He is Love

Anthony W. Franklin

Easter: He is/We are • Sermon • Submitted 16 days ago • Presented 19 days ago

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Scripture: 1 John 4:7-21

1 John 4:7–21 NIV

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 This is how we know that we live in him and he in us: 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 them and they 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 them. 17 This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment: In this world we are like Jesus. 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 Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. 21 And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.

4/28/2024

Order of Service:

Announcements

Ministry Celebration

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Week 4: Ministry Celebration

Michele Lloyd sharing about Emmaus Walk

Opening Prayer:

Heavenly Father, we welcome You here among us today. We are filled with gratitude for the love You give to us. Fill us with Your Holy Spirit and shape us to love like Your Son Jesus as we worship You today. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

He is Love

God is Love

As we focus on learning about Jesus to discover who He is shaping us to be, I hope you’ve noticed that everything seems to originate from Him.

1. Jesus is the light we are called to reflect to others.

2. Jesus is the purity that we are called to live in.

3. Jesus is the truth that we can trust above everything else, and He calls us to be faithful like Him.

Today, we read that He is love as well.

The world loves to hear, “God is love.” But what does that mean?

We have a tendency, and we have all been guilty at one point or another, of using that phrase to justify whatever we wanted it to mean. If God is love, anything that makes me feel good must be from God.

Like those merchants in the Temple, people make a living from merchandise, clothing, and cups that say “____” is proof that God loves us, where we fill in the blank with our favorite food, drink, or any activity we choose to live for. Ultimately, something that could have been a prayer of gratitude for God’s provision can become an idol that takes God’s place in our lives. All because of one phrase, “God is love.”

We have two primary struggles with this phrase. First, it is so short that it needs more depth. We use it in places to grab the attention of people passing by. It is not a thing to study. It is a statement used to grab attention and send people on their way, like a billboard or a catchy saying on a tombstone. This statement is the kind of answer someone would give if asked to describe God using only one word. Nothing is inherently wrong with doing that, but if that is all you get to know about God, You won’t know God. It is far too vague.

The other, perhaps more significant, problem with this phrase is that we do not know what love is. We battle about the word truth in our culture today, but we lost the word love centuries ago. We do not know the biblical word agape or have many good examples to model it. If God is love, and we don’t know what love is, then we don’t know who God is.

Thankfully, John did not have that problem. He had Jesus Himself, the source and definition of love in His life. Jesus is the perfect example of love, and He calls us to share the love we receive from Him.

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Born From Above

Let us love one another. From the beginning to the end of this letter, John pleads with the church to love each other. He wrote to us with a passion born from personal experience and revelation, not education. It is difficult to tell from our English translations, but John’s writings, including his gospel, letters, and Revelation, all use everyday language.

John wrote like a blue-collar worker. Becoming an apostle did not change that. Does that mean he watered down the gospel to make it more accessible to everyone else? No. John used more straightforward imagery and symbols to teach who Jesus was to reach different people differently than Paul, who used more complicated language. He communicated the same mind-blowing, life-changing truth, and following Jesus’s teaching, he pointed to the foundation of all obedience to God as ‘love’.

John tells us that to understand this love, we must first understand that love comes from God. It does not grow naturally out of us. It is not found naturally in the world. Yes, some things look like love all around us, but the kind of love Jesus commands us to give God and each other is something out of this world. It might as well be Martian or from some faraway alien planet. This kind of love we call agape, the word the NT uses in this command, and the more we learn about it, the more we question if it is even humanly possible to do.

John understood and experienced that same question. In his time with Jesus, he struggled to love like Jesus. What did he conclude? Only someone born of God can love like God. Only a child of God can love like God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.

As John wrote these verses, I wonder if he remembered the conversation between Jesus and the Pharisee Nicodemus. Rather than making God’s commands seem sensible, Jesus told this expert in the law that he couldn’t live right until he had been born again, born from above. John struggled with this, even though John had Jesus with him. Only after he had watched Jesus, baptized with the Holy Spirit, serving in the power of the Spirit, giving up His life with the love of God, and rising from the dead by that same power did John even get a picture of what love looked like. Then, at Pentecost, that same Holy Spirit filled him, giving John a spiritual birth. Only then could John feel what it was like to love like Jesus.

