To Rely Upon God's Love: 1 John 4:7-16

Well, we're delighted to have the children remain with us in the service this Sunday for our youngest kids.

We're glad to have you in our worship service.

Children's Church will begin next Sunday, January 4th.

Well, a few weeks ago, uh when Pastor Tom uh asked me to preach this Sunday, he stated that because this Sunday, uh it's kind of the last Sunday of the year, kind of falls between Advent and our week of prayer, the first week of January, there was freedom with the passage of Scripture.

And I asked if I could preach on this passage from 1 John 4.

It's a passage that I've been meditating a lot myself.

It's nourished my faith, and I trust it'll do the same for you.

Our reading is from 1 John chapter 4, verses 7 through 16.

1 John 4:7–16

Hear the word of God.

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.

Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

In this, the love of God was made manifest among us that God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.

In this is love.

Not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.

Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

No one has ever seen God.

If we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us.

By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his spirit, and we have seen and testified that the Father has sent his son to be the Savior of the world.

Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.

So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us.

God is love, but whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

This is God's infallible and inerrant word.

May God's unchanging truth change our lives this morning.

Would you join me in prayer?

Father, as we just sang, we ask that by your mighty working of your Holy Spirit, Lord, we would be transformed this day.

We ask that you would open our hearts, give us ears to hear, eyes to see.

We ask that we would depart this worship service different than how we entered.

We would depart this worship service further conformed to the image of the Lord Jesus Christ, further fashioned into the people you you've created us to be in Christ, that you may be glorified in us and through this.

We ask these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Well, there is a lot of uh content in these uh ten verses, but what I really want to do is dial down this morning on the final verse, which is verse 16.

If you look at verse 16, it says, So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us.

Another English translation, the ESV, translates that we have come to know and to rely upon the love which God has for us.

I think that captures the essence well.

We're called not just merely to believe in God's love at a doctrinal level, at an intellectual level, but we're called to build our lives upon it, to put the roots of our heart down deep into it, that it's a wellspring of life and vitality every day.

Instead of being up and down based on circumstances, there's a stability of peace and joy when we're rooted in the Father's love.

Instead of being controlled by people's approval or disapproval, there's this freedom and there's a security that comes from, again, having our hearts just deeply founded, not just knowing it, not just hearing about it, but believing it.

Building our life upon it, letting it be the foundation where we last our souls.

Well, this morning we're gonna, what we're gonna do is we're gonna work our way through the ten verses.

Uh I'm gonna highlight a few key things.

We're kind of kind of build our way to verse 16.

Uh, we're gonna look at this passage under four headings.

Uh this is, of course, a theme.

This this is a passage about God's love to us, our love to him, and our love to one another.

And we're gonna look at the source uh in verses uh seven and eight.

We're gonna look at the cost, the cost of the love of God.

It's uh it's an expensive love.

Uh the source, the cost, the experience of it, and this is where the passage just is gonna, I think it's very surprising.

It's gonna leap off the page.

Uh, and then finally, uh the expression of it.

What does it mean again to really, what does it how does it show itself as we live our lives?

To really not just know about it, to believe, to rely upon it.

The source, the cost, the experience, the expression.

Again, 1 John chapter 4, verse 7, he says, Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.

1 John 4:7

If I could ask you and your family, what are some of the characteristics of your family?

Uh maybe you have physical characteristics.

You know, maybe your family is known for having curly hair or having um beautiful hazel eyes, whatever it is.

Well, here John the apostle begins describing what's the preeminent characteristic of the family of God?

What's the family attribute?

Well, it's this great quality of love.

Love for one another, love of God.

And this stems from being born again, born of God, born of the Holy Spirit, having the Holy Spirit given us eyes to see our sin, eyes to see the beauty of Christ as he's offered in the gospel and being joined to him by faith, renewed by the power of the Holy Spirit.

And the good news really of verses 7 to 8 is in some ways, no matter where you're from, no matter how you've been trained relationally, whatever's been modeled to you, some of you came from have just come from warm relational environments where you've been trained to really love well.

Others have not had that experience.

Uh the modeling for you has not been love for others, but more self-love.

But I can promise you this if you are born of God, born of the Spirit of Christ, you will be conformed to the image of Christ.

This is who you are becoming.

You're becoming a person of love for God and for love for other people.

For this is the family attribute.

He continues, uh, verse 8 anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

Now, this really parallels other statements about God's nature, both in the Gospel of John and in 1 John.

