The Advent of Love

I want to welcome each of you here and uh to the worship of Christ.

We're in Advent season.

This is an exciting time.

Uh the church is beautified, and we all have Jesus and his first coming on our minds.

And so with that in mind, we're going to be looking at the Advent of Love this morning.

The Advent of Love.

If we could sum up all the Christmas spirit in one word.

All the kindness, the generosity, the gift giving, the family celebrations, the paying it forward, the roasting chestnuts on an open fire.

Okay, has anyone ever done that here?

Oh, one.

You're a great American.

Wow.

That is impressive.

One.

If we could sum all this Christmas spirit up in one word, I think we might agree unsurprisingly.

It would be the word love.

This isn't something lost on marketers, to be sure.

There are products this season that are packaged beautifully and top of the red bow, and they uh show up on your TV and in magazines that come in the mail getting you to try to buy stuff for Christmas.

That promising either explicitly or implicitly, if you place this under your tree and someone opens it with such delight, it's going to create human bonding.

After all, that's why you want your children happy.

It's not happy apart from you.

You want them to love you.

You want your spouse to be delighted in what you get them or whomever you give a gift to.

Even in a Christless culture, you know, the part of culture that doesn't like the Christmas part, that it wants to say seasons, greetings, etc., even they are generally happy to jump on the bandwagon this time of year with uh their own benevolent seasons greetings and well-wishes and gift giving.

In fact, just yesterday I got an email from my dentist's office.

It was like eight in the morning, my phone buzzes.

Get an email, dentist's office says this on behalf of our entire office, we wish, we want to wish you a joyous holiday season filled with health, love, and laughter.

There that word is.

After all, nothing says a holiday season filled with love, health, and laughter like a tooth filling or a root canal.

Nonetheless, I appreciated their sentiment.

Even though they didn't leave or put Christ in Christmas and they called it holiday seasons, greetings, etc., I think there is something universal in the human heart that longs for and even enjoys this time of year with all the uh magnanimity that is flowing from heart to heart.

But I want to ask this morning, as thinking believers and Christians should often do, on what basis is there any legitimacy or credibility or currency to the idea of love and affection and warmth and kindness, whether in this season or any other season of the year for that matter?

Is there really any basis at all for all this talk about love?

For all the emphasis, for all the gifts, for all the effort.

I mean, if you look at a VRBO ads, what are they trying to market there?

You see some uh, you know, dad of a teenager looking out the window, and his daughter, who is kind of dressed emo, is like looking at a pond and saying, wow, this is beautiful.

And they're like, Yeah, VRBO.

Get her away from her phone and outside, and it's gonna create bonding.

They're selling love.

We all long for this kind of love.

But here's the question: what is the basis for all of this talk of love?

And I ask this because without a transcendent basis, a place to stand for love, we're just injecting ourselves with emotional Novocaine to numb the throbbing pain of sadness and loneliness and emptiness that is so much a part of the universal human condition.

So, what is the basis for love and human goodwill?

The answer is so simple, a child could tell us this morning.

Jesus is the reason for this season.

Because in the advent of Jesus Christ was the advent of true and abiding love.

And so this morning we turn our hearts towards 1 John chapter 4, verses 7 through 11, as we contemplate together the advent of love that came to us in the Advent of Jesus.

1 John 4:7–11

Now, if you want to pull out your phone, I sent four photos in the members app.

And if you don't have that, I apologize, but if you do have that, please take advantage of it.

We would be displaying this on the screen here.

The very first one I sent, it shows the entire text in one view with all the words love underlined.

It's rather remarkable.

There are 12 occurrences of some form of the word love in our text.

It's not difficult to tell from the text before us what the theme is.

John is often called the apostle of love because he wrote about love more than anyone else in all of Scripture.

And here, this text might be the epitome of his writings about love, because here it saturates every verse.

But John is not merely writing about love in the abstract or just giving some pietistic uh call to be nice to people.

He's calling us to participate in love as a divine activity, in something that is so tightly connected to God Himself that he would say love is from God and love is from God and that God himself is love.

And so we as human beings, created in God's image, the image of our loving Creator, we are called upon here to love each other.

And so in the second slide that I sent you in the members' app, in the church app members thread, you'll see two verses uh boxed.

The first verse of our text versus verse seven in the verse 11.

So the first and the last, where he commands, where he issues this appeal, beloved, let us love one another, verse 7.

And then in conclusion in verse 11, beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.

So he's not merely just writing about love in the abstract, talking about let's just think about God's love.

Let's let's exalt maybe the innate goodness within all humans to love.

No, he's not doing that at all.

