Subject: The Love Of God
Scripture Reading: I John 4: 8b
I John 4:8 tells us that God is love. But what is love?
Maybe you heard about the guy who fell in love with an opera singer. He hardly knew her, since his only view of the singer was through binoculars - from the third balcony. He was convinced he could live “happily ever after” married to a voice like that. He scarcely noticed that she was considerably older than he. Nor did he care that she walked with a limp. Her mezzo-soprano voice would take them through whatever might come. After a whirlwind romance and a hurry-up ceremony, they were off for their honeymoon.
She began to prepare for their first night together. As he watched, his chin dropped to his chest. She plucked out her glass eye and plopped it into a container on the night-stand. She pulled off her wig, ripped off her false eyelashes, yanked out her dentures, unstrapped her artificial leg, and smiled at him as she slipped off her glasses that hid her hearing aid. Stunned and horrified, he gasped, Sing Baby Sing! sing, sing, SING!”
Love is probably the most misunderstood word in the world. Part of the problem is that we use this one word to describe a lot of things. Therefore we water it down.
We say, I love my wife, I love New York, I love seafood, I love to hunt, I love to shop, I love you, I love to have my back scratched. And we use the word love in so many different ways that it literally has lost it meaning.
It is difficult to give or receive love when you don’t even understand what it is. So before we can talk about the love of God, I need to clear us a couple misconceptions about love.
First of all, most people think that love is a feeling A sentimental knot in the pit of your stomach, or a quiver in your liver, or an ocean of emotion. And it is true that love does produce feelings and some very powerful feelings. But love is more than a feeling.
Second, many people think that love is uncontrollable.
Have you ever heard anyone say, I fell in love as if they tripped and couldn’t stop themselves? You see we just assume that love can’t be controlled. ,How many times do young people and some older ones say; I just can’t help myself, “I’m in love, or I can’t help it I love him/her. Or maybe the opposite, I can’t help it I don’t love him/her anymore.
We talk as if love is uncontrollable. But the Bible tells us that love is controllable, Jesus commanded that we love one another. His words indicate that we have control over who we love and who we don’t love.
But what is love?
You see our word for love includes many different rela-tionships and aspects depending on the use. That is why it is crucial to define exactly what we mean by love before talking about the love God has for us.
In Greek, the lan-guage in which the New Testament was written, there are three words for love.
1st, Phileo means brotherly love, the affection between family or friends.
2nd, Eros refers to romantic or sexual love.
However the word used for God’s love, is agape, a term absolutely distinct from the words used to describe human relations-. It is the perfect, unfathomable, unconditional love of God. It refers to a sacrificial love. It is completely unselfish, forgiving , and dedicated to your complete welfare.
Now on our own we can not generate or experience this kind of love, it can only come from God. This is the word that John uses when He said in I John 4: 8 God is love. You see, God does not just do loving acts, His whole being is love! His whole essence is love! God’s love is eternal and consistent, in fact the truth of the matter is God has always loved you, and He always will love you.
As P.P. Bliss wrote in the song that we just sang a few moments ago, Tho’ I forget him and wander away, still he does love me wherever I stray.
Jeremiah 31:3 tells us that God loves us with an everlasting love. “The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love:”
Listen God’s love is not dependent upon us loving Him in return. Because Paul tells us in Romans 5:8 that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
God’s love is a totally giving love.
Oh listen, whoever you may be today, in your highest joy, or in your darkest hour, God Loves You!
Now let me share with you 4 things about the love of God.
I. God’s Love Is Experienced Through Salvation.
Probably the best known verse in the Bible is John 3:16
16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’
John elaborated on this verse in his first epistle when he wrote in I John 4: 9 “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.”
When God sent His Son to this earth and then allowed Him to die in our place upon the Cross, God was demonstrating His love. The cross, was the ultimate sign of God’s love to a sinful world.
Oh, listen God loves you, even when you don’t feel that love, And He demonstrated that love by sending Jesus Christ to die for us, Even while we were still sinners. Over and over again God communicates His love through the Bible. God is love.
However, we can not experience that love at it’s fullest until we come and knee at the foot of the cross and confess that we are a sinner and ask Him to come into our lives as out Lord and Savior.
The second thing I want to share with you about the love of God is:
II. God’s Love For Each Of His Children Is Unique.
Did you know that God allows us to respond to him in our own uniqueness?
I use to worry that I didn’t feel the love of God like others did, or that I couldn’t respond to that love in the same way. But I have discovered that I am a unique child of God and so are you if you are a born again believer.
If you have raised more than one child you know that every child is different and responds to you in a different way.
Sometime ago I was talking to a pastor friend of mine, and we were talking about how children respond to their parents in love and he has two grown sons. The one is very emotion and will hug and kiss his dad when it is time to say good bye, the other will just stick out his hand and say, Goodbye dad.