Earlier in the book, we see him say God is light.

And we would never say, of course, light is God.

What he's saying is, of course, this God is righteous and true and holy and just in all his ways.

So here, when he says God is love, it's not that love is God, of course, it's that God is loving.

Uh, he is generous, and it permeates his nature and being.

All God's activity uh is loving activity.

Uh, and this really brings us into the heart of uh what's distinct and unique about uh the living God revealed in the scriptures, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

When the scriptures describe God as love, it is a window into God's triune nature.

We serve a triune God.

You see the Trinitarian language just all over this passage.

If you would jump down real quick to uh verses 13, 14, and 15.

We'll come back to uh verse 8 in just a second.

But just look at the Trinitarian language in verse 13.

By this week, we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his, he's given us of the spirit, the person of the spirit in us, dwelling in us, transforming us.

Verse 14, and we have seen and testified that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world.

That is the love that's intrinsic to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

God, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, loving, adoring, delighting in one another, honoring one another from all eternity.

You and I being created in the image of a triune God, created out of the overflow of that love, created to love him and to be loved.

And even as we have rebelled and turned against him, God in love continued to pursue us, to draw us to himself.

This is the language of the Trinity.

This is why the greatest commandment, of course, is to love God and to love one another.

Because when we do that, we are we are acting in accord with the with the foundations of the universe.

We're acting in accord with the with the nature of the God who has made all things uh very good.

Uh my family is uh soon to move uh from Maryland here to uh uh to Alexandria and uh the Mount Vernon area.

And where we live, uh there's a number of people that work at uh NIH, and there's a kind of the scientific research apparatus of the countries kind of in that area of Maryland.

And what's interesting to me is different friends of the church working for NIH and do government research as they kind of show to me different things that have been published over the years.

And what's kind of striking to me is you watch, this is both from NIH and from different uh institutions, uh colleges and universities around the country, is there's a research study put out about every five to ten years that says kind of the same thing.

It is when you study how human beings are wired, and you study what makes people really happy, by any metric you want to use, really makes people satisfied and joyful.

What is it that makes life meaningful?

What makes us, what gives us real?

Yeah, just a light heart and a glow about us.

Uh it is always, no matter who does the study, whether it's a university, whether it's NIH, it's always the same thing.

It is relationships of trust and intimacy and depth and love.

That is what life really is about.

That's what makes us joyful.

And what's striking to me is about those studies is that the research, and I could just quote study after study to you, that shows you the same thing over and over again.

I've never found a single study published by a research university or by NIH that explains why.

Why is it when researchers really dig into our humanity, it's not our material possessions, it's not our pay grade, it's not our achievements, it's not personal comfort and safety.

Uh, these things we all value, but they're not to the really makes wife happy.

Why is it that we're so wired that relationships make us that make us so happy?

The answer, of course, is because God's word is true.

That you are the made in the image of a God, you are made in the image of the triune God, you're made in the image of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the members of the Godhead loving each other from all eternity, you've been created out of the overflow of that to be loved, to love God in response and love one another.

That is why relationships are so critical to your happiness.

Uh and what the rub of that, we are all living in the society, of course, which pressures us not to live that way.

We're pressured to live for material cruel, uh for personal distinction.

Uh we're pushed to live for comfort and ease.

But every time away, you you you turn away from those things and you say, no, what I'm really gonna live for is to love God and love my neighbor.

What I'm gonna do is I even I as I approach my work, is my work is not about me, it's about God, it's about my neighbor, it's about serving God in the public sphere.

Uh it's an best way I'm gonna love my neighbor is to do my work Monday through Friday for God's glory and for their good with excellence.

Uh, every time you make that choice, you are living in line with the fundamental pillars of how God has made our world, how he's made our universe.

You are made, the universe is made, from a trying God, a God overflowing with love within himself.

Getting back to verse 8, he says it so well.

Anyone who does not love, does not love, does not know God, because God is love, and he has a triune God.

This is the first thing we see in the passage.

Uh, we see the source, which is the triune God.

We see next, uh, we see the cost.

Jumping down to uh verse nine.

I realize I'm hopping around the passage here, but we'll get we'll start going verse by verse now.

Uh looking at verse nine, he says, In this, the love of God was made manifest.

It was shown, it was declared, it was proven that God sent his only son into the world that we might live through him.

God proved his love for us by giving us the most precious thing that he had.

He did not hold back from you in any way.

Verse 10, in this is love.

Not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.

