Love God More: Part 1

Now, as we dive into the text, here's what thing we have to kind of wrestle with on the front end of this, okay?

One is that there's a reality where we're preaching a message called love God more, but we're gonna see a kingdom principle that does something unique.

It flips on its head the very thing or the notions that we might assume of what it would mean to love God more.

We might see it in ways or assume it in ways of the more I read my Bible, the more I pray, the more I lift my hands in worship during the music, the more I do whatever, the more I'm going to cultivate a deeper, more sincere, authentic love for God.

But if you know anything about the gospels, if you know anything about the teachings of Jesus, he tends to do something very unique in that he flips our presumptions on their head and shows us the way of God through the lens of the kingdom in a way that should set us right in the ways that we journey toward a deeper, more intimate, sincere relationship with God.

The other thing, though, that's gonna happen is that John is going to help us understand what love really is.

And that's critical for us because a lot of us are gonna come with preconceived notions of what we want to define love as, right?

Love might look this way to us, or we think it should work itself out in these ways in the way that we live our life.

We're gonna come to the table, you and I, with certain presumptions, functional definitions, or worldviews that color for us what love might look like.

And John's gonna do a beautiful job of clarifying for us what does love mean?

Because here's something that's challenging.

In our English language, we have one word for love, right?

And so I don't know if maybe you're a chip connoisseur like myself, but I I would argue that the Sweet Chili Doritos chip is the best chip on the market.

I love sweet chili Doritos.

Yes, thank you.

Yes.

Uh Buffalo, they are so good.

Buffalo Wild Wings did a sauce around them, and then they crumble sweet chili Doritos on top for you to enjoy as if I wasn't gluttonous enough.

But I also love my wife.

Now, hopefully, those two loves are very different.

Some of you this morning love the bangles, and you actually do love them more than your wife.

No, I'm joking.

You hopefully not.

Hopefully that's not true.

But for some of you, uh it might be.

But we only have one word for love, and so it becomes difficult for us to understand these different modes or uh uh understandings that the scriptures communicate about love.

There's different words.

There's one word called eros, it it where we get the word erotic from, but it really means this kind of affectual love that would be between a husband and a wife.

We also have a word called Philia, which we get the word Philadelphia from.

It's this brotherly love, the city of brotherly love.

Not so much anymore, but that's okay.

And it's glory days, um, right?

And so uh it's this understanding of how fellowship and friendship should be sparked between two people with a distinct kind of love.

As we work into 1 John, what we're gonna discover is that there's this other love the Bible knows and communicates to us called agape love.

Agape love.

And here's what I want to do.

I want to work hard to give us a functional definition of what John means and what the scriptures reveal to us about this word agape.

So here's a functional definition.

If you got your notes out, if you got your pen in hand or type in on your app, make sure you get this.

Agape love is the steady intention of the will to another's highest good.

Let's say that again.

Agape love is the steady intention of the will to another's highest good.

So there's some things to clarify about this.

The primary thing that you and I need to clarify about this is that this is not emotive-driven.

This is not something about how you feel, right?

That would be more of the eros love of the scriptures.

This is a conscious choice.

When we look throughout the Old Testament, there's a lot of times where we see the steadfast love of the Lord.

It's how it describes God's love.

What that fundamentally means in its language is that God, out of his will, makes a conscious choice to love you.

And there's nothing based upon our own actions, whether good or rebellious, that is going to thwart or dictate whether God loves you or not, because he has chosen to place that love upon you, and it is steadfast in its very nature, meaning it shall not change or have any turning.

And so it's not an emotive love, it is a conscious choice.

What the early church did was to try and understand this agape love more practically, is that they understood it in the context of a meal.

And so there's certain traditions, even in our own day, that will practice something called a love feast.

The early church, they are understood it as this agape meal or this love feast, and what they did was they practiced providing sustenance for those who, in their own strength and resources, could not provide it for themselves.