He's gonna point us to love, and then as in the beginning and in the end of the text, he's going to appeal to us that we ought to reciprocate this same love that we have been beneficiaries of.

Beloved, let us love one another.

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

And so our main idea this morning is rather clear.

We ought to love one another.

A definition of love that I came across that I thought was helpful goes like this Biblical love, in which is maybe you've heard the term agape.

Agape love is the Greek word that underlies most of the occurrences of the word love in the New Testament.

And it's a very, it's it's a Christian love.

It's it's the biblical love.

And so this is how we may define it.

And it's the word love here in our text.

A biblical agape love is the love of choice, the love of serving with humility, the highest kind of love, the noblest kind of devotion.

It's a love of the will, with intentionality, the fruit of conscious choice, and not motivated by superficial appearances, emotional attraction, or sentimental relationships.

Agape is not based on pleasant emotions or good feelings that might result from physical attraction or family bond.

Agape chooses as an act of self-sacrifice to serve the recipient.

This kind of love is something that does not come natural.

Hopefully that became clear just in that definition.

This is not the love you have for your child as a parent.

In Greek, they would call that store-gay love.

It's this natural affinity for your offspring.

It's not romantic love.

A physical attraction that maybe in the first 24 months of a relationship, when the endorphins are high, you feel this great motivation to do wonderful things for each other and climb mountains and slay dragons.

Then about month 26, you start having to choose to love, like Jesus said to love.

This agape is not something that comes natural to us.

And so John is not merely going to give us a cotton candy pep talk that disintegrates when it comes into contact with a cold, soaking reality of hard things in life and in our fallen world.

Rather, John is going to, between the exhortation, let us love one another, and the exhortation, if God so loved us, we ought to love one another, between those things, he's going to give us three reasons, which you can see conveniently in the third picture I sent you.

He lays out three massive reasons for this moral imperative.

Why we ought to love one another with agape love.

The first is in verse 7, for love is from God.

The second is in verse 8, because God is love.

And the third is in verse 11, an if-then argument, if God so loved us, then we ought also to love one another.

Three reasons we should love the way God loves us.

Reason number one, in verse seven, for love is of God.

This is really interesting.

He's not going to appeal to love on the basis of, hey, this is sort of a utilitarian approach that this is what's going to result in the most good for the most people.

He's going to center this concept of love in God Himself.

The reason love is so wholesome and so good and so right and so beautiful and so healthy is because it comes from God.

It's not the product of human evolution and merely an effort to survive.

Let's get along, and if we band together, we'll do better.

It's not merely the socially constructed consensus of people saying, hey, you know, whenever you do things for me like this, it makes me feel happy, I'll do the same for you, then we'll all be happier.

So it's not evolutionary, it's not socially constructed, it's not arbitrary.

It is something rooted in the very nature of God.

Love is of God.

And what's also a huge part of this idea is that as he goes on to say in verse 7, and whoever loves has been born of God is the idea this.

If this love is uniquely from God, then apart from you being from God, namely born of God spiritually, you can't love this way.

This love is uniquely from God, and apart from being born of God, you can't love this way.

All you can do is love in all the other ways, which are good, and we're thankful for.

But this specific text is talking about agape love, the love that comes from God.

Love is of God.

So he says, Whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.

This is an interesting phrase.

Uh, this idea of being born again.

In fact, if you were to hear that phrase, born again, outside of this room, sort of out there, if you're maybe reading uh Google News or you're watching something on TV and you hear the term born again, it's almost always derogatory.

Born-again Christians.

Those people that think they've had some supernatural, transformative experience of God, and yeah, they're kind of over there in the corner, and we'll just leave it to them.

It's almost always derogatory, the born-again people.

Spoken of in that way.

But biblically speaking, this is a thing.

That God implants a new life principle in human beings that radically transformed them from the inside out.

Jesus called it being born again.

In fact, in John chapter 1, verses 12 and 13, the apostle John, who's the same guy who wrote our text, he says this.

John 1:12

In the very first chapter of his long 21 chapter gospel, he said this.

Jesus came to his own, and his own did not receive him.

That's standard business right there.

People don't naturally receive Jesus.

He's an inconvenience, he asks too much, he's too much trouble.

No, thank you.

I'm good.

That's standard, that's standard hardware in every human being.

He came into his own and his own did not receive him.

But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.

There's that of God language.

Offspring of God.

And then he says this those who were born not of blood that is mere natural lineage, nor of the will of the flesh, that is not something they conjured up from within them their own selves, nor of the will of man.

It's not something you can choose to do of your own accord.

But they were born of God.

Three chapters later, in John chapter three, Jesus is speaking with a master in Israel.

