The Advent of Love

So we're in the third Sunday of Advent, and this is traditionally where we celebrate the Advent of Love.

And I think that this is really appropriate for the cultural moment that we find ourselves in because everyone around us is trying to define and apply what love is, right?

And so we have all of these competing voices inside of culture trying to communicate to us what love is and how it should look expressed to other people.

And what we're finding is that the nature of it is insatiable because it is dictated upon every individual's feelings, circumstances, experiences.

And so what was loving yesterday, right, is either not loving tomorrow, or what was not loving yesterday now needs to be incorporated into our definition and expression of love today.

And it's every morning you wake up, it's something new, and it will not stop because it's going to be completely dependent upon us as people.

We're intrinsically trying to determine what love is based on some inherent virtue that we hold to be able to apply it authoritatively to the culture that we find ourselves in.

And it's not working.

It's failing us.

And it's failing us miserably, and we're seeing the harm that we're doing rather than the good that we're doing in this effort.

And so today, my hope is that I'm able to present to you from the scriptures what love is and how it should be lived out.

The apostle John is writing this letter to these churches in Asia Minor.

And John is the apostle whom Jesus loved, right?

John the beloved, as he would be referred to.

And so love becomes the central core theme to the message and ministry of John.

And this is no different.

Here in this letter to these congregations dispersed throughout Asia Minor, he's encouraging them to love one another as a good and necessary response to the love of God in Christ Jesus that they have received by grace through faith in the gospel of his son.

You see, in his encouragement, John charges the churches to discern the authenticity of their faith by the way that they actually love one another.

And this is a common theme throughout the scriptures that we tend to neglect inside of the Christian life that we live, that what we say is true about us must be evident in the way that we live our lives, right?

If we say we know God, then it will be observable, evidence in our life by the way that we actually live and love one another.

And so we have to bring focus back to this necessary reality.

Right?

If our confession of faith is ever going to be affirmed as sincere and genuine and true, it will be realized in the way that we actually live our life.

He actually says this in verse 8.

He says, anyone who does not love God does not know God because God is love.

Let's think about his train of thought here for a minute, right?

If you say that you have experienced God, if you say that you've received his love and the grace that he has given, if that's been a part of your reality, then it's going to be known and seen by the way that you actually engage and interact with other people, by the way that you love them.

Because the God who transforms you transforms you to live and live in a way that is loving toward other people.

John's working to show that the presence of love in our life is a testament to the presence of God in our life.

Because love is an essential.

This is what we're going to discover here throughout the text.

Love is an essential attribute to his being.

Because God is love and we are of God, we must love also.

This is how the line of reasoning continues.

If our faith is evident by our love for one another, then it begs the question: well, what is love?

How will you and I even understand or know what true love is when we see it or interact with it?

And I love what John does.

He starts with God.

I think this is so important for us as Christians.

We try to start in our understanding, defining of things, attributes, virtues with self.

How would we express love?

How would we understand love?

How would we know kindness or generosity or hospitality or any of these things?

Like, how would we know this?

How would we express it and then try to derive meaning and substance from this empty well?

Right?

We can't draw water from this.

So we must start with God, who is the essence of these realities.

For us to ever truly know God or to truly know love, we must start with God.

If God is love, then we must start with Him and work to understand how He demonstrated love so that we would understand it better and reflect it to the people around us.

You see, if we start with understanding from a position of self, inevitably, and I think this is what the cultural moment shows us, we're gonna end up with a distorted and powerless version of it.

So we're gonna start where John starts with God.

This is what John rightly works to help us do.

Root our understanding of love in God Himself.

And in verse 9, here's where he shows us the presence of God's love.

The presence of God's love.

If you want to know what God's love looks like, it's in this.

And we have to be aware that there's a multitude of different ways that we have seen the love of God, right?

We've seen the love of God in the very beating of our hearts and the lung, uh, the air that fills our lungs, right?

And the good gifts that are surround us and the beauty of creation.

We've seen the love of God, we've experienced the love of God.

But if we want to know the chief way, what is the chief way that the love of God is seen?

John is establishing it right here.

It's in this.

And what is this?

It is the coming of Jesus the Son.

You see, he builds on this truth before presenting us with the means by which God's love is known by saying the love of God was made manifest among us.

It was revealed to us.

It was so that we might know it.

And I think it's important for us when we look at the love of God, right?

The agape love of God, we need to revisit this functional definition that we have here at Sacred Mission for the agape love of God that John is using in this passage because it's gonna help us understand it more holistically, right?

And this is how we define this that agape love is the steady intention of the will to another's highest good.

The steady intention of the will to another's highest good.

Here's what we're gonna discover today.