And so they would create this table that they would set before the community, and they would make food, they would they would uh uh cook and labor and try to provide something for those around them that could not provide for themselves.

And they saw this as one of the most practical ways this agape love was actually lived out in community.

And so John's going to give us a portrait of this agape love, and this portrait's gonna be centralized or rooted in the sending of Jesus for our sin to be our Savior.

In every way imaginable, the thought of a meal of sustenance to the poor and needy is going to be demonstrated and communicated to us through what John is saying here.

We are going to be, as it were, sitting at a table that we might feast without pay to realize and understand the fullness of God's love that he has for us.

As we dive into the text, we see in verses seven through eight, we're gonna kind of break this up into four chunks.

So if we look at verses seven through eight, we see this.

We see the law of love.

The law of love.

Uh John starts out the gate.

Beloved, I uh let us love one another, for love is from God.

And then he ends verse eight with God is love.

So let's look at these two kinds of uh realities.

We should love, and then there's two reasons.

We should love because love is from God, and God is love.

So love in and of itself is both an attribute and a gift.

All right, let's understand this.

An attribute, it is something that is of the actual personhood and nature of God.

And this attribute is communicable.

So when we look out through theology and we understand our relationship with God, there are certain aspects of God's personhood that are communicable to us as image bearers.

What do I mean by communicable?

They are shared with us.

There are certain aspects of God's nature and personhood that are not shared with us, but yet there are others that are.

And love is one of the primary ones that is shared with us as image bearers.

So an aspect or an attribute of God's actual personhood is shared with us as image bearers of Him.

So love is from God because God is love.

That's His attribute.

But then He gives us the gift of love also.

And so that dictates something for us.

That means that we don't have the freedom or right to try and say or have authority over what love should be and how it should look.

We don't have that freedom.

We don't have that authority because it's not ours.

When we try to do that, what do we in essence try to do?

We try to dictate who God is and how he should be in relationship with his people.

Well, what does the potter say to the clay?

Who are you?

So we have to submit to the truth that's been shown to us in the scriptures because when we try to mess with love, we're not just messing with the concept of how we engage with one another, we're dealing with the very nature and person of who God is in his essence.

And so we have to get this right, and John's gonna start the scene or lay the foundation for us in such a way.

Loving others is the fruit of being born of God and knowing him.

He goes on to say, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.

This is the fruit of being in a relationship with God.

It's something that comes after the fact.

It is not something that earns a relationship with God, how we treat others or how we love others.

It is a fruit or a byproduct of the reality that we have come to know and be born of God.

It's something that's produced or fostered within us after we have known his salvation.

And then he goes on to say, and anyone who does not love, does not know God.

The credibility of our confession is found in our actions.

We're gonna continue on with this theme later in the passage because John revisits it, but what we say and what we do are inseparable realities.

And there's credibility in our confession by the way of which we live our lives.

If we truly say we love God, then we should love others.

Because here's what John does he lays up something for us in a gentler way now that he's gonna bring home in a much harsher, demanding reality for us later in this passage.

And here's his gentleness toward us.

Anyone who does not love God does not know God.

That is John being gentle.

Wait until he gets a little bit more harsh in his language toward us and later on in the text.

But he concludes with God is love.

Here's something that we have to be cautious of as we engage with this language.

We cannot elevate one attribute of God above another.

John is not trying to make some summarizing statement about God indefinitely that he is simply love.

In fact, in this very letter of 1 John, he goes on to say that God is light, God is spirit.

So even John himself is going to use these God is uh phrases to help us understand God better and more clearly.

Why does John summarize God in this portion as God is love?

Because he's trying to build on or affirm the principle that he's trying to make in the whole message itself, that if we truly claim to love God, we should love others, because an attribute of God is that he is love.

But God is also light, spirit, he is also justice and mercy, he is also wrath, he is also jealous, he is also vengeance, vengeful, he is all of these things that the scriptures, he is kind, all of these things that the scriptures communicate about God, and if we elevate one attribute of him over another, we get a warped perspective of who God is, and it really uh causes us in some ways to not worship God, but worship our own fabrication of him.

