Introduction:
A. I really like a letter that a little girl once wrote to God, it said: “Dear God, I bet it is very hard for you to love all the people in the world. There are only four people in our family and I can never do it. Nan”
1. It is hard to imagine how God can love every last person in the world, isn’t it?
2. But as hard as it is for us to imagine, God truly loves everyone. God loves you, and God even loves me!
3. This is an amazing and transforming truth for our lives.
B. Last week we began a new sermon series titled: “All You Need Is LOVE!”
1. We spent our time exploring the truth that LOVE is the most important thing and is the key to everything in our lives.
2. When a Pharisee asked Jesus what the greatest commandment was, Jesus answered, “Love God and love your neighbor.”
3. We looked at numerous statements from Paul’s letters, including “The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love” (Gal. 5:6), and “These three remain, faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:13).
C. So, having nailed down the truth that all you need is love and that love is the key to everything, I want us to move on to another important, foundational truth.
1. Today I want us to try to grasp the truth that God is love.
2. And because God is love, love ultimately comes from God.
3. And because God is love, God loves each and every one of us.
D. I have to admit that I feel so inadequate this morning as I try to describe the truth of God’s love.
1. A.W. Tozer was a great American preacher and writer in the first half of the 20th century, he said this about the love of God: “The love of God is one of the greatest 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.”
2. Then as Tozer attempted to explain God’s love, he wrote, “I can no more do justice to this awesome and wonder-filled topic than a child can grasp a star. Still, by reaching toward the star the child may call attention to it and even indicate the direction one must look to see it. And so, I stretch my heart toward the high, shining love of God so that we may be encouraged to look up and have hope.”
3. Let’s spend the rest of our time this morning stretching our hearts toward the high, shining love of God so that we may be encouraged, have hope, and ultimately be transformed – so that we can live a life of love, and so that we can be like God, who is love.
I. Common Misunderstandings about God’s Love
A. Before we get too far into our discussion, I think it is important to make an observation: Perhaps no attribute of God is so widely known and accepted as the love of God.
1. If you interviewed people on the streets of Syracuse and asked them to tell you what God was like, I would suggest that the word “love” would be mentioned more than any other word.
2. But although it is good that they have come to associate love with God, unfortunately many people misunderstand what the love of God means or what it is like.
3. Let’s quickly review what common misunderstandings people have about God’s love.
B. The first misunderstanding is the idea that God loves every person in exactly the same way.
1. I think we all assume this is true, but it is not.
2. A moment’s thought, however, will show us how unreasonable the notion is.
3. We often use the word love in many different ways—and we in fact love in different ways and to different degrees.
4. Here’s a little rhyme that makes the point very effectively: “I love my wife, I love my baby, I love my biscuits dipped in gravy.”
a. There you have three different uses of the word “love” in the same sentence.
b. Married love is not the same as love for your children, and loving your food is something entirely different.
c. Yet the same word is used of all three.
5. From a biblical point of view, we may say that God loves the world, but He lavishes love on his children.
a. The one kind of love is of a general nature, but the other kind of love is of intimacy and relationship.
C. Second, some people mistakenly believe that God’s love somehow cancels his holiness.
1. Unbelievers often think this. Many people have the idea that when they reach the gates of heaven, God will smile and say, “You don’t deserve it, but aw, come on in anyway.”
2. Unfortunately, that view is far from the truth.
3. Whatever else we may say, this much is certain: God’s love is not benevolent softness because God cannot overlook sin. He will never contradict his own nature.
4. Behind this wrong idea is a perverted view of love that says, “If you love me, you’ll accept anything I do.” Which is so Wrong!
5. Love makes judgment calls. Love cares about right and wrong. That’s why parents discipline their children. That’s why God discplines his children.
D. The third wrong idea is growing more and more popular, even in some Christian circles. It’s the idea that God’s love means that everyone will one day be saved.
1. This is the heresy of universalism.
2. While it sounds attractive, it is completely at odds with the Bible.
3. Not everyone who says “I love the Lord” or “I’m a believer” is going to heaven.
4. Jesus himself said, Matthew 7:21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”
E. The final wrong idea is that “God is Love” means the same as “Love is God.”
1. The first part is certainly true. God is love, as 1 John 4:8 plainly states.
a. Love is at the core of God’s being.
b. It is that which causes him to reach out to save guilty sinners.
