Chico Alliance Church
Pastor David Welch
Impossible Love Part 6
INTRODUCTION
We have examined the characteristics of genuine love like the pedals on a beautiful rose. Whatever does not match the lofty descriptions revealed by Scripture falls short of the real thing. We may call it love but without the accompanying characterizes is simply is not genuine love. The short version:
Love is a desire and decision to meaningfully connect with others
evidenced by sacrificial deeds.
1 Corinthians 13 outlines an impossible love.
Romans 12-15 holds up an unhypocritical love.
I. Terms of Endearment
II. A better way to go
1. Inadequate love
2. Humanly impossible love from 1 Corinthians 13
3. Divinely imparted love
a) Realize His Unimaginable Love
(1) God is love
The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. 1 John 4:8
We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. 1 John 4:16
God always loves. It is His nature to desire and decide to connect with us.Everything he does is motivated by love.
(2) Love comes from God and is taught by God.
In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation (satisfactory payment) for our sins…We love, because He first loved us. 1 John 10,19
Peace be to the brethren, and love with faith, from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Ephes. 6:23
God’s love motivates and is the basis of our capacity to love.
God created us with the capacity and the inclination to connect with Him and others.
Because we were created in the image of God who is love, love is at the core of human experience. Even the secular “experts” admit that the core longing of man is to love and be loved. The fall twisted that desire to love and serve others into self-love. Only through a supernatural transformation can that diminished capacity to love God and others be restored to its original capacity.
Now as to the love of the brethren, you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves are continually taught by God to love one another 1 Thess 4:9-12
Paul doesn’t specify just how God teaches us. He is active in our learning process. Even though His love indwells us, there is a continual learning and growing process. Since love is so humanly impossible, it is obviously a God thing.
For God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power and love and discipline (self-control).
Since you have in obedience to the truth purified your souls for a sincere love of the brethren, fervently love one another from the heart, for you have been born again not of seed which is perishable but imperishable, that is, through the living and abiding word of God. 1 Peter 1:22-23
When we respond to the truth of the word of God there is a new birth. The old heart, no longer capable of genuinely loving God or others, is purified and renewed with a new capacity to love like God. A new desire to meaningfully connect with others becomes instilled in the new believer.
Peter urges us to then demonstrate this heart change by actually loving one another.
Love is because of God. Love is from God.
hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out (spilled, gushed out – perfect tense verb indicating a past action with continuing results i.e. poured out and still there!) within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. Rom 5:8
At the moment of salvation, God filled our empty relational reservoir with his undiminished love. That includes both the personal realization of it and the practical release of it. Within every believer is a reservoir of God’s love waiting to be released by the Holy Spirit. Jesus said out of your inner most being will flow rivers of living water by the Holy Spirit. Selfishness blocks the flow of the rivers. Our damaged soul fails to personally perceive the wonder of His love for us and realize the satisfaction of sharing that love with others. We make the choice to share His love or squelch it but the desire is there. Sickness blocks desire. Overindulgence blocks desire.
(3) Love for God and others is the central point of the entire Bible.
And He said to him, " 'YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND.' "This is the great and foremost commandment. "The second is like it, 'YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.' "On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets." Matthew 22:37-40
Let all that you do be done in love. 1 Cor. 16:14
They will know you are my disciples by your love for one another. John 15
If, however, you are fulfilling the royal law according to the Scripture, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself," you are doing well. James 2:8
Is meaningfully connecting with others our central focus?
(4) Love is the result of surrender to work of the Holy Spirit
“The fruit of the Spirit is love…” Gal 5:22
When we walk by the direction and power of the Spirit, we love. The self-centered lust of the flesh automatically disappears when we walk by the Spirit. Use any failure to genuinely love as a signal that you are not walking by the Spirit. You are trying to function by the energy of the flesh. Remember, living by the flesh is like trying to run the car off the battery. Failure to love indicates that you got is connected from the alternator or the water is low in the battery and can not longer hold a charge.
You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified? This is the only thing I want to find out from you: did you receive the Spirit by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? Did you suffer so many things in vain—if indeed it was in vain? So then, does He who provides you with the Spirit and works miracles among you, do it by the works of the Law, or by hearing with faith? Galatians 3:1-5
Love is the natural result of walking by the Spirit. Walking by the Spirit comes by active trust in God not ourselves to produce the impossible in us on the basis of His promise.