And so we have to hold intention the beautiful harmony of God in all of his attributes, and realize that in this text, John is helping us understand a greater principle about our response to having said we have known the love of God, rather than trying to summarize fully all of God and his personhood through one simple phrase.

In 9 through 12, we see the portrait of love, the portrait of love.

So, 7 and 8, the law of love.

9 through 12, we're gonna get the portrait of love.

God's love was made manifest, John said.

He said, In this, what is this, right?

When he says, in this, what is this?

It is the fullness of the finished work of his son Jesus that we see the love of God, he says, made manifest.

What this means is that it was brought forth into light.

We talked about last week how we should we serve a God who has revealed himself to us.

The principle or theological understanding of revelation is so critical to us as believers because we serve a God who has made himself known.

He's brought himself into the light.

We do not serve a God who has concealed himself or remained in the shadows or in darkness, leaving us just to our own speculation about who he might be.

No, he has shown himself.

And how does he fully show himself to us?

He reveals himself fully and most comprehensively in his son Jesus.

In this, the gospel of Christ, 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.

It was brought forth for a purpose that those of us who were dead in our sin might be made alive and live through the Son.

And he talks about this very nature of the way in which we were dead in our sin.

And he does this in two ways.

He first says in verse 10, in this is love.

Not that we loved God, but that God loved us.

How were we dead in our sin first?

We were dead in our sin because we did not love God, nor love our neighbor, of which we were called to do, but God loved us.

When we were unlovely, he loved.

When we were in rebellion against him, when we when we did not desire to love him or serve him or be in relationship with him, God loved us.

And how does he reconcile or right the wrong of all of the sin in our life?

He does so by sending his son to be a propitiation for our sin.

Now, this word propitiation, it simply means wrath absorber, is one way you could understand it.

It means that Christ stood in our place under the wrath of God for the punishment of our sin.

You see, God is not a God who looked at our sin and just said, Hey, if you can be okay with it, I can be okay with it, and we can kind of just sweep this under the rug and get along.

No, that would actually be something that would be at war against the attribute of his justice.

God had to see his justice fulfilled, and he saw it fulfilled in Christ by taking our place on the cross.

We believe in this principle of substitutionary atonement, meaning something had to pay for the price of our sin.

And Christ, in his love and kindness, stood in our place as our substitute, and on him the fullness of God's wrath was poured out so that we might be brought in as orphaned children to the family of God.

This is the beauty of Christ's atoning work.

That he was brought forth for propitiation, a wrath absorber in our place.

If God loved us in such a radical and relentless way, we also ought to love one another, church.

This is what John is helping us understand.

Because the gospel declares that we love because we have been loved.

It goes on to say, No one has seen God.

Verse 12.

There's a reality where everything John is saying here is true, but we have to try and interpret Scripture with Scripture.

This is a fundamental principle of biblical interpretation.

We use Scripture to see against itself the fullness of what it's trying to communicate instead of just drawing out of one passage trying to create a complete or comprehensive thought.

That's we're not able to do that through the scriptures.

We have to allow scripture to interpret itself as we cross-reference it to get a bigger picture of God's revealed truth.

Though we have not seen the Father, we have seen the fullness of his love in the Son.

Let's go back to John 14, uh, chapter 14, verse 9.

Jesus talking to Philip, who asked Jesus, Show us the Father.

Here's what Jesus says.

Jesus said to him, Have I been with you so long and you still do not know me, Philip?

Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.

How can you say, Show us the Father?

Jesus is the fullness of the glory of God the Father manifested to us.

John even says that in the letter that we just read.

He says that in this way, what was in darkness concealed, has been brought forth into light and revealed to you the love of God the Father that He has for you.

How?

Through the fullness of Jesus' sacrificial work on the cross.