God is a passionate being, and his emotions are diverse.

God loves, God is kind, God is patient, God is gracious, God is vengeful, God is jealous, God is wrath-filled, God hates, God is angry.

So we can't reduce God down to some simplistic version of himself that isn't in the end truly him, but it's an idol that we worship, right?

Because we just want him to be so simplistic and singular that he is love and love alone.

No, God is passionate and his feelings are diverse, and the good news for us is that his love for us isn't based upon his passionate feelings that he has, but it's in his will, his good pleasure that's sovereignly established upon us so that we might have his highest, our highest good in him.

That is great news for you and for me in understanding and knowing the love of God for us.

If we want to know what this kind of love truly looks like, John's going to show it to us so that we can have clarity, right?

That's what's so important for us is that we don't continue to operate in this clouded and distorted view and understanding of love.

We need clarity and we're gonna find clarity with inside the text so that we can see God's love for all of its beauty, for all of its goodness and passion that it contains.

Because it was this kind of love that was made manifest among us.

It was this love that was revealed to us that we might know it, experience it, and demonstrate it for all that it truly is.

You see, I I love that what John's gonna help us see is that God's love isn't something just communicated to us from a distance, right?

Imagine if God's love was only ever something etched into stone tablets, right?

It's cold and sterile, it's written but not experienced.

Or maybe it was given in visions and dreams to these wild-haired prophets, right?

But it was never known by his people.

It was never realized in their very own experience.

If it was ever just lip service to his image bearers rather than something that actually redeemed us from the pit of despair we were in.

God's love is made near.

This is the advent of Christ his son.

And this tangible and present reality is actually how John opens this very epistle that he's writing.

He's gonna use the same manifest language because he's gonna say, You don't get it.

This isn't just something distant and far off.

This is something that has come near to us, and we've seen it, we've heard it, we've felt it.

Look at John, 1 John 1, 1 through 2 here.

He opens the epistle this way: that which was from the beginning, Jesus the Son, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and have touched with our hands concerning the word of life.

The life was made manifest, and we have seen it and testified to it and proclaimed to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us.

John just unpacks this manifest language in the way that they saw him with their eyes, they heard his voice with their ears, they touched Jesus the Messiah.

This is the love of God.

He was real, present.

So the chief way that the love of God has been revealed to us and experienced by us is this that God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him.

Church, this is the presence of God's love.

Jesus the Son.

And here's what we have to look at that God sent his son into our experience, the transcendent one of heaven descended to us on earth, into our world, into our existence, so that we might know God and his holy love for us.

And we see the ambition of it all.

Like, what was God's ambition in sending Jesus?

What was the aim of this work so that we might live through him?

You see, when whenever John uses the language of world by by in its dominant nature, he's not speaking of this material, physical reality.

He's speaking of this sin-filled darkness, of this depraved state of rebellion and wickedness.

This is the world, right, in which Jesus enters into, because in that world is death.

And his reason for coming, his ambition in being sent is that we might be delivered out of death and live through him.

That's the purpose of the presence of God's love for us, that we might live through Christ His Son.

You see, Jesus was sent into this world, an existence of darkness, sin, and death, a place of despair and hopelessness.

He was sent into that so that we might live through him.

Because he alone is the light of life and hope of man's soul.

And so, what this verse aims to cause us to see is this that the love of God is revealed for the ambition of God to be accomplished, that men would be rescued from death and brought into life through Jesus his son.

And so Jesus is the presence of God's love made known to us.

And while this is gloriously good news, it's fascinating that John almost finds it insufficient to fully communicate God's love for us, of which we're supposed to love one another by.

Because the apostle presses on and he progresses from the presence of God's love to the substance of God's love.

And this is going to round out our ability to see with clarity.

You see, he uses the same in this statement.

In verse 9, in this, the love of God was made manifest to us.

Now in verse 10, in this is the love of God.

This is the substance of his love.

So that we might know it clearly and rightly.

And here's what I want us to kind of work from as the substance of it that God's love is revealed in holy passion.

God's love is revealed to us in holy passion.

I want to submit to you that holy passion is the very substance of God's love.

And we're going to work to understand those two words in relationship to one another this morning.

But it is the way that it is displayed, and it is in this manner by which it is accomplished through his son.

Let's read verse 10 together.

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.

What John does first is he finds it necessary to let us know and make us aware God sending Jesus His Son, it's not a response to our love for him.

Right?

It's not this.

And I think we can kind of tend to think this way at times, right?

Like we were working to love God, we were striving to honor him, we were trying to be faithful to him, we wanted relationship with him, and we just didn't have it in us to close the gap.