God in love was seeking you and me, even we when we weren't seeking him.

Uh and I really want to dial down on that word propitiation.

Uh, it's one of these technical theological words, it's a meaty word, there's no other quite word for it.

Uh, and uh literally the word propitiation means to it means to pacify divine wrath, to assuage uh just uh judgment and anger and the the almighty wrath of God poured out for sin.

And it's a word that uh there's so much to say about it, but if I could, um it's a word which causes the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the New Testament, to really come into focus.

Uh and here's what I mean.

When you read the four gospels, all four of them, if you would just consider for a second how many times Jesus is physically threatened.

Uh he's he's he's he's he's he's he's he becomes an object of either physical violence or verbal violence, and notice always his response.

Uh in Luke chapter 4, after he preaches one of his first sermons, the audience gets so angry that they threaten to throw him off a cliff.

Luke 4 · chapter mention

How does Jesus respond?

Jesus is not nervous, he's not uh you know upset or anything like that.

He's perfectly poised, he's perfectly calm.

In Mark 2, after he heals the paralytic, he's accused of blasphemy, right?

And they get so angry.

Jesus is not rattled at all.

Uh in Mark 3, he heals the man with the withered hand.

The Pharisees and Herodians immediately hold counsel about how to kill him.

Jesus is unfazed, he's perfectly at peace.

Twice in John's gospel, when Jesus makes some of the strongest statements of his divine identity, truly I say to you, before Abraham was, I am, and I and the Father are one.

The people who hear him get so angry, they pick up stones to kill, to stone him on the spot.

And how does Jesus respond emotionally to that?

He's perfectly at rest.

He's perfectly self-composed, he's perfectly poised.

You know, Jesus preaches, do not fear those who kill the body, uh, do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.

Rather, fear him who can destroy both soul and body and hell.

And what he preached, he perfectly lived.

And the gospels go on and on and on and on like this, until right before Jesus is arrested, uh, right before uh Jesus is betrayed, uh, Jesus comes to the garden of Gethsemane, and it says, Being in agony, he began to pray most earnestly.

His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.

And this is, of course, a real medical thing.

When people are under intense anxiety, their pores open up so much that they can uh this can happen.

He begins to say things like, I am sorrowful and troubled, my soul is sorrowful even to death.

And you read the gospels that way and you say, Why is this?

Why is it when Jesus is physically threatened, consistently throughout his story, he's always poised, always calm, until this final chapter, right before his arrest and betrayal, and suddenly he's undone.

Why the juxtaposition?

And this is where the word propitiation brings everything into focus.

It's because in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus begins to wrestle over something called the cup.

And he prays three times.

Father, if it is possible, take this cup from me, yet not as I will, but your will be done.

And what is the cup?

Well, the cup, consistently, throughout the entire Old Testament, is the cup of divine wrath for sin.

It is the cup of God's just judgment.

Just there's there's 15 different references I could give you from the Old Testament, which talk about the cup, right?

And that's what Jesus is praying about when he is emotionally undone.

Isaiah 51 says, Awake, wake yourself, stand up, O Jerusalem.

You who have drunk from the hand of the Lord, from the cup of his wrath, you have drunk to the dregs of the bowl, the cup of staggering.

Jeremiah 25.

Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, say to me, Take from my hand this cup of wine, and make the nations to him, to whom I send you, drink it.

Over and over again.

It's in Job, it's in the Psalms, it's in Habakkuk, it's in Revelation.

Why does Jesus live his whole life poised while being physically threatened?

And suddenly in the garden, as he contemplates the cup, become emotionally sorrowful even unto death, it is because of the weight of the word propitiation.

It is because the wrath of God, as the sky is darkened, as Jesus cries out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me out of Calvary?

He knows that he is going to go under that full cup, with the full wrath of fat of sin, the full cup of the Father's wrath for our sin, for his church's sin, for his bride's sin, will be pulled off on the Lord Jesus Christ in our stead.

And he contemplates the weight of that, right?

He contemplates what it means to descend into hell, to be descended from the to be separated from the Father, to be an object of the Father's punitive wrath.

And he is undone.

That is the weight of the word, uh, propitiation.

Yeah, and even as you as we consider these things, who is worthy even to uh to speak of them?

They call for the most profound silence for reverence, for fear and chandling, but they also call for the sweetest joy and worship.

Why did God the Son bear not just the measly threats of men, uh, but the full cup of divine retribution and the for the fullness of redemptive history?