And so, in a real way, the Father has been brought forth into light that we might see through his son himself.

Sacrificial love for others becomes the evidence that God's sacrificial love has ransomed us.

He concludes no one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us.

Where is our evidence that God's love dwells within us?

Well, it's in do we love others.

Verses 13 through 16, we see the testimony of love.

The testimony of love.

Let's read through this since we didn't get to in our earlier part of the gathering.

By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his spirit.

So we've been given two testimonies from the Father that testify to us of his love and affirm it in our hearts.

The first one that he's given us is the Holy Spirit.

It is through the Holy Spirit that we can have confidence and assurance that we have received and known the love of the Father.

I don't know about you, but when I got saved, my whole world changed.

I went from a person who got high and hated God, rebelled against him and every authority in my life.

I did graffiti and skateboard it.

It was punk rock, anarchist, blah, blah, blah.

You name it, I did it.

And then all of a sudden something flipped when the Holy Spirit filled my heart and took out that stone rock that was in my chest and gave me one of flesh that I might know the love of God.

I didn't want to do those things anymore.

I didn't want to.

I remember after the service that I went to at this small little Pentecostal church in Lebanon, I walked up to the pastor and I simply said these words, I don't want to sin anymore.

And then a love for his word started filling my life.

A love for prayer, for worship, for the church and the people of God started flooding my heart.

What is that?

That's the testimony of the Holy Spirit in your life, giving you confidence that the love of God has wrecked you.

But he goes on to say, and we have seen and testified that the Father has sent his son to be the Savior of the world.

Who is this we who have seen and testified?

It is the apostles.

John the Beloved, he was a disciple of Christ in the New Testament church, an apostle of Christ in his church.

He has seen and testified.

And so the second testimony that we are given by God for affirmation that we have known his love is the apostolic witness of the ancient church.

So we have the spirit as the first testimony to us, but we have the apostolic witness as the second testimony.

This is the reality of the Christian faith that it's been a public revelation to the world for them to see the glory of Christ.

And this makes Christianity unique in every sense of the way, uh form, because all other religions have been private in revelation but demanded to be followed publicly.

Let's give two examples, right?

One simple example would be Islam.

Muhammad got revelation privately and then demanded publicly that all People would follow it.

Mormonism, Joseph Smith up in New York, digging at a tree, finds some golden tablets, some magic glasses like Harry Potter.

Then all of a sudden, oh, there's truth.

Private revelation that then he demanded public to be followed and submit to.

But what about the gospel?

The gospel was public from the beginning.

It was never an individual who received some private revelation and then demanded that the world submit to it.

No, it was put on display for all people to see, being brought out of concealment into the light of the world, and now we are held accountable that we might submit our own selves to it.

Even Paul, writing in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, he says, if you don't believe the report that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried and that he rose again.

1 Corinthians 15 · chapter mention

If you don't believe the report of our testimony, here's 500 brothers that you can go ask if they saw the same thing we did.

Because the revelation of God is public in its very nature, which gives us assurance and confidence in the faith of which we confess, that we align ourselves to the church of old with the consistent message of the gospel, and so we have the testimony of the Spirit and the apostolic witness that produces what for us?

Confession.

Confession.

Because what does John go on to say?

He says, whoever confesses, verse 15, that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.

And here's the supernatural reality of this.

No one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit.

And Jesus is Lord is a fundamental theological statement.

And so what we see is the power of these two testimonies coming together create for you and I our confession.

By the Spirit, through the apostolic witness, we are able to declare Jesus is Lord.

And this lets us know we abide in Him and He in us.

Through this power, spirit, and truth, we have come to know the love that God has for us.

That's what he says in 16.

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

God is love.

And whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

As we close out this section of the text, 17 through 21, we see the power of love.

The power of love.

We are commanded to love in 7 and 8.

We have been shown the portrait of love.

We have attained confident knowledge of love.