And so this sympathy and compassion came upon the efforts of which we were demonstrating.

And Jesus comes and he closes the gap so that we can actually be with God.

No, that's not the story, that's not the narrative, that's not the truth of the scripture.

We hated God, we rebelled against him, we were sinful and wicked, we wanted nothing to do with him.

And Jesus saw the chasm of being with us, and he came to close it in the fullness of his own strength and finished work.

He loved us first.

Not that we loved him.

God's love for us is not a response to our love for him, it's in spite of it.

In spite of its complete absence in our own life, God loved us.

You see, the apostle Paul works to actually communicate this in his letter to the Romans, and he synthesizes some verses from the Psalms and Proverbs and from the prophets to help us understand the condition of our heart before we were reconciled to God in Christ Jesus.

In Romans 3, 10 through 18, he says this is not good news, right?

None is righteous, no not one, no one understands, no one seeks for God.

All have turned aside.

Together they become worthless, no one does good, not even one.

Their throat is an open grave, they use their tongues to deceive, the venom of ass is under their lips, their mouth is full of curses and bitterness, their feet are swift to shed blood, and their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known.

There is no fear of God before their eyes.

Here's what Paul's saying: that was you.

That was me.

So God's love isn't because we loved him first, it's him who loved us.

And we need to understand this truth, or else if we fail to embrace this reality, to submit to the truth of our condition that scripture reveals, if we don't do this, we're never gonna see the fullness of the beauty and goodness and majesty of the love of God for us.

It's gonna be diminished in our eyes.

Because we're gonna think and fathom that somehow we deserve that love as a response of who we are.

We earned that love because of how good we were.

Right?

Of course, God loves me.

Look at me, right?

I'm amazing.

No, you're not, you're horrible.

And the good news is God still loves you.

We did not love him, he loved us.

He loved us when we reviled him, when we rebelled against him, when we were dead in our sin.

Not simply unwilling to love him, but the despair reality of our state is we were utterly unable to love him.

So this truth begins to help us understand God's love revealed as holy.

And here's why we're gonna we're gonna work to understand this together.

You see, the word holy means completely other.

When we say God is holy, it means he is so transcendent beyond ourselves that no one and nothing can even begin to compare to him.

He is completely other, he's altogether transcendent in his power, wisdom, and being.

He is morally perfect, and in himself the fullness of righteousness dwells.

God is holy.

And holiness is the characteristic of God's nature that is at the very core of his being.

It is from the reality of his holiness that every other attribute of his being flows from and is fortified by.

God's love is holy.

God's wrath is holy.

God's grace is holy, God's kindness is holy.

You go down the list, right?

And this is good for us.

God's justice is holy.

That's good for us.

God's love is holy.

That's good for us.

You see, holy is the only attribute that is given to God, ascribed to his person, that is actually follows this threefold pattern and formula that we see in the scriptures in two specific places.

One is in Isaiah 6, where Isaiah beholds the glory of God and he sees at his throne the seraphim.

And they declare, holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts.

The whole earth is full of his glory.

Nowhere in Scripture will you see love, love, love, grace, grace, grace.

It is holy is his name.

And also by the four living creatures of Revelation 4, who never cease day or night to proclaim holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come.

And so, church, if we're going to know God rightly, if we're going to know his love rightly, we must first know him as holy.

So all of that, all of his love, all of his grace, all of his wrath, all of it comes from, flows out of this eternal fountain of his person.

And the two things we need to look at to understand God's love rightly is not simply his holy love, but we must know and realize his holy justice.

You see, these two attributes, love and justice, I think if we're trying to communicate what love is, especially within our culture, justice will never be a part of the conversation.

Not in good and holy ways.

But what John sees is that these two realities, these two attributes, are actually inseparable from one another.

There's this chain that binds them together.

That God cannot be loving if he is not just.

And this is what he's gonna help us to see.

This unbreakable chain is what John will put before us to observe that if we are ever going to truly know and display the love of God, we must know it in his justice.

He says, in this is love.

So again, what's verse 10 working to do?

Verse 10 is working to establish the substance of God's love.

The presence is in the coming of Jesus, the substance of it he's about ready to reveal.

And John he feels this need to clarify something first, like, hey, reminder, this isn't because you loved him, this is because he loved you.

So how do we see?

How do we experience?

How do we understand God's love for us?

He sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins.

Uh I don't have any of you used the word propitiation this week in a sentence?

Like general conversation.

Hey, mom, just want to check on you.

Propitiation.

Uh no, probably not.

So what does propitiation mean, right?

It means wrath absorber.

That's what John's trying to help us understand.

Do you want to know what the substance of God's love is?