His name is Nicodemus, really, really, really sharp guy.

Knew the Old Testament Jewish scriptures, front and backwards, and Jesus is talking to him, and Jesus says to Nicodemus, You need to be born again.

And Nicodemus says, Born again?

And this is what he says to Jesus.

How can a man be born when he is old?

Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?

He was kind of making fun of Jesus.

Yeah, that's a great idea, Jesus.

And Jesus says, No.

Truly, truly I say to you, unless one is born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.

And that which is born of the spirit is spirit.

Rather, that which is born of the flesh is flesh.

That is, it stays flesh.

Flesh can't produce spirit.

That which is born naturally of the flesh, that's all it can ever be is flesh.

But what is born of the spirit is spirit.

And then he says, Do not marvel that I say to you, must be born again.

We're talking about a spiritual act of God in the soul of a human where he turns on a light switch, or if we use some Old Testament terminology, where he gives us a new heart.

He takes out the heart within us that's like a rock, the prophet said.

Your heart is like a stone that has no affection for God, that has no agape affection for your neighbor.

It's all self-interest.

You scratch my back, I scratch yours.

That's how we normally operate.

The new birth changes that.

This new life principle of God Himself within a soul enables us, empowers us to love like God loves.

Galatians 5.22, the Apostle Paul would call love agape, the fruit of the Spirit.

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness.

These things are things that don't come naturally to us, they come forth as fruit of the work of the Spirit in our hearts.

And so in John's, in 1 John itself, John uses this phrase, being born of God or born again six times.

This is a major, that's five chapters, six times.

So in every chapter, he mentions this idea of being born of God.

And in 1 John 5, 1, he says this everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God.

And everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him.

In other words, we're born into the family of God spiritually.

Now, if you look at two people side by side, they look exactly alike on the outside, you wouldn't be able to tell this one's born again, this one's not.

But God knows all them that are his.

And Jesus says you're going to know a tree by its fruit.

You can look at two trees, and maybe from a distance you can't see the bark, and you can't see the leaves, and you can't see the fruit, but from a distance they look the same shape, the same size.

But when they start bearing fruit, you know the difference.

And the new birth determines what kind of fruit we bear in our lives.

He gives a second reason.

Not only is love from God, and thus we ought to pursue it in our lives, as children of God.

Number two, reason number two, verse eight, he says, because God is love.

Whoever does not love, he says, doesn't know God because God is love.

It's impossible to know God truly and savingly.

It's impossible to actually have a relationship with God, a real relationship, and to not be someone who loves with agape love.

Because God is love.

And you can't know him without loving like him to some degree.

We all obviously have lots of room to grow.

But in principle, John says, those who don't love this weights because they're not of God, because God is love.

Now, this phrase is often misunderstood, it's it's misused, it's even abused.

The idea that God is love has sometimes been sort of uh propagated as a way of saying that God is little more than an indulgent Santa Claus, grandfather in the sky, who just is here to affirm us, or or maybe a winking bobblehead Jesus on the dashboard of your life, just affirming everything you do and say, because God is love.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, God is love does not mean that God loves everything, or that he's incapable of hatred.

If you love your child, you would hate that child to run into traffic and be harmed.

If you love your child, you would hate a predator, whether a four-legged or a two-legged predator, preying on your child, right?

You wouldn't love that too, all love, no.

God is love, and actually, love demands some forms of hatred.

Love demands hatred for that which would destroy the thing we love.

So God being loved does not mean he's incapable of hatred.

It means he loves with a perfect love and he hates with a perfect hate.

Secondly, God is love does not mean that God has to love everyone or even anyone.

Some would cite this, God is love, to say that God has to relate to all humans in the same exact way.

He's sort of an equal opportunity offender.

He loves everyone the same way.

When we look in the pages of scripture, we find that God is actually sovereign in the way he loves.

He doesn't owe anybody love, even though he is love.

His love is sovereign, his love is selective, and it's not based on anything good or bad in us.

It's based on the pure pleasure of his good will.

To be loved by God is not a right, it's a privilege.

If we all got what we deserve, we would not get God's love, we would get forever severed from God's love.

That's why it's so amazing that Jesus came, the advent of love, because Jesus extended the olive branch of God's love into our world and into our hearts.

It's only in Jesus Christ that we can say nothing can separate us from the love of God.

So, what does this phrase God is love actually mean?

Well, it speaks, I think, of God's intra-trinitarian relationship, most fundamentally.

How can you say this phrase, God is love?

That's such a massive phrase.

Say that God is anything, to say that God is loving would be only describing him.

To say that God is love, that's much more.