And now, in the closing of this section of the text, we will be perfected in love.

And I love what John does here because he brings everything home in this way.

What does he say love perfected in us does?

It creates us to be fearless.

It creates us to be fearless.

Why?

Because the only thing that we should fear is the punishment of God, the creator of all of the cosmos, for our sin.

Look what he says.

He says this love perfects in us so that we would have confidence for the day of judgment.

Because as he is, so also are we in this world.

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.

For fear in its very nature, he goes on to say, has to do with punishment.

But what was Christ?

Christ was the propitiation, the one who took the punishment on our behalf.

And so if we are in Christ, because the Spirit of God has filled us and we have confessed Him as Lord, then in Christ there is no fear because we don't have to worry about punishment for the sins that we have committed in our lives, because Christ absorbed that punishment by being the wrath absorber himself in our place.

Therefore, we can live boldly, fearless lives, because there is no power in all of creation that could ever harm us because we are in him.

There is nothing to fear in the love of God, because we have been saved from the punishment of our sin.

The propitiating work of Jesus has absorbed the punishment we deserve so that we can obtain the Father's blessing.

We love because He first loved.

And in that love we have no fear.

If he set us up softly and gently in the beginning, here he's going to bring home the truth about the lives of which we live.

This language of John is hard for us to hear.

If we hate our brother, but we say we love God, fundamentally we're liars.

We can't have it that way.

Being those who have experienced and known God's love for us through Jesus demands out of us that we love others.

It's a natural response, right?

It would be like us saying we're vegans, but then eating a steak at the table.

People would be like, I don't understand you at all.

Right?

We're saying one thing, but then we're doing another.

And while that might be silly and funny in a real, eternal way, John's saying the same thing.

You cannot say you've known God's love and then not love your brother.

If you do that, you're a liar.

What I believe that this text is helping us understand clearly this morning is that loving God more is evidenced in loving others more.

Loving God more is evidenced in loving others more.

I think this is the kingdom principle that's going to flip some of our assumptions on its head.

That to actually love God more starts with loving others more.

If we are people who have confessed that Jesus is Lord and that we have known the love of the Father, then the reality is that we would love others more.

And so if we want to love God more, then the more that we expressed the attribute and gift of which He has given to us as believers, the more that that love for Him will be fostered in our lives.

We don't start loving God more.

Let me submit this.

We don't start loving God more by going through our Bible reading plan, you know, uh relentlessly day in and day out, by praying for hours on end, by fasting all of our meals for a month, by doing this, by doing that.

No, to love God more is going to be initialized as an evidence in simply loving others more.

Because if we're doing all of those things but we're still not loving our brother, do we really love God and has his love been perfected in us?

The scriptures seem to be clear.

No.

You see, it seems like a contradictive statement.

If we desire to love God more, we must love others more.

But to love God more is discovered in his image being restored in us through the power of the gospel.

That image which we bear contains the attribute of love, a relentless, sacrificial, benevolent love.

This agape love, the steady intention of the will for the highest good of another.

This is the love of which God has shown to us so perfectly and beautifully in his son Jesus, and the love of which he's calling us to express in our own lives also.

If we abide in God, then that love abides in us.

And that love is not purposed to be hoarded or kept in, but to be set upon others.

To be like God, to love others with his love will cause us to love him more in return.

This is the gospel being believed, applied, and expressed in the lives of his people.

This will strengthen and grow our affections for the Father.

Yet many of us, we wrestle with misconceptions about love, about our relationship with God, and even our relationship with others.

And this leads us to live in very dangerous and even false ways that result in that result in deceiving others and ourselves.

Some of us, we believe that loving others equals loving God.

We believe that loving others equals loving God.

And let me try to clarify this for us this morning.

Many of us, what we'll do is we'll flip the truth of God is love and distort it into the lie that love is God.

And those are very different statements that are being made by the individual.

One is saying that God in Himself is the attribute of love.

The other is saying that the attribute love is God.

