Trinity Baptist Church September 9, 2002
Will God meet your deepest needs?
God’s love has your name on it
1 John 4:9-11
Most of you know the story, but I love it, so I’ll tell it again. It’s the one about the SS teacher who was trying to illustrate a story. She asked, "Kids, what’s brown and furry and has a long tail and runs up and down in trees?" Little Johnny ventured a guess. "Well, I know the answer is Jesus, but it sure sounds like a squirrel to me!!"
When it comes to the having the right answers, Christians usually have it down. We might look at the title of our new series, "Will God meet your deepest needs?" and say, "Silly question! Of course!" Others of you may think I’m going off the deep end of heresy like a TV preacher who promises God will make you rich and perfectly healthy. When it comes to the issue of needs, Christians are typically at one extreme or the other. Either God is a vending machine kind of God who is just waiting to give us everything we want, or we believe God can and will meet our needs -- after all He’s promised to in Scripture -- but we’ve never really gone deep enough to experience that.
When it comes to The business of your "needs" we can’t skate past that word deepest. The question is whether God can and will meet our deepest needs. I’ll tell you as we begin: At the end of your search to satisfy the most critical needs of your life, there will stand the God Who loves you. Some of us wander for years, even decades, looking in all the wrong places, eating from the garbage cans of life, trying to satisfy appetites that refuse to be filled. We’re looking for love, satisfaction and contentment, chasing security, significance and forgiveness.
And the God Who is there --- remains --- waiting patiently in line, until at last, we recognize that, like Psalm 73:25 says, Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. Psalm 73:25
That’s a person whose discovered that God is the business of satisfying the deepest needs of our hearts.
There have been plenty of times in my life when I’ve heard verses like that and said to myself, "that’s living on a mystical plane, a pie-in-the-sky kind of experience, where few people live". But biblically it’s an intentional, chosen place we come to when we concede there really is nothing that will satisfy the aching emptiness of our hearts except a vital relationship with God Himself.
So, What’s a need? If we’re not careful, we slip all kinds of things into the category of need and we become like little children, demanding that every desire and appetite and lust and love be satisfied; otherwise our "needs" aren’t being met. That lie has decimated more marriages than we could count. There are of course, real physical needs, like food and shelter. But we need to explore the ones which go much deeper. The ones that keep us awake at night. They’re universal and genuine needs of the heart which will drive us our whole lives.
A need is a lack of something required for well-being; a need drives us onward, sometimes when we’re not even cognizant of it, to find its fulfillment.
Why are these needs such motivating factors?
Because they reflect who we are as human beings. They reflect how God made us: to be related to Him. Augustine said "The heart of man is restless, Oh God, until it rests in You." Pascal said, "there is a God-shaped vacuum in every heart that only God can fill."
These needs mirror the separation that came between God and man through man’s sin.
What happens if real needs go unmet?
- restlessness, - anxiety, - self-centeredness,
- unhealthy relationships. In other words, we move on and on, looking, struggling to meet the needs in our own self-willed ways.
I’d like to begin today with the area love. The urgent need of newborns is a need we never lose. It’s the need to be loved. We might hide it and not admit to it as adults, but we testify to it with every relationship we move into. But John Eldredge says, "the real issue: the buried and burning question in the heart of everyone: God, do YOU really care for me, God?"
When it comes to the needs of the heart, that’s where we have to begin! Scripture overflows with evidence that God does in reality, love you.
In our passage we look at two facets of God’s love; then we hear John describe what must be our response to God’s great love. First,
1. God’s love for you defines Him. (4:7-11)
Verse 7 and the final words of verse 8 form one of the most profound statements in all of Scripture. John’s declaration is tough for us to grasp and believe. First, in verse 7, love is from God; then verse 8 ends with: God is love. When we think of the expanse and complexity of the universe, when we think of the long history of man since creation, when we think of the suffering that goes on, we ask: how can there be a God who really loves and cares about us? But John insists without hesitation, God is love. The God of the Bible declares Himself not only to be the Omnipotent Creator, but also as the very Personal God as well.
We realize in what John says that God is not too great to be bothered with our puny little lives, instead He is so great that He’s actually interested in every one of us personally.
In verse 7, John urges love to be the mark of our lives because love is from God; the phrase means God is love’s source. If it’s authentic love you’re looking for, you will find it in a single location.
But then God also wants us to know He defines Himself by love. Just like you can’t find a source for love apart from God, you’ll never understand the beauty of God’s character outside of the element of His love. Integral to His majestic Being is His love. His love for you is termed in the Greek NT, agape. Agape is a relentless and sacrificial committed love, dedicated to the well-being of the people God loves. To know God is to begin to experience that sort of love. God defines Himself by it.
Second,
2. God’s love for you moves Him. (4:9-10, 13, 14)
You heard about the old farmer whose friend said about him: "That Fred -- he loves His wife so much, he almost tells her!"
One of the huge differences between the kind of love we offer each other and God’s love is His moves Him to act. Verse 9 reinforces that the proof, the evidence of God’s relentless love for people is the appearance of God’s Son from heaven. John explains that motivation more in verse 10: he says, it’s not that we loved God.
Christ’s coming had zero to do with God seeing and responding to some signal of love from us. You and I had no love for God. But, verse 10 says again, He loved us. Therefore He moved. Christ’s sacrificial blood-offering for sin -- propitiation -- grew out of God’s relentless, pursuing, giving, grace-driven love. Love meant God could not leave us as we were. With no reciprocation, with no possibility of reciprocation or response from us, He loved us. You and I owed a staggering debt that none of us could ever pay. And Jesus paid.
