OUR GOD IS A GOD OF LOVE

THINK OF THOSE THAT NEED OUR HELP

I want to look at the characteristics of God. This blog has a three-fold purpose

1. Focus our attention on the awesomeness of the God of the Bible
2. To help us learn more about God so that our relationship with him is deepened.
3. To help us more accurately reflect God to the world in which we live.

Some of you are old enough to remember the Beatles.  You may even remember that one of their hit songs was entitled ‘All you need is love.’  I once heard a song that had the line ‘The Beatles sang all you need is love and then they broke up.’  Where they wrong when they sang ‘all you need is love’?  The word ‘love’ is used very freely today.  It is used to speak of everything from a personal taste to lust.  In fact the word ‘love’ has been cheapened and stripped of any real meaning by being used so freely and readily.  Steve Turner a Christian poet writes how ‘love was once many splendid colours but now is shown in techno-colour’ and how ‘they have stolen away the only word he had to say how he felt.’  That is what has happened to ‘love.’  It has been cheapened, devalued and degraded by the world in which we live.  So in this post I thought it would be good for us to begin again with the statement ‘God is a God of Love.’

We often say ‘God is love’ but what do we mean by that statement?  We say ‘God loves us’ but how does he loves?  We are often challenged to show God’s love to the world but how do we do that?  I hope this sermon will help answer those questions.

Read 1 John 4.7-21.  We will look at this passage under three headings 

God is Love

God is Loving

Reflecting God’s Love.

God is Love – At the end of verse 8 and in verse 16 John states ‘God is Love.  John states very succinctly that God’s very nature is love.  He does not say God loves, which he does, but that God is love.  John wants us to understand that at the very core of God is Love.  Therefore every action of God is love and every word of God is love.  God creates in love.  He acts in love.  He speaks in love.  He judges in love.  He rules in love.  Every activity of God is determined and directed by love.  He can act in no other way than in a loving way.  Every one of his activities is motivated by love.  All that God does and all God says is an expression of his nature – which John says is love.

God’s love is an exercise of his goodness, of his grace and of his generosity.  God is love and therefore his desire and his delight is to express that love.  He expresses that love in and for us.  His love is expressed towards us – sinners.  His love is expressed in grace and mercy.  His love is deep and it is constant.  In the OT when Moses asked God to allow him to see God (Exodus 33) God said to him.  ‘I will hide you in a cleft in the rock and I will pass before you and declare my name before you.’  When you read the passage you realise that what God revealed to Moses was this – steadfast love (hesed emet).  His revelation to Moses was that He, God, was love. 

I read the other day that a psychiatrist said that the most important thing in parenting was to be ‘consistent in love’.  That is God – he is constant, consistent, steadfast and faithful in love.  Why?  Because it is his character and he cannot act contrary to nor deny his character.  God is love – that is a foundational and fundamental fact.  It is foundational and fundamental to a right understanding of God.

When we grasp hold of the fact that God is love it should affect our relationship with and to God.  When I remember that God is love, that all his actions and words are always loving then I will not resent his discipline.  The letter to the Hebrews tells me that God disciplines those he loves.  So when I experience discipline from God and I recall that it is an expression of his love then my attitude towards that discipline and towards God will not be one of resentment and anger.

When storm clouds appear above me or I am going through a tough time and I recall that God is love and therefore all his actions towards me are loving then my attitude and outlook will be affected by that foundational understanding of God.

God is Loving.

John goes on to state how God expresses his love for us.  I want to concentrate on just two things:

1.God loved us before we loved him.

2.God expresses his love ultimately in the Cross of Christ.

1. God loved us before we loved him.  Look at verse 10 and verse 19.  Do you see what John says here?  He states that God took the initiative and loved us before we loved him.  You see love always takes the initiative.  Love gives itself before it receives.  Our love for and towards God is our response to his love for us.  If you want to know love John says then here it is – before you and I had even thought of God he loved us.  Paul says in Romans 5 that while we were still sinners God loved us.  God did not wait for you and I to become worthy of his love before he loved us.  He loves us unconditionally.  Listen to me– God loves you just the way you are.  It matters not  how far you are away from him he loves you.  It matters not the life you are leading he loves you.  But because he loves you he wants what is best for you and what is best for you is found only in a relationship with him through Christ his Son.

2. God expresses his love ultimately in the Cross of Christ.  Look at what John says in verse 10 and verse 14.  God shows us that he loves us in that he sent his one and only Son to die on the cross in our place.  In Romans 5 verse 8 Paul puts it like this ‘While we were yet sinners Christ died for us.’  John stated it like this in his gospel ‘For God so loved the world….’ 3verse 16.  Friends do you want to know the extent of God’s love for you – then turn your eyes to the cross and to Christ hanging on the Cross.  John says Christ became our ‘propitiation’ when hanging on the Cross.   By that he means he took the punishment that our sins deserve upon himself.  He became our atoning sacrifice.  He satisfied God’s wrath at sin, he met God’s requirements for a holy perfect sacrifice.  As the hymn writer put it ‘in my place condemned he stood.’  God’s Holy Spirit takes that sacrifice and applies it to you and to me when we come to Christ for forgiveness. 

