father runs to meet him. No, the son is not repentant but seeking to make a deal to save his own life. The Father brushes this aside and pours out his full love on the son. We are completely bankrupt spiritually. It is the Father who loves us first.
Romans 5:8 accentuates this, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” While typing my notes I accidentally wrote “stinkers” so that this verse would read “while we were still stinkers.” This is the act of pure love, to love stinkers (sinners) who are unworthy of such love. That is agape in the true sense.
James Packer in his book Knowing God wrote: “God’s love is an exercise of His goodness towards individual sinners whereby, having identified Himself with their welfare, He has given His Son to be their Savior, and now brings them to know and enjoy Him in a covenant relation.”
God’s love in these words is an expression of his goodness. More so it is an expression of his goodness to sinners. Better yet it is an expression of his goodness to you and me. God’s love to you and me is seen in his identification with our human situation. God’s love to us was expressed in the gift of his Son to be our Savior. And the climax of this love is the relationship we may partake in now with God.
This is love: God wants to have a relationship with us and he made it possible.
3. Making God’s love Visible
a) Love one another – Our study on God’s love is incomplete unless we follow it through to its final thrust. John’s purpose in writing about God’s love is to lay a basis for Christian love. Three times he writes in this passage “love one another.” In fact, revealing the essence of God’s love is motivation for us to love one another.
Romans 5:5 implies that God not only revealed his love to us but poured it out into our lives. “…God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us” (Rom 5:5). What God has poured into our hearts is not “love for God” but rather “knowledge of God’s love for us.” When this so fills us there is a natural outflow that results. Paul says three things about this experience in God’s love:
1. That it is poured out suggests a free flow and a large quantity. God literally floods our hearts with the knowledge of his love for us. As you know from recent experience, flooding is not bound by conventional barriers. Water flows where it wants to and saturates everything.
2. “Poured” is a perfect tense verb. That means it is a complete action. With a flood the water recedes and returns to normal. Not so with this flood; God flooded us with his love and we remain flooded at this very moment.
3. This instilling of knowledge is part of the regular ministry of the Holy Spirit to those who truly believe in Him. While we may concern ourselves with trying to find out what spiritual gifts we have or what the Spirit is trying to say to us, we tend to neglect this ministry of the Spirit where he reminds us of God’s intense love.
The purpose of God’s outpouring of love is not simply that our tanks be filled and we can feel loved. It is so that we may share that love with one another in the community of faith, the church.
b) To see God – John emphasizes the importance of loving each other as a means of revealing God. He said, “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us” (v. 12). This is interesting because he began his gospel in much the same way with one slight difference: “No one has ever seen God, but God the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known” (John 1:18). John introduces his gospel with Jesus as the revelation of the invisible God in the flesh. Now John says in his letter that we reveal the invisible God through imitating Jesus Christ.
Jesus told his disciples that everyone would know they were his disciples if they loved each other. The same is true for us of course, but it is easier said than done. Relationships can be rather prickly things. A church full of individual personalities is like room full of porcupines. Each of us has our sensitivities and areas of hurt. So we need to learn a lesson from actual porcupines.
The woodland creature known as the porcupine weighs 15-20 pounds. This primarily nocturnal animal gets its name from the Latin word for pig and the French word for thorn. These “prickly pigs” have 30,000 quills each are a mass of tiny overlapping barbs. When threatened these rodents first try to escape and if that doesn’t work---it tucks its vulnerable little head, turn its back and when touched the quills dislodge into an attackers warm flesh and the barbs on the quills flare out working against the muscle to embed deeper into the flesh. Though not poisonous, the quills may kill. Animals with quills in the mouth can die of starvation or from a subsequent infection. The 1 – 2.5 inch thorns have been found in everything from polar bears to trout fish. Porcupines are not known to be lovable or amiable. They don’t hang out in colonies like other rodents do. They detached from their mother and self-sufficient just a few months after birth. It’s a small wonder that their peculiarities don’t render them extinct. In fact they populate North American forest areas rather well, some stabs and scratches along the way notwithstanding. How do porcupines survive and even thrive? How do they get past all the prickliness and go on? Well, actually they learn to dance. Seriously. They do a kind of two step to get along and we could all learn a lesson here. Called a “love dance” by some, porcupines will waddle on their hind feet to engender a better situation during mating. When disposed, they nuzzle noses and place their front paws on each other’s shoulders and sort of waltz a little. Each flattens their quills so to not hurt the other. They make it work. In wintertime a small group may even cluster together for warmth in what is termed a prickle. So there you have it, even the unlikely scenarios of intimacy, mating and fellowship can and do occur with such spiny a species.
If others are going to see God’s love in us we are going to have to flatten our quills. God’s love compels us to love as he has loved us. Love for each other is evidence of a true faith in Christ, and the absence of love is an indication of a false profession. Study 1 John and you will see this is so. But a love like God’s that has flooded our hearts cannot help but flow over to others.
Conclusion
Love comes from God. God is love. He showed his love to us on the Cross of Jesus. God loves you. So love one another.
A young girl was asked who her mother’s favorite child was. The little girl quickly replied, "She loves Jimmy best because he’s the oldest; and she loves Johnny best because he’s the youngest; and she loves me best because I’m the only girl!" It would be difficult to find a better illustration of God’s all-embracing love for His children. It is wonderful to know that God loves us personally, no matter what our experience has been. His love transcends every barrier, and each one of us is most precious in His sight.
God loves you…
AMEN