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Loving with God’s Love

Deuteronomy 25 describes how the Hebrews were to carry out justice in God’s kingdom, and verse 4 suddenly says, “Don’t muzzle the ox while it is treading out the grain.” Paul later used that verse in his letters as an example of how churches should support the missionary efforts of the early church leaders. Jesus also used similar examples of how we treat our farm animals as examples of our lowest expectations in treating one another. For example, if we would try to rescue a donkey that had fallen in a well on the Sabbath, we certainly should do the same for a fellow human being.

The lesson of the ox, though, is about the ability to serve. In short, you cannot give what you do not have. It sounds simple enough. You cannot expect a car to run if you don’t fill it with gas or charge the battery. You cannot expect a work animal to work at full capacity first to earn the food it needs to do the work. I have even heard that well-fed cats make better hunters than those left to thrive on their own. It is the way things work. Without fuel, things don’t work.

Yet, we often pretend or expect to give and work spiritually without being filled. I suppose God Himself might be able to pull that off, but even Jesus made sure he was spiritually fed before going to work. Yes, he withdrew from the crowds to pray multiple times throughout his ministry, but it all started with a 40-day retreat to be fed spiritually by God. He didn’t start anything until after being filled Himself. If Jesus required spiritual sustenance to love God and others, how much more do you and I?

John repeatedly tells us we should not manufacture or create love to share with others. We are to take what Jesus has given us and share it with others. We never have to worry about running out because we know where the source of love is. However, if we refuse to return regularly to refill ourselves, we will run out. We can starve spiritually, right outside the bakery of the bread of life, simply because we refused to go in and ask for help.

Often, the harder we try to love, the more trying we become because our human love always asks for something in return. Only God’s love, passed through us, gives unconditionally, and we cannot pass on something we are not receiving ourselves. So feed your ox, feed your cats, rescue your donkey, and get to know Jesus and His love before you march off trying to love like Him.

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True Love

Sharing the love of Jesus means sharing Jesus Himself with others.

We usually drift between two extremes when trying to love others like Jesus. On the one hand, we can be overly focused on getting a particular response from others. We may choose who to love, how to love them, and when and where to share that love based on getting a specific response from them. We want them to pray a particular prayer, claim Jesus as their Lord and Savior, or behave better.

I remember working at a Chrysalis youth retreat several years ago, far from here, where a young man went on this retreat as a punishment for misbehaving at school. The leaders found this out quickly, and for two days, everyone around him tried to fix this situation and get him to respond like the other students. He probably thought everyone acted like aliens and was very uncomfortable. They were sincere in their love and sincerely wanted to see something happen to him, and they were not going to quit until they got what they wanted.

Finally, on the last day, as the final pastor was preaching a sermon about allowing the Holy Spirit to work through us, he stopped in the middle of his message and started a conversation with the young man in the room full of people. He acknowledged that this situation was not ideal and told him our whole purpose was to give him Jesus. Period. He could do with that whatever he wanted to do. There was no altar call or significant conversion that happened in the room that day, but the walls we had built around this young man, trying to goad him into a specific response, came down, and he was free to see Jesus for Who Jesus truly was, not for who we were trying to make him be.

On the other hand, sometimes we love others by dropping something at the doorstep and running away. It is easier to feed people physical food than to share spiritual food with them. While one example is sometimes called more “evangelical” than the other, both attempts at loving others fail for the same reason. We don’t love them like Jesus loves us if we fail to give them Jesus. Not the lifestyle or a particular experience. Jesus Himself. We will not know how to share Jesus Himself with them if we try to do that without the direction and empowerment of Jesus through His Holy Spirit. If you want to love others like Jesus, give them Jesus.

God is love, and we love because He loved us first.

So, have you fed your ox today?

How is your spiritual gas tank?

Is it time to return to Jesus for a refill?

When you think of the people God has put in your life who need love like Jesus, what do you need to ask Jesus to give you to take to them?

How can you ask Jesus for guidance in sharing His love through you so they can recognize and receive Him in a way that fills them to overflowing?

Closing Prayer

Heavenly Father, we only exist because You created us from the dirt and dust and breathed life into us. We only know love because You gave us the picture of love in Jesus Christ. We only know how to receive that love because You patiently teach us to know You more daily. You are always right there, waiting for us, with more than we can hold ourselves, and that is how You teach us to share Your love with others. Lord Jesus, we are so forever in Your debt that the debts others owe us look meaningless. Teach us to love like you. Give us the love to share with others. Give us Your Holy Spirit of Faith and Trust in Your eternal provision so we can love You faithfully and share Your love with everyone we meet. In Jesus’ name. Amen.