That is why John goes on to say in verses 11 and 12 to say that love is ‘perfected in us.’  It is not that God’s love is deficient or lacking in anything, on the contrary.  It is that God’s love finds its fulfilment in us.  His love is directed towards us and when we receive it and respond to it by repentance and faith it comes to fulfilment.  That is why Christ says in Luke 15 that there is rejoicing in heaven over one sinner that repents.  It is not that God’s love lacks anything.  It is not even that he needs us to respond to his love for us.  God does not need us but he has chosen that we can bring him happiness and joy by responding to his love expressed for us in and through Christ Jesus.   We show that we have received the love of God by loving other people in the manner in which God has loved us.  John says that by loving one another God abides in us – that is God comes to live within us, to literally ‘pitch his tent in our lives.’  It is God’s abiding in us and we in him that brings to completion the purpose of his love.  And what is that purpose?  That we might be saved from eternal death and a lost eternity.

When someone says to you ‘I love you’ you have certain expectations of them.  You expect their actions to support their words.  You expect their actions to not only support but also to reinforce their words.  We learn this from God.   When God says ‘I love you’ to us he reinforces his word by sending his Spirit to confirm in our hearts the knowledge and belief of his love (verses 13-14).  Look at verse 13 – John says ‘by this we know’ – not we feel but we ‘know.’  When God’s Holy Spirit abides in our hearts we ‘know’, we have knowledge, we have certainty and security of knowledge that God loves us.  How?  Because God’s Spirit confirms in our hearts that God’s love for us is shown in that he gave his only begotten Son for us, to be our Saviour.  Look at verse 16.  John says we have come to ‘know’ and also ‘believe.’  You see it is not enough to know that God loves you, you must also believe that he loves you.  There is a difference between knowledge and belief.  John says we need both.  We need to know God loves us and we can only know by him telling us – which he has done through his Son Christ Jesus.  But added to knowledge must come belief – we must believe in our hearts, in our souls that he loves us.  We do this by opening our hearts and embracing his love for us in Christ Jesus.  You see I need not only to know but also to believe God loves me.  When I do both God confirms it not only from his word but also by his Holy Spirit abiding in me.

Then in verse 17 John starts to explain the outworking of that in my life and in your life.  Because God loves us and sent his Son Christ to be our atoning sacrifice we have ‘confidence on the day of judgment.’  On what grounds will I have confidence on the day of judgment?  It certainly will not be on any thing that I done.  I place no confidence in my own works or flesh.  I stand with St Paul when he says that all the things I thought made me righteous before God are in fact ‘garbage’ before him.  No the confidence is in the love of God expressed to me in the Cross of Christ.  Because I have confidence in this love saving me on the day of judgement I have no fear.  The fear of death is gone because love reigns in my life because God abides in me by his Spirit.  You see the other side of confidence is fear.  If I go into an examination and I have not studied for the paper I am filled with fear.  But if I have covered all the topics on the paper I have confidence that I will pass.  If I come before God on the day of judgement and I know nothing of God’s love for me it will be with fear that I stand before the judgment seat.  But, if I know the love of God in my heart by the witness of the Holy Spirit abiding in me then I stand before God with confidence.  Confidence not in myself but in the finished work of Christ and the faithful love of God in Christ to me a sinner.

Friends I want to summarise this for you.  John says to us that God is love.  His love is constant and consistent.  His love is faithful and eternal.  When God wanted us to know his love he expressed it in sending his only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, to this world to die on the cross for our sins.  On that cross he took our punishment.  He bore our sins.  He shouldered the wrath of God in our place.  He took punishment and fear – that which we deserved on account of sin and he replaced it with love.  By God’s love for us in and through Jesus, God the father lifted us from a place of fear, punishment and death to a position of freedom, forgiveness and life eternal.  That is what God’s love has done for us and continues to do for all who come to Christ.

As if to reinforce what he has said John reiterates the fact that the initiative for all of this came from God and not from us.  God has always, and will always, search out lost men and women.  The lost sheep did not seek the Shepherd.  The lost coin did not seek the woman of the house and contrary to what this world tells you people do not search out God.  From the first days in the Garden of Eden God has searched out mankind lost in his sin. 

Reflecting God’s Love

I do not propose to say much on this point.  In verses 20 and 21 and also in the first 5 verses of chapter 5 John points out to his readers the outworking of the love of God in their lives.  He states quite clearly that knowing God’s love for us is the foundation, the source and the motivation for us to love one another.  As Christ said in the gospel of John: ‘they will know you by your love for one another.’  Friends knowing how much God loves us.  Knowing how much he gave as an expression of his love for us.  How can we fail to love one another?  Ghandi once said to a missionary ‘I like your Jesus but I don’t like your Christians.’   if you know in your heart the love of Christ then it must be seen in your love for one another.  If it is not then John says you make God out to be a liar.  Our love for God is seen here and now in our love for one another.  It is seen in our love for those who are considered the outcasts of society.  Is that not the accusation that was levelled against Christ Jesus?  Was he not accused of being a friend of drunkards, sinners and publicans?  Did he not say to us that when we did it to the least of these we did it to him?  Did he not tell a wonderful parable about the Good Samaritan?  The challenge for us all is two-fold. 

1. To respond to God whose love for us is expressed in Christ on the Cross.
2. To love one another as Christ has loved us.