I think it speaks about the fundamental aspect of God's character between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, so much so that I don't think if God were not a Trinity, you couldn't say God is love.

Because God in Himself, without reference to any other creatures or things outside of Him, God is love.

Because the Father and the Son love each other, and the Spirit and the Son and the Father, they have this eternal relationship of everlasting, infinite joy and love one for the other.

And so we see that it's not all that God is, but his love informs and shapes all that he is and all that he does.

And if that doesn't make sense to you, that's probably because the Trinity is a little hard to wrap our minds around, too, right?

We see glimpses of this mutual delight of Father and Son in each other in Jesus' earthly ministry.

For example, in Jesus' baptism, you see Jesus going into the water and he's being baptized by John the Baptist, his forerunner.

And it says that as he's baptized, he comes out of the water, and you see a dove, which is the Holy Spirit, John says, coming down, or Matthew says, coming down and lighting upon Jesus.

And then you have this cloud overshadowing the whole place, and a voice coming out of the cloud, saying, This is my beloved son, in whom I'm well pleased.

Beloved Son.

What an understatement.

That this Father from all eternity, who has loved his son, delighted in his son.

Now he sends his son into a stinking, rotting world, and he says, This is my son.

I love him.

I approve of him.

It happens again in Matthew chapter 17 when Jesus, what we call the Mount of Transfiguration, takes Peter, James, and John.

Matthew 17 · chapter mention

They go up into the mount, and there Moses and Elijah appear before them talking with Jesus in spirit.

This vision of them standing before Jesus.

They were dead, but then they're now alive.

Because after we die, our souls are still alive.

And here they're talking to Jesus, and then the apostles look up, and all of a sudden, Jesus, his whole, his whole visage, his whole face and appearance begins to change, and a light starts beaming out of his face like the sun, and they become so frightened they fall on their faces to the ground.

And they hear a voice and a cloud, this fog covering the mountain, and a voice out of the cloud saying, This, this is my beloved son, hear him.

All the authority that God had vested in Moses as the lawgiver, all the authority God had vested in Elijah as the great prophet, are now in their quintessential form in Jesus Christ.

They've spoken, they've spoken, and now here my son is here, hear him.

Oh, what love the Father has for Jesus.

And Jesus has for his Father.

We see this out of the mouth of Jesus himself in John 15 9.

He says, As the Father has loved me, As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.

Now abide in my love.

Can you imagine the joy and the privilege of now being entered into the family of God, where the same love that God has among the three persons of the Trinity, He lets us in on as sons and daughters.

We can't comprehend that kind of love.

I think one day we'll be we'll be better at that.

We'll be closer to it when we see it in person.

John 17, 26, Jesus is praying to the Father and says, I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them.

And I in them.

Jesus' presence dwelling in us, being the source of God's very own love lived out through us.

These are big concepts.

Hard to wrap our minds around and put flesh and blood on, but I pray that God would do that through this message so that these things would be lived out in our lives.

Love is of God, and God is love.

Huge reasons why this should characterize our lives, this kind of selfless sacrificial love from the will.

Now the third reason is in verse 11, it's this if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.

And because we're going to talk about that later on in the message, I think the kids' workers would appreciate me not stating all that stuff twice and cutting this down.

So we will pass over this at the moment and revisit it in a few minutes.

But despite all these reasons, we ought to love each other sacrificially and volitionally as a matter of daily choice and not as a matter of convenience or feelings.

We have not done this well.

We've not done it perfectly.

And apart from being born again, we haven't done it at all.

And this is where we enter into our story, where we realize, like, okay, that's what God's doing.

That's what God is asking of us, but where are we?

And where have we been apart from his grace?

And our story is this that we have not loved each other as we love ourselves.

We've not loved each other as we love ourselves.

Does that phrase ring a bell?

Remember, all the law and the prophets of the Old Testament, Jesus says can be summed up in two commands.

You should love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, strength, and you should love your neighbor as yourself.

We haven't done that.

Matthew 22, 37.

On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.

If you break these commandments, you've broken all the law and all the prophets.

I have done that, you have done that.

To love our neighbor as ourself here basically means to show the same treatment that uh towards others that you want them to show towards you.

Sometimes people take that phrase, love your neighbor as yourself, and instead of focusing on the actual command to love your neighbor as yourself, they focus on the command that they think is there, you should love yourself.

And they write books about it, about self-care and about how you should really love yourself, and even like songs are written.

I can't love you until I love myself and that sort of thing.

No, it's it's assumed that you want people to treat you well.

You already love yourself.

You don't like people to yell at you, you don't like people to snub you, you don't like people to reject you, to not pay you when you work for them.