And often what we do is when we go down the road of love is God, we start trying to determine and dictate what that love is and how it should look expressed.

And we end up worshiping an idol, a God of our own fabrication, rather than the God who has revealed Himself through the scriptures.

And so it's idolatrous in its very nature to believe that love is God.

We believe that we can fulfill all that God has called us to, all that God demands of us in our lives, simply by striving to love others.

Not submitting to Jesus as Lord and from the outwork of that revelation and truth in our life, loving others, but seeking right relationship with God fundamentally in loving others.

But I think in this pursuit, we at least get three things critically wrong.

Number one, we fail to realize that on our own, we are incapable of truly loving others.

On our own, we are incapable of truly loving others.

Here's what I mean by that.

First, in this letter, John is telling us not to just generically love people, but he's telling us to love others the way God has loved us.

And so, first, we have to understand and know God's love for us that we might truly love others.

If we seek to love others out of our own strength, out of our own understanding, it is not going to be God's love, it's going to be our love, which will be sinful, fallen, and not be the way of which God has truly called us to love others.

But secondarily, what we fail to realize is that what John communicated to us earlier in this letter, we didn't love God.

He loved us.

We are incapable to truly love others in our own state because we don't love others.

We don't love God, we don't love our neighbor.

This is the reason that God had to send his own son, not out of the way of which we deserved it because of how amazing that we were, but because of how we didn't deserve it.

We deserved wrath and punishment, but it was God who loved us who sent his son to be our Savior.

The second thing we get critically wrong is that Jesus had to be the propitiation for our inability and unwillingness to love God and others.

God didn't just come down and say, hey, y'all, if you could just work a little harder, try a little bit more, and kind of get this thing right for once, we can all be good, right?

That's not the message of the gospel.

Hey, if you guys could just love each other better, then we can just kind of move on and everything can be uh this utopian society that that you we've all desired it to be.

And that's the mantra of this world, right?

If we can just love better, and then what's everybody doing?

They're trying to define what that love should look like.

Oh, well, loving really isn't that way.

You have to love this way, and we're gonna define uh on the daily a different interpretation and a different realization of what that love should look like, because the love of yesterday does not constitute or equal the love of today according to the standards of this world.

But God doesn't say, hey, if you could just love better, we'll make everything right.

No, God said you won't be able to.

You are not able to love, nor do you desire to love in the way of which I love you, and therefore Christ isn't just gonna come and tell you to be nice, Christ is gonna come and be crushed under my hand so that you might be reconciled and made whole in his very presence.

And third, we are empowered to love only by the gospel.

The Spirit in us and the gospel witness through us is the power that enables us to love in which the ways in which God has called us to love.

1 John 4, 10.

Let's reiterate this.

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.

To live in a way where we believe love is God, and that if we simply work to love others, God will be satisfied with us, creates a damning idol of self-righteousness that discards the finished work of Jesus as useless trash.

If we can do this on our own, why do we need Jesus?

And that's the world's understanding of him, right?

Not as a Messiah, but as a good teacher.

If we can just do what he said, everything will be fine.

However, we don't even really want to listen to what he said.

And we just want to fabricate his own words into the own image of love that we want to make it to be, and then we worship that.

And in that worship, we demand from every single person on this earth that they love the way we determine it should be.

And it is hopeless.

It is a hopeless state.

We deceive ourselves and place our hope in a powerless God of self.

And we deceive others by calling them to follow our lead toward their ultimate destruction.

How egregiously wicked is our self-expression, self-deception of love.

Some of us, though, we believe we can love God without loving others.

We believe we can love God without loving others.

John the Beloved has some strong language for us.

We are liars.

We cannot love God if we do not work to see his love perfected in us and bear the fruit of setting that love upon others.

To love God and to love our neighbor are two parts of a singular whole.

When Jesus was asked, what is the greatest commandment?

Singular, he answers with two.

He says, All of the law can be summed up in this way: to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

What is Jesus communicating?