From God’s vantage point, you were worth the life of His only Son. None of us could ever clean up our acts. Because sin isn’t just a behavior problem, it’s an identity problem. We were diseased and marked by sin.
But --- Romans 5:8, While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. John 3:16, For God so loved the world?. 1 John 2:2, He Himself -- Jesus -- is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only but for the sins of the whole world.
God’s purpose wasn’t simply to rescue us from sin: He proposed to take dead people and make them alive. The greatest need you’ve ever had was a solution to death. And Jesus came into the world, with a corner on the market of eternal life. Christ’s bottom-line purpose in loving us wasn’t just to die, but to offer Life to everyone who would believe in Him.
John says there’s a logical reaction after coming to know God’s love in Christ:
3. God’s love for you requires your response. (4:11-13, 15-21)
The conclusion of John’s reasoning comes in verse 19. We love, John says, because He first loved us. The NT says there are two responses to being loved by God. The most reasonable response is to love Him in return. Jesus said, the highest calling God puts on your life is that you love the Lord your God with all your mind and heart and soul and strength. The second response is that we love other people, especially other Christians.
But in case we need it: (and we do), he answers a question: Why should I respond to God’s love? A first reason is in verse 11: He says, if you’re a receiver, be a giver.
If God so loved us [and He has], then we ought also to love one another. God doesn’t ask us to invent love on our own, He simply requires us to give to others what He gave and gives us. His great objective is propagating, or multiplying His love through you.
The second reason is in verse 12: God’s love in you exhibits God’s reality to people. John says, No one has seen God. The finest apologetic you have available is to display God in loving people. He describes the need for love to be perfected in us: part of growing up as Christians is both experiencing and giving on the love of God.
Most compelling reason: Love is the mark of your new identity. Verses 7 and 8 and 20 and 21. When you put your trust in Jesus Christ, love became your heritage. It is just as twisted to say, "I believe in Jesus but I don?t believe He’s God’s Son," as it is to say, "I believe in Jesus, but I won’t engage in loving relationships with my brothers and sisters in Christ."
John says, how can you claim to know the God of love?
Respond. God’s love is kind of like an electrical current. You don’t just receive it, you put it to work. The reason many of us are still looking for ways to get our love need met is because we don’t let God’s love flow through us.
So, how can you experience God’s love?
Receive His love.
Let Him love you. If you’ve never put your faith in Jesus, for the forgiveness of your sin, receive God?s offer of forgiveness and eternal life today. You?ll never understand love until you know Christ. Do that today.
But you may be a Christian who also needs to let God love you. Take a passage like this one and let it fill your mind and heart. Memorize God’s promises and declarations of love for you. Meditate on them. Let the Truth about God replace the lies you bought into previously. Sit in God’s presence with an open Bible and revel in God’s love for you. Just sit still and be with Him. Tell Him your deepest needs. And let Him love you.
Let others love you.
Most of us will need the welcoming, unconditional love of other Christians before we will fully believe God?s love. But we resist letting other Christians into our lives. I doubt I would ever have believed God loved me, if Christians hadn’t shown me what agape love looked like. One of the first people who did that is going to speak here at the end of the month. If you’re distant, if you’re disconnected from Christians, you need to connect. You need a 1-1 relationship with someone, or be in a group or small fellowship where you can open your heart and let others minister Christ’s love to you.
Respond to Him as a Person.
God is not a force, He is a person who tells you what He is like through His Word, by His Spirit in you, and through His people.
Determine to know Him deeply. Stop being content with a passing acquaintance with God. You can’t have a significant love relationship with someone you barely know. Take the Psalms and other Scripture and ask God to show you what He’s like. You will have to commit some time to the relationship. Take Him into everyday life with you.
Choose to obey Him. Jesus said, If you love Me, you will obey My commandments. You can grow in experiencing God’s love by growing in obedience. As God shows you specifics in His Word, ask Him to put you on the path of obedience.
Reflect His love by intentionally connecting. I need to camp on this for a minute. We Americans aren’t very good connectors. And so, we American Christians don?t connect well beyond our large fellowship interaction. We’ve got this individualistic thing going that makes us think we can take or leave deeper levels of fellowship, we can take or leave Bible Studies like Discovery, we can pretty much do our own little Christian thing over in the corner of our own living room. That’s the way we try to grow as believers. Not to connect means love is not my lifestyle. Connecting means opening my heart, it means looking out for needs in other peoples’ lives, it means calling people up, it means getting them over, it means regularly and faithfully sharing my heart, my table, my home, my resources to encourage and challenge and love other Christians.
The elders and I and our wives made a decision a few weeks back. We added another meeting to our monthly calendars. Because we needed something more to do? No. The meeting is for us as men and women to get together once a month, to share together, to love, to pray and think, to cry and laugh, just to share life with each other. We can’t know each other well and lead well together if we don’t. We’re going to keep doing the same kind of thing in Discovery and elsewhere. Why? Because that’s what love looks like. Love is connection. It just doesn’t happen with a sweet smile and "hi, how are you?" on Sunday morning. It means time to share life. You and I can’t do that with 150 people. But I can do it with a few. And so can you. But you?ve got to start connecting. If you’re a Lone Ranger Christian, you’re moving in the wrong direction when it comes to experiencing God’s love.
The God Who is there designed you in such a way that He alone can meet your deepest needs. And the need of love is basic and fundamental. God’s love is more than enough to fill your heart up to overflowing. Would you today respond to His Love?