You don't like all those things.

No one has to teach you those things.

Even kids know they don't like to be lied to, they don't like their toys stolen from them, right?

It's all it's pretty bogus.

All this stuff about self-love taken from that verse?

No.

Jesus assumed that you already want people to treat you well.

Now he's saying, treat them as you want to be treated, which he we elsewhere call the golden rule.

Love people as you already love yourself.

You want to be treated well.

I was driving the other day and I was in this neighborhood and I saw a sign that said, drive like your kids live here.

And I told Brandon, I said, I'm gonna use that Sunday.

That's exactly what I'm preaching on.

Drive like your kids live here.

In other words, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

If your children were running around playing in the driveway, would you want someone driving through faster than they should be?

Or fiddling with the radio, or texting someone, or drunk, or sleepy.

No.

Because you know the danger's there to harm your child.

And so you should reciprocate that to others.

This is this is what it means to love other people in this way.

You you treat them as you would want to be treated.

And so I don't think I have to convince you that we've broken God's law into a million pieces.

We've we've bled each other out with a thousand cuts.

If you doubt this, just think about how you treat the rental car versus how you want someone else to treat your car when they borrow it.

Or maybe closer to home.

When you cut someone else off in traffic versus when you get cut off in traffic.

One's a bigger deal to you.

Or when you're late versus when someone else is late and they leave you standing.

We tend to make excuses when we're late and accusations when someone else is late.

Or being irritable or impatient or self-indulgent or not giving others the benefit of a doubt.

You see, we don't love each other like we want to be loved.

We tend to show ourselves much grace, though we are quick to deny that to others when we are the victim.

Now, if that sounds bad, our story that we've not loved others like we love ourselves, it actually gets worse.

Because when Jesus came, and especially for believers who have this uh heart to love God and to love others, we have received the love of God.

The stakes are raised.

When God has been so kind and generous to us, we ought even at a higher level to reciprocate that to those around us.

And so our story is also we have not loved others as God loves us.

We've not loved others as God loves us, and God has loved us lavishly.

We often don't live out of an awareness of God's lavish love towards us.

And there's this um story of these two country boys who they lived and they retired, and they were these old farmers, and they were sitting on the porch together, front porch, and um one was Jim and one was Joe.

They were just rocking back and forth, and finally Joe speaks up and says, Jim, I got a question for you.

I've been thinking.

He said, Yeah, what is it?

We've been friends for so long.

We we were childhood friends, we've we've harvested each other's crops, we've been there for all sorts of difficult times, and and I just have a question for you.

He said, Yeah, if you had two million dollars, would you give me one million dollars?

Jim said, Joe, you're my best friend.

I would give you a million dollars.

Now you sit there rocking a little longer, then finally Joe speaks up again and says, Now, Jim, just have another question.

We're really good friends and everything, and we've got a lot of history together.

If you had two tractors, would you give me one of those tractors?

Jim says, Absolutely, Joe.

I would give you a tractor if I had two tractors.

We're best friends.

A few minutes later, pass, and finally, Joe looks at Jim and says, One more question.

Jim, if you had two hogs, would you give me one of those hogs?

And Jim sits up and says, Now, Joe, you know I've got two hogs.

One of us needs help.

Um, so the idea is this that we often are less enthusiastic to actually give other people what we've really received.

And when it comes to God's love and his love towards us in Jesus, we all have two hogs.

And it's all incumbent upon us to give one away, so to speak.

Jesus told a parable in Matthew chapter 18 about the unforgiving servant.

Matthew 18 · chapter mention

The unforgiving servant is someone who represents ourselves when we hold grudges, when we refuse to forgive.

The apostle Peter came to Jesus and he says, Jesus, I'm getting so fed up with these hard-headed guys that we're kind of living with these other apostles.

Is it enough if I forgive my brother seven times?

Thinking he was doing pretty good.

I mean, seven's the number of completion in Jewish numerology.

It's a big number.

I mean, seven times.

Think about if someone burns you seven times, and seven times, you love them still.

Now, if you're married, that happens like seven days a week, right?

So one week would do that.

No, but this love, and so Jesus says, um, no, Peter, I'm not impressed with you loving seven times, forgiving seven times.

You should do it um, depending on how you translate it.

It could be 77 times or even seven times 70.

A lot of times.

More times than you can really keep count of, unless you have a ledger, and we're already told that love doesn't keep a record or wrong.

So probably more times than you can even try to keep in mind, you need to forgive your brother.

And Peter probably was taken back by that and thought, this is a little crazy.

And so Jesus tells a story, a parable, to illustrate just how important it is that we forgive people readily and don't keep count.