2. But the second part—"love is God"—is completely untrue.
a. Not all love is of God.
b. Men love darkness rather than light—that is not of God.
c. Some people love murder and rape—that is not of God.
d. Some people love deception and violence—that is not of God.
F. So, with those misconceptions out of the way, let’s look at what the Bible says about the love of God.
II. What the Bible says about the Love of God
A. Psalm 103:8, “The LORD is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love.”
1. This statement about God’s nature and character is repeated throughout the Old Testament.
B. The most famous verse of the whole Bible is John 3:16 says, “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.”
1. In that short verse we see whom God loves and how He demonstrates the extent of His love.
2. We will have more to say about that in a moment.
C. Let’s look at 1 John 4:7-10, “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. 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. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
1. As we move through this series on love, we will be focusing on our mandate to love as God loves, but before we focus on that, we must first focus on the source of love, God, himself, who is love.
2. In this passage we learn three important things about love:
a. First, we learn that God is love.
b. Second, we learn that love comes from God – ultimately God is the source of love.
c. Third, we learn that God demonstrated how vast and extensive His love is for us by the sacrifice of His own Son.
D. So consider the truth “God is love.”
1. Consider the fact that the Bible does not say that “God is grace” or “God is mercy,” although we know that God is gracious and merciful.
2. The Bible does, however, say that God is love.
a. God did not create love when He was creating the rest of the universe.
b. Love was already there, because God is love, and God has no beginning or end.
c. Love finds its origin in God, and God himself is the personification of love.
d. Within the Godhead of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, love has always reigned.
e. There was not a time when God started loving and there will not be a time when God stops loving, because God is love.
3. And because God is love, all real love comes from God.
4. God’s love and human love are often very different.
5. Human love generally is a response to conditions and circumstances around us.
a. We love because someone pleases us or because they seem attractive or because they pay attention to us or because they make us laugh or because we feel fulfilled around them.
6. By contrast God’s love is utterly uncaused.
a. He loves because that’s the kind of God he is.
b. Nothing in us causes him to love us. Not our beauty (most of us have very little), not our wealth (what we have came from him), not our wisdom (the same), not our good deeds (we have done nothing to recommend us to the Almighty), not our promise to love him back (we can make no such promise without his enablement).
7. Our love is conditional and often temporary. God’s love is unconditional, uncaused, and eternal.
E. Perhaps the central passage in the New Testament on God’s love is Romans 5:6-8. Here Paul focuses on the death of Christ as the supreme manifestation of God’s love.
1. “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
2. We discover two vital truths in these verses:
a. We discover the truth about who we are.
b. We discover the truth about the extent of God’s love.
F. What is the truth about who we are?
1. Verse 6 says we were “powerless” and “ungodly,” and verse 8 adds that we were sinners.
2. Powerless … ungodly … sinners…Not a very pretty list, is it?
3. But those three words describe what you and I were and it describes the spiritual state of every person in the world apart from Jesus Christ.
a. This is God’s judgment on the entire human race - No one is excluded.
b. We can search the four corners of the universe and we will find no exceptions to this truth.
4. Not only are we all sinners, powerless, and ungodly, but this makes us enemies of God.
a. And it doesn’t matter whether you accept this truth or not. These things are true without regard to your personal opinion.
b. You may say, “I’m not ungodly” or “I’m not God’s enemy” or even “I know lots of people who are worse sinners than I am.”
c. But this is the truth about us if we stand on your own before God apart from divine grace.
5. But this underscores the truth we already mentioned about God’s love – it is not dependent on anything in us.
a. There is, then, no reason for God to love us.
b. No reason except this: That’s the kind of God he is.
c. God loves you and he loves me because God is love and he can’t help loving us even when we are his enemies.
d. God’s love is both greater than our sin and in spite of our sin.
G. The second truth these verses reveal to us is the amazing extent of God’s love.
1. God’s love goes far beyond what we would do.
2. “Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die.” (vs. 7)
3. Here’s a good question to think about: How many people are you willing to die for?
a. If the chips were down, the moment came, and in a split second you had to make a decision, how many people would you be willing to lay down your life for?
4. Our answer might be: “Only a few. A handful and no more. Your parents, your children, your husband or wife, and perhaps one or two very close friends. But that’s about it.”
a. Hopefully, we will never have to face a moment like that.
5. This text from Romans is telling us that all of us would likely die for a few other people, but that there are many other people we would never consider dying for.
H. We all have heard about heroic stories where someone gives his or her life to save people they care about.
1. We’ve heard of wartime situations where a grenade flew into a tank or foxhole and everyone in there was going to die from the explosion, but then one soldier falls on the grenade to save everyone else.