You cannot separate loving God and loving others.

They are two inseparable parts of a singular whole of which God calls us to be as his image bearers.

And here's the reality for us: we may, in our own confession and conviction, say with clarity, well, of course, of course we love God and we love others.

But our lives tend to tell a different story.

And we don't really love others.

In fact, we have a lot of animosity toward others.

And I think that one of the ways that it plays itself out in our camp is that what we have led ourselves to believe is that if we uh uh love, if someone loves God, then they also get all the answers right to their doctrine.

So these two things go hand in hand: loving God, saying you love Jesus, and getting all the answers right in your doctrine.

And so what do we do?

We create animosity toward those who say they love Jesus, but don't have the same answers as us in our theology and doctrine.

And we don't show love to them, we show judgment, animosity, we cast them out, we don't give them the fellowship that they deserve as being a brother or sister in Christ.

That's not what the scriptures say.

It's not love Jesus and get all the answers right, it's love Jesus and love others.

And so we even condemn ourselves in our actions because we've set this false dichotomy up.

And we're not, we might say with our mouth that we love others, but in our very actions we only show animosity toward them.

We break fellowship with them, we cast them out because they don't have the right answers.

There is no real gospel power where our beliefs and our actions are so disjointed.

He will not look at you on the day of judgment and say, Well done, my good and faithful servant, because you loved me and you got all your doctrine right.

He will say, Because you loved me and you loved others faithfully.

This is revealed to us in this very text.

If we say, but we do not do, we are liars.

Let that sit heavy on you this morning.

1 John 4 20.

If anyone says, I love God and hates his brother, he is a liar.

For he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.

And probably one of the most dangerous ways this has crept into the church in today's time is in a political divide that we have created that is nowhere discovered within the scriptures.

And we might say we love God, but if you say you're voting Democrat, no.

You're not our brother.

You're against us.

We've got to get the politics out.

I'm not saying that the gospel doesn't speak to politics.

I'm not saying that the scriptures don't speak to politics.

They speak to every aspect and facet of our life, and they inform those things, and they should rightly inform those things.

But we have created a dangerous divide in the church, and it has caused us to functionally live out a lie rather than the truth of what he's called us to in loving others.

We must wrestle with the strong language of John and work to live in such a way that the action of our lives certifies the beliefs of our minds and the words of our hearts.

Our hope, though, church, is in Christ.

Jesus was despised so that we would be loved.

This is the hope of the gospel that we have this morning.

Jesus was despised so that we would be loved.

Love caused God to send Jesus to be our propitiation, our wrath absorber, so that we might know and be embraced by the fullness of God's love for us.

Psalm 22, 1 and 6 says this.

What glorious good news is that we have been so loved.

It was not our love that caused God, that motivated God or moved his hand on our behalf.

It was his own love that drove him to make a way for us out of our hopeless despair.

We were merely beggars, poor and needy, who could not provide what we needed out of our own strength.

But God's love for us set the table.

And he freely gave us a seat to be welcomed and to feast.

And it was the meal of his own son, the Lamb who was slain for the sins of the world.

And as you and I feast without pay, we are brought into the fullness of God's agape, sacrificial for our ultimate good, love.

Look at God's love for us.

In Christ, we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us.

And so my hope for us this morning, church, is that we would love others like we have been loved.

We would love others like we have been loved.

Pause for a moment and reflect on the relentless, sacrificial, benevolent, overwhelming love that God has for you.

Just ponder that for a moment.

The call is not for us to simply hoard that love in for our own self-benefit, but to joyfully lavish it on others.

A person who has been overcome by the love of God is a person who cannot help but to love others also.

There are people who are sacrificial, seeking the good and welfare of others, not after selfish desires, but humbly seeking to serve one another.

They are a person who loves because they have been loved.

And so we should aim for such a life.

Because after all, how can we say we truly love God if we fail to love others?

Let's pray.