It's that the presence of his love absorbed the wrath of his justice so that we might know his holy love for us.

That's the substance of God's love.

You see, God the Father sent Jesus His Son to absorb the Father's wrath that was kindled against our sin and rebellion.

A simfulness of man that was an assault and violation to the holiness of his character.

You see, our sin demanded God's wrath.

If God is holy, he is morally perfect, he is completely other, then he has to do something about the presence of wickedness.

But not just about the presence of wicked action, the presence of wicked people.

You see, we we we try to like limp wrist God.

And uh, God, you gotta love, love the sinner, hate the sin.

For us, that's 100% true.

And we're gonna get to why that is for you and me.

For God, that is not true.

God hates the sin, he hates the sinner.

Jesus said this very thing.

Why do you fear man who can only destroy your body?

Why do you not fear the very one who can send body and soul to hell?

God doesn't take you in the end of time in the judgment before his throne and parse out your actions from your person and send your behavior to his eternal conscious torment under his wrath and preserve your personhood in some other state.

God sends the sinner with their sin to hell under the wrath of his justice because he hates it.

I told you, God's a passionate God.

The good news for us in Christ is that his passionate love for us has been made known to us.

You see, God is holy, and since our sin was an offense to his moral perfection, it demanded that justice be executed against it.

God must do something about sin.

And so he does.

God deals with sin in a passionate display of his love and his justice.

There's an old hymn that talks about at the cross is where love and justice kiss.

You cannot have one without the other.

They're inseparable realities of the two.

His love was displayed in this way that even in his wrath, he did not crush us under the weight of his holy justice, even though it would have been a righteous response to our sin.

And his justice was displayed in that he crushed his son in our place.

Somebody was going to pay for sin.

So Jesus was crushed under the Father's wrath so that we would be able to live under the Father's love.

That's gloriously good news.

You see, as Isaiah proclaimed in his suffering servant songs in Isaiah 53, he actually says that it pleased.

He says, Yes, it was the will of the Father to crush him.

It pleased him.

God found delight in this.

Not in this perverted way that our minds want to try and take this.

No, God found delight in its satisfaction.

That he could be with us.

You see, if we under wonder how passionate God's love is for us, all that we have to do is look to the cross.

That's God's passionate, holy love put on full display.

The cross is overflowing with holy passion.

He doesn't dismiss our sin and wickedness.

He doesn't come and just tell his son to teach us how to be nice.

No, Christmas is about the cross.

Jesus was born to die.

If you want to know God's pursuit of you, if you want to see how much he desires you, if you want to bring into clear sight how relentlessly he loves you, he should have crushed you.

He should have crushed me.

His righteous wrath was fixed to be poured out upon you.

But his holy and passionate love for you caused him to delight in pouring it out on his son so that he may be with you.

Remember, God will find no dwelling with wicked people.

But God desired to dwell with you.

So he was going to do something about it.

In all of the justice that our wickedness deserved, he said, I'll pour it out on my son so that I can be with you.

When we look at the advent of Jesus, it is the cost of heaven just to be with us.

Who didn't love him, but he loved us.

So let's return to verse 8 for a moment.

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

So if we say that we know him, right?

If we make this confession, then that claim is authenticated by the way that we love others.

Because our love for them is a necessary response to knowing the love of God for us.

You see, we don't have a right to try and execute justice.

We don't have a right for the act of vengeance.

We don't have the right to do these things because we have been receivers of that which we did not deserve.

That's why the scriptures clearly say, put that in the hands of God.

Vengeance is mine, declares the Lord.

Why are you called to love your enemies?

Why are you called to turn the other cheek?

Why are you called to walk in peace?

Why are you called to love in such a self-sacrificial way?

Because that's the love you received.

Here's what you don't ever want.

You don't ever want God to deal with you the way that you deserve.

So God forbid we deal with others the way they deserve.

So if we're gonna love people rightly, if that's gonna be a statement, if that's gonna be a way of life that authenticates, right, the confession of our faith, I want to offer three truths that I think we can observe in this text that transforms the way we love others.

The first one is this God's love, his love is a present love.

His love is a present love.

This kind of takes me to James, right?

James is saying, you say you have faith.

Well, let me see your faith by your works.

Because works without, or faith without works is dead, right?

Love without action is cold.

It has no impact.

There's no transformation there.

So we are thankful that God's love for us isn't just etched in some cold stone tablet, right, that resides in the Middle East.

No, we're thankful that God's love for us is seen and heard and felt and experienced in the coming of His Son, in the pouring out of His Spirit into our hearts, that we might respond in this affectionate declaration of Abba Father, right?

That's what we're thankful for.

