Able to Love
1 John 4:7-21 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. 17 In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. 18 There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. 19 We love because he first loved us. 20 If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. 21 And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.
Intro: Have you ever been in love? Hopefully, many of you still are. Love… what a wonderful thing! The grass is greener, the sky is bluer, the sun is brighter, the flowers are prettier! The object of your affection is someone who is perfect in every way and can do no wrong. You never knew someone could be so beautiful or handsome! Now, all you married couples move ahead 5-10 years. “I sure wish she would quit squeezing the toothpaste in the middle of the tube. That really bugs me!” “I sure wish that lazy bum would get up out of the recliner and take the garbage out! He never does anything around here.” Does that describe anyone you know?
-No doubt the love is still there, but the mundane details of life can strip away the veneer of infatuation. What does it really mean to love someone?
-Now, shift mental gears a little bit. Have you ever known someone who was really, really hard to love? They didn’t love you back. In fact, maybe they didn’t even like you. They knew how to press your irritation buttons. How frustrating!
-Well, thankfully, there is help available to us. Love is something we could never do without help from someone who is really good at it. And that is our main theme today.
Prop: Because of God’s love for each of us, we have the ability to love God and others.
Interrogative: How does God’s love help us love in return?
TS: John the Beloved gives us four perspectives on love from our text.
I. The Source of Love (7-10) God is love.
-Loving is not just one of God’s activities, but it is who He is. Therefore, all of His activity and work is done out of His nature of love. God’s supreme characteristic is His love. Now it is fine to speak of love in the abstract, but it often does not mean very much to us if that is all the farther we take it.
-I find that one of the best ways I can connect with God’s love for me is to remember that He is my Father in heaven. He loves me like a Daddy loves his little boy. He loves you like a wonderful Daddy loves his little girl or little boy. In fact, if you take the best Daddy and the best Mommy in the world, and wrap the love they have for their children in one great bundle, this might give us a small idea of how good and how great God’s love is for each of us. Who gave Moms & Dads the capacity to love? God did.
-What other kind of love would keep on hoping, waiting for the lost son to come home- even after the son had dishonored his father? What other kind of love would accept the poor, the helpless, the sick, the beggars, the prostitutes? Even to one who was caught in the act of adultery, Jesus said, “I do not condemn you. Now, go and leave your life of sin”? What other kind of love accepts each of us just the way we are, even though He knows every secret of our lives? Only the love of God is like this.
-V.7 says that love comes from God. V.8 says that God is love. V.9 says that God’s love had an object- mankind. God showed his love to us by sending His only Son into this world to give us life. V.10 shows that it wasn’t our love for God that made Him do this, but His love for us. He sent His Son, Jesus, to be an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
-God is the source of love. Love was never man’s idea. It certainly was never Satan’s idea. God is the one who has the patent on love. He is the source of love. Love is what flowed from the body of Jesus when He died a cruel death on the cross.
-We will not find it within ourselves to love God, or to love other people. God alone is the instigator of love. Any genuine love that you see in this world has its source in the heart of God. Even some of those who do not yet know God, but are able to love others are only able to do so because of God’s love. I have to believe that anyone who has true love for others either knows God, or is coming to know Him.
TS: Now John goes on to tell us that since we all have been the recipients of the love of God (whether or not we have accepted it yet), then we all have a responsibility to love other people.
II. The Obligation of Love (11) We ought to love.
-Why are we obligated to love? Because we have been and are loved by God, who is the only source of love.
-Jesus told his disciples, “Freely you have received, freely give.” We who are Christians have received God’s love, and have the responsibility to give that same love out to others.
-Paul wrote in Romans 13:8, “Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law.” We have an ongoing debt of love. We can never pay it off and be done with it. We can never refinance, seek a lower interest rate, consolidate, or retire this debt. We must make installments every time we have the opportunity.
-What happens if we don’t? What happens if we decide that we do not want to love certain people? John said in verse 8, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”
III. The Ability to Love (19) We can love… if we are connected to the source.
-The failure to love indicates the lack of a personal loving relationship with the Lord. Maybe there are people who have said the sinner’s prayer and seem to do what is right in most areas of life, but they do not really love people. The Bible says that these people do not know God, because if they did know God personally, they could not help but be affected by His contagious heart of love.
-It is essential that we maintain a vital connection with God through personal interaction with Him. Prayer, reading His word, praise and worship – these all help us get to know Him and become more like Him.
-If there is a love deficit in our love bank, it is because we have not gone to the source of love. We need daily refills in order to fulfill our obligation to love others.