(5) The body teaches us and motivates us to love
The Bible also indicates that we learn to increase in love from one another.
But you followed my teaching, conduct, purpose, faith, patience, love, perseverance, persecutions, and sufferings, 1 Tim 3:10-11
and let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more, as you see the day drawing near.
Hebrews 10:21
Not only do other body members teach us to love by encouragement but through continual prayers for our increased love (Paul prayed continually that they would increase in love.
(6) Love may continually grow and increase
Now may our God and Father Himself and Jesus our Lord direct our way to you; and may the Lord cause you to increase and abound in love for one another, and for all men, just as we also do for you; so that He may establish your hearts unblamable in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all His saints. 1 Thess 3:11-13
Now as to the love of the brethren, you have no need for anyone to write to you, for you yourselves are taught by God to love one another; for indeed you do practice it toward all the brethren who are in all Macedonia. But we urge you, brethren, to excel still more, 1 Thes. 4:9-10
Desires can get stronger. Growing in love has to do with the intensity of desire as well as the increase in deeds. We learn though words as well as witness. We learn through explanation as well as example.
(7) Love involves personal participation
God enables us to love by flooding our hearts with His love. God teaches us to love.
We learn love from the body. We also have a part in this love thing.
“Put on love which is the perfect bond of unity.” Col 3:14
But flee from these things (fleshly pursuits), you man of God; and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance and gentleness. 1 Tim. 6:11
Here is where we make a decision based on the desire of our heart to act. It is not passive. It has action built into it.
(8) Love for God leads to greater obedience to His word
Whoever keeps His word, in him the love of God has truly been perfected. By this we know that we are in Him: the one who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk in the same manner as He walked. 1 John 2:3-6
The more we love God the more we will voluntarily and enthusiastically keep His word.
The more we enthusiast connect to Him the greater desire to connect with others.
(9) Love is a protective shield
But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting anxiously for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to eternal life. Jude 1:20-21
But since we are of the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and as a helmet, the hope of salvation. 1 Thes. 5:8
God’s love is a shelter in a world that desires to destroy anything that is related to good and God’s kingdom. No matter what rages around us, we are assured that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ.
(10) Understanding God’s love for us and through us is the final step to God’s fullness
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God. Ephes. 3:14-19
b) Receive His unimaginable Love for you
Let us cry out to God for a fuller understanding of His love for us.
When we realize our cup is full of His eternally renewable love for us we wil freely reflect that love to others.
c) Reflect His unimaginable Love to others
We will know we are His children by His love for us. The world will know we are His children by our love for each other.
• Let us cry out to God for forgiveness.
• Let us cry out for significant healing in our soul that prevents us from releasing genuine love to those God brings into our circle of influence.
• Let us cry out for a new work in the very core of our souls that we may learn to fervently love one another from the heart.
Conclusion
The last days will be filled with those whose love has grown cold. People will be lovers of self more than lovers of God. Parents will be without natural affection. The consequences of a fleshly walk will be evident by deterioration in relationships. The church will lose its first love for God that will affect their love for each other. Carnality will result in internal fighting and disputes and jealousy. Rather than assemble more often, which the Bible instructs us to do as the end draws nearer, fleshly Christians isolate from one another. Isolation is the desire of the flesh not the Spirit. God created us for fellowship and meaningful connection. The flesh does like being around people because of continual exposure for what it is – selfish. Those in the flesh will be miserable around people because keeps getting challenged. Love longs to touch the needs of people.
Lack of encouragement by the truth will bring about a hardness of heart. The result will be a failure to reflect a true picture of the God of love to a world that no longer finds love at home or in the church. Much of our interaction is mere tolerance and politeness. We no longer desire meaningful connection with the entire body of Christ. We pick and choose whom we will significantly relate to based on how comfortable they make ME feel or what they can do for me. We choose to relate to people based on a comfort or discomfort level. This, my friends, is not genuine love. This is hypocritical love and God tells us to love WITHOUT hypocrisy. This love seems impossible but God tells us that with Him all things are possible even loving our enemies. Those who do demonstrate genuine love, I urge you to cry out to God that you may excel even more. For the more we demonstrate genuine love the more the world will realize that God is in our midst.