He tells a story about a servant who was indebted to a master more debt than he could possibly ever pay.

In fact, the only way he could possibly try to pay it off would be to be imprisoned and then work in a labor camp.

His every earthly possession be taken away from him.

But the master, uh, whenever he was gonna hand out sentencing on this servant, the servant falls on his knees and he pleads with the master.

He says, please, don't uh exact this debt of me.

There's no way I can possibly pay.

Please forgive me.

And the the master in mercy said, You know what?

I'm gonna be merciful to you.

Your debt is forgiven.

And with a stroke of the pen, the debt was gone.

And that servant leaves there so happy.

Can you imagine the feeling of having a hundred million dollar debt hanging over your head?

You're gonna have to spend the rest of your life in a work camp trying to pay off, you know, breaking rocks or something.

Can you imagine how happy you'd be you get to go home that night?

That debt has been removed.

But on the way home, Jesus says, he sees this servant who was just forgiven, he sees another servant, uh, a fellow servant who owed him just a little bit of money and who didn't have enough money to pay him.

And he goes up to him and he takes him, he says, Where's my money?

You owe me this money, you never paid it back.

I lent that to you two years ago.

You didn't pay me back, where's my money?

And the guy says, I don't have it.

I'm poor, I don't have it, I'll get it to you as soon as I possibly can.

And it says, literally, Jesus says, Jesus is pretty dramatic here.

He says he grabs him by the neck and begins to throttle him and says, Give me everything you owe me.

Just so happens, there were some other servants of the king who saw that happen, went and told the master, and says, You know the guy you just uh just forgave,$100 million?

He was just choking someone out because they owe him ten dollars.

And the master went and sent some of his servants, captured him, took him back, and says, You're gonna pay every penny.

And then Jesus finishes with this.

So also my heavenly father will do to every one of you if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.

Forgiveness is not merely an outward smile, it's not merely toleration, it's in the heart.

That's where salvation happens, that's where the new birth happens, that's where love happens.

It's it's this choice in the heart to say, I've been forgiven an infinite debt, and now I can forgive a finite debt readily.

Not gonna keep a record of wrongs, not gonna keep tally, not gonna keep score.

I'm going to forgive, I'm going to love as I have been loved.

We see the same argument played out elsewhere in Scripture, when even in husbands in Ephesians chapter 5, when we're told, husbands, love your wives even as Christ loved the church.

Ephesians 5 · chapter mention

Well, how did Jesus love the church?

Does Jesus keep a record of wrongs?

Does Jesus keep score?

That'd be a bad game, right?

I mean, think about it.

We sin against God uh frequently.

We are imperfect, we don't love him as we ought.

We are not a very faithful spouse.

It's only his love that makes us beautiful and lovely.

There's really nothing in us that he would desire.

The same could be said for wives.

Do you choose to love your husband in accord with the love you freely receive from your ultimate groom, Jesus?

And so now we enter the good news.

This advent of love in Jesus.

Our gospel conviction is this in verse nine that God sent Jesus to live with us.

John's gonna give us two evidences, two manifestations of God's profound love for us in Jesus.

The first, verse nine, God sent Jesus to live with us.

He says, in this is the love of God manifest among us that God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him.

In John's vocabulary, the world is not a neutral thing.

The world is not merely the cosmos.

The world is a whole system of fallenness and brokenness and corruption.

In fact, he says in 1 John that the whole world lies enslaved under the power of Satan himself.

So when John says world, he's thinking about something that's as dark as you can possibly imagine.

A dark, sinful, cursed, hellbound world.

And now he says God sent his son into the world.

Think about what kind of love it would take for God to send his only precious son from all eternity to his love to clothe him in flesh and to send him into this corrupt, fallen creation to live with us.

This speaks about the incarnation of Jesus, the ministry of his presence with us.

He didn't just sort of zap people from heaven, you're healed.

Jesus came in his, the hands that formed the mountains touched blind eyes.

The arms that held the planets in orbit would embrace leprous outcasts.

The feet that walked on water and, in the words of Job, rode upon the wings of the wind.

These feet would be covered in dust and manure and eventually be impaled with Roman spikes to a rough hewn post called the cross.

Think of the condescension and the humiliation of Jesus entering our world to be with us.

Though he was the heir of all things, there was no room for him in the inn.

Though deserving of a throne, he was laid in a feeding trough.

Though all history had awaited his arrival, his advent was announced by Jewish society's lowest class of workers, smelly shepherds.

Though he was truly king of kings and lord of lords, Herod sought to kill him at his young age.

Though miraculously conceived by the Holy Spirit in Mary, he was stigmatized in the small town of Nazareth as being born of fornication.