Because he loved his sheep, he loved his flock, he loved his bride, uh, and he loved you as a member of it.

You know, it's all about those pronouns.

The life I lived, I lived by the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me, not just his church universally, but for me particularly.

Jesus was glad to bear propitiation for your sake.

And as we say here at APC, uh all the Father's wrath for our sin was poured out on the beloved Son, so that all the Father's delight, all the Father's good pleasure could be poured out on you both today and for all eternity.

This is the meaning of the word propitiation.

Uh, but it's within this, as it is a weighty word, a word that causes us to fear and tremble, but also to praise and worship, uh, there is, of course, here an implicit warning.

To reject the Lord Jesus Christ, to spurn God's gracious gift, uh, is to remain an object of divine wrath.

Um, in John chapter 3, there's that great verse, for God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

John 3 · chapter mention

But to follow that paragraph to the end, Jesus warns whoever does not obey the Son, whoever does not receive God's gracious gift and turn to God in repentance and faith, whoever does not obey the Son shall not seed life, but the wrath of God remains on him.

And if you have not received Jesus through faith and repentance, uh the Lord's command is for you to repent and believe.

Uh perhaps you're out of town guests and you've come to stay with a member here in Alexandria for a family member for the holidays, and perhaps you've decided to join them for church, and perhaps you've watched them for years and you've seen how God this person has gotten more into God, and God's really changed this person, and God has become so real to you.

But then you think about your own life, and you think about the petty forms of greed and self-centeredness and malice, things you have done, things you have left undone, and you're troubled in heart.

The Lord God is speaking to you, and he is calling you in love to himself, to the Lord Jesus Christ, in repentance and faith.

And God's command to you is to not refuse him, to not refuse the one who is speaking to you, and you say, That's just a really scary bridge to cross.

We realize that.

At the conclusion of this worship service, there's going to be two members of our of our church, Rob Fisher, Sharon Holiday, which are going to be here to pray with you.

And if you would like help, turning from unbelief to faith, from a life lived for yourself, in repentance, a life centered on God, to be no longer becoming an object of God's divine wrath, but an object of his divine favor because you have been joined to Christ and you see now and receive Christ as your propitiation.

I invite you just to come and speak with them.

This is love's source, the God who is all love.

This is this cost.

This is his propitiation.

Let me move us to verse 11.

Let's look thirdly at the experience.

Verse 11, he says, Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God abides in us, and his love, here's the key part, is perfected in us.

This verse is one of those verbs that just absolutely leaps off the page.

When you look at verse 12, just think of the language that it begins with.

He says, No one has ever seen God.

And that's not the first time we have seen that language, right?

If you think about John's writings, his corpus of material, both his three epistles and also the gospel, this is a Greek phrase he's used before.

In the Gospel of John, in verse 18, chapter 1, it says, No one has ever seen God.

Same Greek phrase.

And then he says, God, the only Son, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known, which makes perfect sense.

We say, hey, we can't see the invisible God, the eternal God.

God is a spirit, but God has it made manifest and perfectly seen and understood through his Son.

Okay, that's what we're anticipating in verse 12.

But notice again, if you look again at verse 12, that's not what it says.

It says, No one who has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us.

God love is completed, it is driven, demonstrated, it is brought to its proper and fitting end.

Ligan Duncan says, My friends, this is astounding.

John is saying that your love, your practical commitment, your selfless self-giving to one another is a standing witness to the world of the love of God.

It is the visible manifestation of the love of God.

As we just heard earlier in the service, about 3,000 people being fed in Eastern Congo, right?

When they receive that meal, who is loving them?

You say, you know, good news for Africa is loving them.

The members of this church is loving them.

That's not what John's saying.

John's saying that they're being loved by Almighty God.

That when you love someone well, his love is being translated, communicated, perfected, demonstrated through you.

And whether it's in Congo or whether it's in Alexandria, the question to ask is who has loved you well?

And have you seen through them to the ultimate source of that?

We have a shepherding ministry here at APC, and maybe you've had somebody really check in on you and listen to you and care for you and get to know you, and you felt really loved.

It's proper for you to know where that love is really coming from.

It's not coming ultimately from that person, it's ultimately coming from God.

The same with a community fellowship group.

However, you've been loved well, who has loved you well?

Verse 11 is saying God's love has been channeled, demonstrated, perfected, brought near through that person.

And you were made to experience the love of God in Christian community.

You were made to be known, understood, esteemed, and desired.