That God's love is present with us.

And so, in the relationships that you have and the people that you're called to love, man, how much is your love just lip service rather than sacrificial service?

Present service.

And I think one of the best places we can start is right here at Sacred Mission Church.

We're called to be the body of Christ who loves one another.

And if I'm honest with myself, like there's more time that's lip service than dirty hands.

We've got people who are suffering, go through hardships, trials, and war.

We're just like, hey man, I love you.

But I'm gonna go sit in my recliner and watch the office for the 754th time.

But you'd be good.

Right?

Like, like when are we getting our hands dirty and loving people?

God's love is a present love.

It wasn't just something that remained distant and transcended, it was something that came near and it was real.

Our love should reflect that.

If we have known the love of God, it will be evident in our love for others being present in their life.

The second thing I think we can observe is that He loved first.

He loved first.

Um we we exist in this just horribly transactional economy of love.

It is horrible, right?

And most of the time, if we were really to reflect on relationships, our strongest relationships with other people are primarily determined by their love for us first.

And those of us who don't love us well or don't love us in the way that we find satisfying, we love less.

Because we're functioning out of a transactional economy of affection.

But God loved us when we did not love him, when we had no love to offer, when we had nothing to merit his love and affection for us, there was nothing that we were bringing to the table that says, Oh, I want to love them in response to the way they're loving me.

God's love is a first love.

And we should strive to love others in this way.

You see, the love that God has for us is only, or the love that we have for God, right?

The love that we have in us for Him now, it's only reciprocated from us after the suffering of the Son.

We did nothing to earn it.

The only thing that we deserved or earned was his wrath-filled justice.

And so, if God, imagine this, if God would have waited to love us in response to our love for him, you and I would have never come to know the love of God.

And so, how many of your relationships that you can think of right now are transactionally based?

If they love me first, then I'm going to love them in response.

And I just want to help us understand that's that's not the love of God, that's the love of the world.

And it's failing them, it's making them miserable, it's making them lonely.

The third thing is his love is sacrificial.

And this is love that Jesus took our place.

You see, he was compelled by his love for us to suffer and die, to endure the agony of the cross, and this is a sacrificial and merciful love.

To love people the way God loves us, it is going to cost us.

Because God's love is a costly love.

It costs all of heaven to love us, it's going to cost us time, comfort, money, space.

Like you name it, right?

It's going to cost us something.

And so we have to be sacrificial in our demonstration of it toward one another.

Because if it's not costing us something, then we should truly question: is it truly love?

All of love is sacrificial.

Are we willing to pay the cost for it?

And I think a lot of times we get really self-absorbed, right?

It's like, ah, this is inconvenient, this isn't the best time, or you know, but we have all these excuses that are really self-centered and self-loved focused rather than a genuine love for others.

And I'm going to add this on just as a, you know, this one's free.

Uh here, here's the reality.

We are entrenched in a self-love culture.

And it's causing us to be selfish people.

And I want to do a couple things.

First off, I want to acknowledge and I want to even affirm the reality and presence of mental health issues, emotional health issues, and care and counseling and therapy in those things.

I want to affirm that while at the same time challenge the reality that if the answer is self-love, I think we're going down the wrong avenue.

Because here's what I've discovered personally, and I think that this affirms the truth of the scripture: that we don't need self-love.

We need to be loved more.

Be loved by the Father to experience and to feel and to know the beauty of the love of God and the gospel of his son Jesus.

The more you and I are loved and we experience that and feel that, right?

Not from something intrinsically within us, but from something transcendent beyond us.

To know the love of God more makes us love others more.

I don't know if you've known the love of a good woman.

I'm sorry if you haven't.

I have had the pleasure and joy to know the love of a good woman.

You know what that makes me want to do?

It makes me want to love her better, makes me want to love my children better, it makes me want to love some of you better.

Right?

Like to know her love is astronomically better than any striving to love myself that I could ever pursue.

And I want to submit that what the scriptures show us is that the bigger the gospel becomes, the smaller we become, the more like him we live.

And we're able to love better by being loved better.

That one was for you, right?

Free.

But but but let's go back.

If God's love is present, if God loves us first, if God's love is sacrificial, then when John says, anyone who does not love, does not know God, because God is love, he's talking about people where these things are absent in their life.

If we're gonna claim to know God, then these things have to be evident and true.

Or else we only have one conclusion to draw.

We don't love God.

Church, our hope is in this.

Jesus is the advent of love.

He was sent into the world to bring us out of death and into life through the wrath-absorbing sacrifice of the cross.

Jesus was born to die so that we wouldn't have to.

This is the love of God revealed in holy passion.

Let's pray.