His own brothers at first would doubt him.

The cheering crowds would eventually turn on him, accuse him of being demon-possessed, and leave him.

His enemies, though lacking a cause, would plot to take his life.

Even his closest friends in his most dire moments would betray him, would forsake him and run.

How can we possibly adequately describe the love of God in sending Jesus into the world?

I think this is one reason why God created some people with the ability, not me, to write poetry, to write songs that touch the heart, because these mere facts, these mere words on a page or on a screen or even on the pages of scripture sometimes often don't touch us like they should.

And so I think God is behind good poetry that reflects reality, that touches heart strings.

In 1917, a California businessman who had recently lost everything he'd owned in a bunch of business deals, he was reduced to working in a warehouse, just packing oranges and lemons into wooden crates.

And on one Sunday, he was so moved by a sermon on the love of God.

He was so moved by this sermon on the love of God that the next day when he was working, he was packing these crates, that he began to scribble some lyrics that were just coming to his mind.

And he wrote them on scraps of piece of paper on wooden crates.

And when it was all said and done, he had written the well-loved song, The Love of God.

Friedrich Lehman wrote this.

Oh love of God, how rich and pure, how measureless and strong, it shall forevermore, the the forevermore endure the saints and angels' song.

And I love this last line.

Could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made, were every stalk on earth a quill, and every man ascribed by trade to write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry?

Nor could the scroll contain the whole, those stretch from sky to sky.

I wonder if we know the love of God like that.

If when we sing about the love of God, talk about the love of God, hear about the love of God, is our hearts ignited at the condescension, the affection, the choice that we didn't deserve for God to send his only son into the world to live with us.

Emmanuel, God with us.

The second gospel conviction in our text is verse 10.

Not only did God send Jesus to live with us, he sent Jesus to die for us.

Verse 10 says this, and this is love, not that we have loved God.

That's not love.

Our love is so small.

You want to see the epitome of love?

Don't look at yourself.

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

Interestingly, John does not merely say Jesus died for us.

You see, in our day and time and throughout history, a lot of times people will take the death of Jesus and they'll sort of chalk it up to an unfortunate demise of a young man, sort of like a soldier in a battle.

Or maybe a martyr who was misunderstood, or maybe who just angered the wrong people.

Yeah, he died.

And because he was our leader, yeah, he died for us in that way.

Or maybe Jesus dying as our mere example to his followers to help us to be more willing to give our all and to love our enemies.

No, John doesn't entertain these vague ideas of Jesus dying some random death for some random people.

He uses something very, very specific.

In John's understanding of the death of his Lord, which he actually stood at the foot of the cross, he heard the prayer of Jesus for his enemies.

He saw the rocks tear when Jesus breathed his last.

He heard about the curtain in the temple rent from top to bottom, the earthquakes, the graves opening, the thunder, the shroud of darkness.

John was there for all of that.

He heard Jesus say to the thief on the cross, This day you'll be with me in paradise.

He heard Jesus groaning in pain and say, Father, forgive them.

They don't know what they're doing.

And in John's knowledge of the cross, John said, Jesus was our propitiation.

The word propitiation used also in 1 John 2 and verse 2, so this was something John mentions twice.

It's a word that is hilas mas in Greek.

And it that's significant because the New Testament writers used, a lot of them didn't read, write, and know Hebrew.

They weren't really educated.

They had the Greek Bible.

They had the Old Testament scriptures translated into Greek.

It's called the Septuagint.

Often when the Apostle Paul would quote Scripture, he'd be quoting the Septuagint.

Well, this word Hilasmas in the Septuagint is used in the Old Testament on occasion of the Day of Atonement.

The day of atonement.

In Leviticus 25 and verse 9, you read this Then you shall sound the loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month on the day of the Hilasmas, on the day of atonement.

You shall sound the trumpet throughout all the land.

There he's writing about the year of Jubilee.

Every 50th year, all debts would be released, all debtors would be released, all obligations would be released.

It was the year of Jubilee, it was the year of liberty.

And what would initiate that was a trumpet on the day of propitiation, on the day of atonement, when all sins were forgiven, when all debts were forgiven.

And so this idea, John, is calling our minds back to the understanding that in Jesus Christ, the one who came to die for our sins, in him we have the year of Jubilee.

In him we have atonement.

In Jesus, we have the satisfaction of divine justice against our sins.

This word is powerful because it points to the fact that on the cross, Jesus Himself took upon himself everything that was offensive to God.

Jesus stood before God.

Though he was innocent, he stood before God guilty.