2. But listen carefully - Romans 5:8 is telling us that God’s love is not like that example.
a. That example shows us friends dying for friends and loved ones dying for loved ones.
b. As great as that is, God’s love is much greater.
c. God went far beyond what we would do. We would never think of doing what he did.
3. Romans 5:8 says: But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
a. When we read it, we like to emphasize, “Christ died for us,” but the emphasis is clearly on the first phrase—“While we were still sinners.”
b. The wonder is not that Christ should die for us—though that would be wonderful enough.
c. The wonder is that Christ died for us while we were still sinners, still ungodly, still powerless and still enemies of God!
d. He didn’t die for his friends. He died for his enemies.
e. He died for those who crucified him. He died for those who hated him. He died for those who rejected him.
4. Let’s consider that wartime illustration again, only this time imagine the soldier has been captured by the enemy. The soldier is beaten unmercifully. His captors torment him day and night, trying to break his will. Meanwhile an attempt is made to rescue the captured soldier, suddenly a grenade lands in the middle of the room where the soldier is being beaten by his captors. But just before it explodes, the captured soldier throws himself on the grenade, dying in the process, but saving his enemy captors.
5. You say, “Who would ever do anything like that?” Answer: Jesus!
a. Jesus did something like that when he died for us while we were still sinners.
b. He didn’t die for good people. He died for bad people.
c. He didn’t die for saints. He died for sinners.
d. He didn’t die for his friends. He died for his enemies.
6. The death of Jesus is the final proof of God’s love.
7. Sometimes in this crazy, mixed-up world, people say, “Where’s the love of God?” and to answer that question, we need to do is point to the cross.
a. The words to the hymn “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” are so powerful:
See from his head, his hands, his feet. Sorrow and love flow mingled down.
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet, Or thorns compose so rich a crown?
Were the whole realm of nature mine, That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine, Demands my soul, my life, my all.
I. Let no one who hears these words ever doubt that God loves you.
1. God loves you? Yes He does! And He proved it when Jesus died on the cross for you!
2. As we bring this sermon to a conclusion, let’s consider Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians: “And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” (Eph. 3:17b-19)
3. The love of God is so great it surpasses knowledge – it is beyond our ability to comprehend completely.
4. God’s love is so wide – wide enough to encompass everyone – even you and me.
5. God’s love is so long – it is eternal, never-ending, long-suffering, patient.
6. God’s love is so high – it is the very best, and highest of all – it is perfect.
7. God’s love is so deep – it is absolutely solid and real – it reaches to the depths of our being.
Conclusion:
A. I’m praying today that God’s love for you has gotten a hold of your life.
1. I’m praying that you have grasped just how wide, and long, and high and deep is that love.
2. It is so important that the truth of God’s love for us makes its way deep into our hearts so that it can have its’ transforming effect.
a. When we truly know God’s love, then we can love God in return.
b. When we truly know God’s love, then we can love ourselves as God loves us.
c. When we truly know God’s love, then we can love others with God’s love.
d. When we truly know God’s love, then we can even love our enemies with God’s love.
e. And when we truly know God’s love, then we will want to tell others the Good News of God’s love.
3. Joe Aldrich wrote, “Evangelism is what spills over when we bump into someone.”
4. We need to allow God’s love to fill us up to the full measure, and then allow His love spill over into the lives of others.
B. Let me end with the words of George Matheson, who after going blind, and experiencing the rejection of his fiancée, who said she could not marry someone who was blind, wrote these words about God’s love:
“O love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe, That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.”
C. Is that the way you feel about the love of God?
1. Is it a love that will not let you go?
2. Is it a love that you rest your weary soul in?
3. Is it a love that causes you to give your life back to God?
D. If you are not a Christian this morning, then we invite you to experience the soul-saving love of God.
1. Allow the love of God to come into your life and bring transformation and fill you up.
E. If you are a Christian this morning, but you have been resisting God’s love, or wandering away from His love, then know that God still loves you and invites you to come home to His open arms.
1. Let’s allow the truth of God’s love for us to have its transforming effect in our lives.
2. Love is all you need, when it is God’s love.
Resources:
Love is Always Right, by Josh McDowell and Norm Geisler, Chapter 4: You Don’t Know Love If You
Don’t Know God.
Sense and Nonsense About God’s Love, Sermon by Ray Pritchard, keepbelieving.com