-In actuality, love for others should not be viewed as something we have to do, but it should flow as naturally from us as water flows from a spring. We must never allow the spring to dry up through neglecting our relationship with God through Jesus. Neglect, laziness, and apathy will result in a dry spring that cannot give anything to anybody. Things like bitterness and unforgiveness will poison the spring, actually harming those we come in contact with.
-We need to stay connected to the pure source of love and life, Jesus Christ.
V.19 indicates that we can love because he first loved us. Not only does God’s love give us an obligation to love others, but it gives us the ability to do so. Again, it is not something we come up with on our own, but it is the HS living in us that produces the fruit of love. In Romans 5:5 Paul says that “God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.”
-We can’t do it on our own! We might be able to love those who love us and who treat us nicely, but how will we love those who need it most, but have not even learned to be civil to other people? Some people are hurtful because of the hurt and pain they have experienced in their lives. How will you get past that defensive wall they have surrounded themselves with? It is a wall that only love can conquer.
-I’ve pondered the meaning of the Scripture in Proverbs 18:19: “A brother offended is harder to win than a strong city….” How do you win someone who has been offended? Well, how would you win a strong city? If you had a large army and clever tactics, you might conquer a strong city, but I don’t think that is what this means. I suppose it speaks of the effort that is required to make things right after you have offended someone. You must prove yourself and earn their trust again. I believe the greatest way to win someone who has been offended by abuse, neglect, or anything else is to love and accept them unconditionally.
-The only way we can do that is with God’s help. God offers His help to us through a personal relationship with Him, receiving what Jesus did on the cross for us. As verse 10 says, He became an atoning sacrifice for our sins. This is why we are able to love, because the sin and turmoil that kept us from being able to love has been removed. And in its place is a love relationship with Jesus that He initiated. We love because He first loved us. We love because we personally know the God, whose nature it is to love. V.18: “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.”
TS: Finally, who exactly are we to love?
IV. The Recipients of our Love (19-21) We can love God & Man
A. God- We are returning God’s love back to Him from our hearts. We were not capable of loving God before He found us and placed His love upon us and in us. However, our response to such a wonderful loving Father is to love Him back.
B. Other Believers- John says that if we cannot love our brother, whom we can see, then we cannot love God, whom we cannot see? Believers should be able to love one another, because of what the Lord has done in each of us. Granted, there are times when we have personality clashes, have bad days, wake up grouchy, say the wrong thing, etc. In spite of these, we still must love one another. This may involve forgiving other Christians when they are jerks. This may also involve asking others to forgive us when we are jerks. Hopefully, we will allow the Lord to help us avoid “jerky” behavior, since He is not the source of that.
C. Those Yet-to-be-found- If you were here last Sunday night, you were reminded how much lost people matter to God. Jesus gave 3 parables about something that was lost: the lost coin, the lost sheep, and the lost son. In each story, something valuable wound up missing. It mattered so much that it warranted an all-out search. After finding what was lost, there was a great celebration! Lost people matter to God, and they must matter to us. We must learn to love those who have not yet been found. Why? Because when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6). When we could not help ourselves, God helped us. That is how we must love those who have not yet received Christ as their savior. And we can love them that way, because God loves them that way and He lives in us. He will help us love those who are lost. You’ve never met anyone who did not matter to God. How do I know that? Because every person matters to God. We can and must let Him love others through us.
Conclusion: As we close, we are able to love all people, because God was able to love us with no strings attached. God’s love has given us what we need to be able to love Him and other people. The fact that we must love others is very clear. V.21 says, “Whoever loves God must also love his brother.” However, we have the power to love people, because God has given us the power of His love. He is the source of love. If we stay connected to the source, then there is no person in this world that we cannot love.
How are you doing in the “loving people” business? Do you love others enough to get involved in their lives and let them know there is hope and that someone cares about them? If you find yourself unable to love certain people, it is possible that your connection to Jesus, the source of love, needs some work. One of the best ways to love God is to love those whom He has created. Maybe you would say, “I could use some help in this area. I want God to help me love Him and other people. If you need to strengthen your relationship with the Lord this morning, and ask Him for more of His love to flow through your life, I urge you to talk to Him and tell Him so. If that is you, you are welcome to come up front and pray, and I would love to pray with you. You can come to love the Lord, your spouse, your family, friends, neighbors, and even your enemies better and deeper than you ever thought possible. God is love. Won’t you connect with the source in a greater way today as we pray.