But that dad said, in just the way He shakes my hand and give it that special squeeze I know that He loves me just as much as the one who hugs and kisses me.
What is it? They are both unique in their own way of showing their love. Oh, today, God’s love to me is unique. He knows just how to show me He loves me, and the wonderful thing about it is that God allows me to respond to Him in my own uniqueness.
III. God’s Love is Eternal
Oh, I wish I could get you to let this truth sink into your heart and mind God’s love is eternal. Now what do we mean when we say that God’s love is eternal?
1st, God’s love for you never had a beginning
God has always loved you. Before God ever made this world of ours, God loved you. Before the sun was ever turned on or the stars plugged in God loved you. God never began to love you or me.
Oh, there was a day in eternity past when God began to create, One day God began to redeem, But thank God He never had to begin to love. God is love, and God has always loved you and me, His love is eternal!
2nd, God’s love never pauses.
God’s love not only never had a beginning, but God’s love never pauses. He loves you without a pause. His love for you never has an intermission.
Time out is never called. It knows no recess, it knows no vacations,
It’s no wonder the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 8:
35 “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
37 Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.
38 For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
39 Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Oh, the truth of the matter is God loved you when you were in sin. He loved you when you didn’t do right, He loved you when you would not love Him back and turned my back on Him, and wanted your own way. He loved you when you strayed from Him. He loved you when you forgot to pray. He loved you that night that you wish you could erase and forget. Oh, He didn’t love what you did, but he loved you!
You say, but pastor, You don’t know what I have done! No I probably don’t, But I do know that God loves you today!
You can not go to the highest heights in the sky, but what the love of God will be there. Go to the depths of the sea, But God’s love will still be there.
Ask Jonah in the belly of the whale if God’s love ever pauses? Ask Peter on that night when He cursed and denied Christ if God’s love ever ceases? Ask the 3 Hebrew boys in the middle of the fiery furnace if God’s love ever takes a break.
Oh, listen today, you can not get away from the love of God.
Thank God His love never started, and thank God His love never pauses. But the eternal love of God also means that:
3. God’s love never ends!
There will never be a day when God will stop loving you. Oh, you may choose to not trust Christ as your Savior, and die and go to Hell, but God will still love you.
You see, the reason why people go to Hell is not that God stops loving them, but that they refuse to trust Jesus Christ as Savior, let God remove the quilt and sin from their lives. And when we refuse to allow God to come into our hearts by faith, and we die in our sin, then we must pay for all eternity for our stubbornness.
But even in Hell while you are suffering, for eternity, God will still love you.
And that brings me to the fourth thing I want to share with you about the love of God:
IV. God Spells Love S-A-C-R-I-F-I-C-E
You’ve probably heard about people who risked their lives to save others, maybe in a fire or a crash. At a crucial moment, they disre-garded their own safety and future to give someone else a chance at life. Stories like these can make you say, Now that’s love.
Jesus said something similar in John 15:13: “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.”
But we were not the friends of God, we were sinners, and Paul tells us that it is a rare thing for a person to die for righteous person, but Christ died for us when we were sinners, the enemies of God. For a person to be willing to die for a friend takes a great deal of love, but for a person to be willing to die for an enemy takes sacrificial love.
That’s the kind of love Jesus demonstrated when He came to earth to die for your sins. He gave up everything for a time on your behalf, forgoing the honor and glory that are His and became a human being. God in the flesh, fully God and fully man.
Philippians 2:6-8 describes His complete personal sacrifice. “Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: 7But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: 8And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.”
Why did He go through all of that for you? He did it to get rid of the one thing that sepa-rates you from the love of God and keeps you from loving Him sin. Anything in your life that is displeasing to God and contrary to His Word, God calls sin, and all of us are born with sin already in our hearts. (Romans 3:23)
Sin is the big love-blocker, and only some-one without sin can remove it from you. That Someone is Jesus Christ, the sinless Son of God. He literally took your place by taking your punishment.
When you believe that He did this for you, placing your faith in Him as your Savior, He wipes away every ounce of guilt and wrongdoing. You are covered by His blood and filled with His love. None of us deserve God’s grace. In fact at our worst we are reprobate sinners, rebelling against God’s purpose for our lives.
At our best we stumble and fall, and our lives seem to be a continual cycle of failure. And when we are the most aware of our shortcomings, we are also painfully aware of our undeserving. And Yet God loves us, and it is our sinfulness that places us in the position to receive His love and grace.
We can never earn God’s grace and love, but He wants to freely give it to us and express His love for us, if we will just humble ourselves before Him and confess that we are a sinner and need Him in our lives.
Oh, today, there is no one who loves you like God loves you! The question is, have you accepted His love for you by letting Him take control of your life and giving you eternal life?