And the passage begs the question Are we in this type of community?

If you've been attending APC for some time, but held back from this type of community, uh, this verse is for you.

If God's love has always seemed kind of distant and unknowable, you want to ask yourself, have I kept myself from Christian community?

The very community which the verse is telling us is meant to be translate, to make the love of God real and palpable to us.

Yeah, if you've been attending APC for some time, uh, this verse uh is for you.

Uh upcoming uh in the life of our church family, we have a lot of different things to coming up, but one of them is the newcomer fellowship dinner.

You can sign up to it through the second QR code on the back of your worship guide.

Uh if you have withheld yourself from community and God's love has felt distant, hear the word of the Lord, speaking through his word.

He is calling you to know him more deeply, to experience his love more intimately, by being more enmeshed in the community that Christ has created.

And I invite you not to, you're made to be known and loved.

Would you take a step in?

Would you come to that newcomer dimmer?

Would you step into a community fellowship group?

Well, these are the first things we see, three things we see.

We come now to a conclusion.

And I I made the preacher's cardinal mistake as I started my sermon.

I actually got my pages out of order.

Sorry about that.

Uh but I'm experienced to know that when you get to your fourth point, it's the time to loop back into what you skipped earlier.

Uh so I'm gonna do that because they actually do tie together.

Um we've looked at the source, right?

God is love.

He's trying God.

We've looked at the cost.

Uh it's the propitiation, right?

Jesus is suaging the wrath that we deserved at the cross.

That's why the sky is darkened, the cup of God's wrath is poured out.

That's the cry of dereliction.

Right?

We've looked at the experience of it.

As you experience love in Christian community, we don't look at the people that are loving us so much as we look at the real author who's come who God's love is being channeled through him.

That's the point of John chapter 4.

John 4 · chapter mention

And all this has been built up to verse 16.

So we have come to know, right?

We've heard about it, but we've come to believe it.

We've come to rely upon it, we've come to build our our lives upon it.

We've come to know and to believe the love that God has for us.

And this is, of course, the question, right?

This is the question that Pastor Tom has been asking all through our December sermon series.

You know, where are you?

Where is your heart with this?

Is there a distance between what you know to be true, but what you really believe and what you really rely on, where you really live?

How have you lived in 2025?

What have you really relied upon?

Have you been up and down based on your circumstances?

Have you been overly controlled by the approval or disapproval of men and women around you?

Man, let 2026 be a different day.

Let it be a different year to know, to rely upon the love that God has for us.

Do you have this foundational, shakeable joy and peace?

And you say, Oh, this is so difficult for me because it's hard to believe because my life is so difficult.

We struggle with the statement because God permits afflictions to beset his beloved children.

Um, one uh the late minister in our denomination, uh, Tim Keller, sat with his wife, Kathy, uh, through many years of treatment uh for Crohn's disease.

She had several different surgeries back to back.

Uh the physicians were unsure if she would survive.

Um, and the situation was quickly reversed, of course, when Tim Keller contracted uh pancreatic cancer and got treatment uh at NIH.

But Tim Keller made this great statement while he was going through all these tough years.

He said, I'm going to judge my circumstances by Jesus' love, not Jesus' love by my circumstances.

We say that again.

I'm going to judge my circumstances by Jesus' love, not Jesus' love by my circumstances.

I think what he's saying there is, I'm not going to interpret the difficult things in my life, my health concerns, my financial problems, the conflicts at work, the turmoil within my relational system.

I'm not going to interpret them as evidence for or against God's love.

Rather, I'm going to let the reality of God's love in Jesus Christ outshine, overshine all of life's circumstances.

I know that everything, even hard things, must come from his love, because God has not withheld his son, his only son, his beloved son, from me.

And that is where the Lord wants to bring you and I this morning.

C.

S.

Lewis said it well, take courage, child.

We are all between the paws of the true Aslan.

And he is the God of all love, the God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Would you join me in prayer as I close?

Heavenly Father, we do ask that by the work of your grace, by the work of your spirit, we would be changed this day, that we would live 2026 different than we lived 2025, not being up and down based on our circumstances, not being controlled by man's approval or disapproval, but putting the roots of our heart more deeply into your love, your eternal trying nature, and your great deed of giving your son to be the propitiation, Lord, of the joy that is of all that is set before us, of your great promises, Lord, of the resurrection, Lord, of the true home of the true family of the Lord Jesus Christ being glorified.

Lift our hearts in joy this day.

We ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.