When God poured out his just wrath and punishment that we deserved on his son, it was because Jesus had become guilty for our sakes.

He was our propitiation.

Which, if we were to define it, it means to appease or satisfy divine wrath against sins.

Our sins of cosmic treason against our creator, our sins of mutinous rebellion against God, the good Lord who created us with good designs for human flourishing, and we messed it all up.

Our sins of disregard and disdain for his glory and his law and his designs for the world he created.

Jesus did this by bearing in his body all of our sins.

He became the wrath quencher.

He became the wrath absorber, bearing our punishment so that we could go free.

And so, how do we live in light of these truths?

Brieffully, our gospel vision this morning is exactly what John asked of us.

We love others as God loves us.

The take home point from John this morning is that we have so many reasons to love one another in daily acts of choice and humility and patience self sufficient.

Sacrificial ways to do these for the good of others.

Sometimes when we love people like that, we think at the end of the day, we think, you know what, I've just been had.

I treated that person well, they burnt me, and then for me, I'm done.

You ever heard that?

You ever felt that?

That's not the appropriate response if you know the love of Jesus.

Because you could never repay what Jesus has done for you.

John says, because love is of God, it is right, it is good, it is noble, it is beautiful, it is always the right thing to do.

And never the right thing not to do.

Because God Himself is love.

God is so characterized by this in his own being, and he has shown it to us as undeserving sinners that he makes in making us his adoring children that then share in the family likeness.

Because God has loved us by sending Jesus to live with us and to die for us, we can show in some small measure this same love we've received freely.

Knowing the gospel of free grace and love makes all the difference in our lives, doesn't it?

It truly does.

You can't fake it.

If you fake it, if you fake, know the gospel, if you fake, believe the gospel, you won't be able to live out in accordance with the gospel.

But if you truly are rooted in who God is and what he's done for you and Jesus freely, it revolutionizes the way you treat your spouse and your children and your coworkers and your neighbors, your friends, and your enemies.

I'll close with this.

Corey Tin Boom was a Dutch woman who, along with her father and a beloved sister Betsy, they were living in Holland, but they were they were hiding Jews.

They were sort of part of a counter-Nazi effort to hide people that the Nazis were taking to death camps.

And so they themselves, their house was raided, they were taken to concentration camps as well.

And although Cory Timboom's father died of illness, and her sister, whom she loved so much, too, succumbed to starvation and disease in the camps, Corey survived and later became an evangelist that went around all over Europe, even in Germany, proclaiming forgiveness and healing in Jesus Christ for even people who had done all these things.

In a book that she wrote, she described how that after one speaking engagement in 1947, she had just literally spoken about her favorite subject, that of forgiveness of your enemies, and how that God had taken our sins and had cast them into the deepest sea so that they were remembered no more.

But after she got done speaking, she wrote that a balding man in a gray overcoat stepped forward to greet her and she froze.

Because she knew this man well.

He'd been one of the most vicious guards in the Ravensbrook concentration camp, the one who she remembers like it was yesterday, who had mocked the women prisoners as they showered.

She wrote, quote, It came back with a rush, flashbacks of the huge room with harsh overhead lights, the pathetic pile of dresses and shoes in the center of the floor, the shame of walking naked past this man.

And now he was extending his hand to shake hers, and he said, A fine message, Forline.

How good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea.

But Corey could not raise her hand, she said.

He went on, You mentioned Ravensbrook in your talk.

He said, I was a guard there, but but since that time I've become a Christian, and I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips.

Can you forgive me?

She would write, as I stood there, I whose sins again and again need forgiven, and I could not forgive.

Betsy had died in that terrible place.

Could he now erase her slow and terrible death simply for asking?

And so standing there before the former SS guard, she remembered that forgiveness is an act of a renewed will through the Spirit, not an emotion.

And so she prayed, Jesus, help me.

She talked herself into raising her hand.

She said, I can do that much, God.

You must supply the feeling.

And Corey thrust out her hand, and as she did, she later wrote, quote, An indescribable thing took place.

The current started in my shoulder and raced down my arm and sprang into our joined hands.

And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes.

I forgive you, brother, she cried with all my heart.

She concluded, for a long moment we grasped each other's hands.

The former guard and the former prisoner, I had never known God's love so intensely as I did then.

But even so, I realized it was not my love.

I had tried and I could not love.

It was the power of the Holy Spirit in me, loving my enemy.

Dear brothers and sisters, I wonder who the Spirit is asking you to love today.

Who the Spirit is asking you to release from your resentment.

Who the Spirit is calling upon you to love and to serve again.

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

For in the advent of Jesus was the advent of our true and lasting love.

Let's pray.