“Can I Love Others?”

Let’s take our Bibles please and find the book of 1^st John.  This message and the following Sunday morning’s message will be the last one that I bring that has been more of a topical nature trying to direct us into the year and then we are going to march our way back to the rest of 1^st Corinthians.  As we do that during March on Sunday evenings, we are going to have a couple of weeks to where on Sunday evenings we do a kind of a “spiritual gifts” seminar as we go through the nature of the church and find out that all of us have individual gifts and skills with which we serve, what we want to do is provide you with an opportunity to just look at yourself and say, “Where might I be most equipped to serve?”  Following that we hope to have another Ministry Fair to show you all the ministries in the church and say that this might be an area that you would want to go to work in, so, that’s just to give you a little bit of direction in where we are headed.

We are in 1^st John, Chapter 4, beginning with verse 7, in the pew Bibles, if you’d like to follow along, you can find that on Page 1023.  You really need to look at the scriptures this morning even if you borrow from the person next to you because we are going to look at it eyeball to eyeball.  I want you to see what God said.  That’s why He put it in print and so you can understand that I’m not making these things up.

1 John 4:7:

“Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and whoever loves has been born of God, and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love.  In this the love of God was made manifest among us.  That God sent His only son into the world so that we might live through Him.  In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.  Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.  No one has ever seen God.  If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.”

Now, the question we are going to answer this morning is, “Can I love others?”  The first thing this demands of us is that we get really honest.  I’m not going to have you look around because you might look at somebody you don’t love, but do you ever struggle with loving other people?  Do you ever wonder why it is that you just can’t love some people?  Some people in your family… some people in the family of God …..most of the time you avoid them.  Don’t look at me like that [laughter].  I watch you slip around the corners in church when you see somebody you don’t want to see, just like you do at Wal-Mart when you don’t want to get stuck because you don’t have your makeup on, or you haven’t shaved that morning.  Don’t try going to Wal-Mart at 2:00 in the morning.  I’ve tried it; it doesn’t work.  You’ll still run into somebody you know.  No…it is true that it is difficult to love other people.  Now, can you agree with me?  Don’t let me put anything in your mind.  I want to know if you agree with me that it is difficult to love other people….sometimes….not all the time; sometimes and some people are difficult to love.  If you agree with me, would you please raise your hand?

Okay, I even got an Amen on that.  Okay, there are three sections: Those of you sinners who can’t love others, you have to go over here; I guess there’ll just be two sections; those of you who are liars and sinners have to go over here!

Beloved, let us love one another, so the first thing is that it is difficult.  But the Bible just said, as a matter of fact in this passage of scripture it says 3 times, “Let us love one another” could we agree that it is demanded?  Do you think that God demands of His children that we love each other?  That is the primary mark of being Christian, but….do you think it’s doable?  Do you think it’s doable?  Can you love other people?

By the time we leave today, I want you to see God’s affirmation, undeniable, saying “Yes you can.”  You can do that and when we do that the world will know that we are God’s disciples.  As a matter of fact, the world will see God through us, but we have to do that or those things will not happen.  The first thing we see is that we need to understand the origin of love.  It is very crucial in our day and time, we have to know where love comes from.  We don’t have to read long to find the basic answer to that. 

In verse 8 says this, “Anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love.”

Love exists because God exists.  Now you cannot turn that around and say “Love is God,” as some people would like to do.  I just want you to understand that the Bible is telling us every single kind of love (and I’m using that in its proper sense) in the universe is from God.  It is His nature.  So, if there were no God, there would no love.  So, a Godless world would be a loveless world.  It comes from Him.  It is the actual nature of God.  So the substance and the idea of love come from Him, out of Him.  John defined God in three overall statements, one was in his gospel, he said God is spirit; one was in the first chapter of this book, he said God is light, and then in this one we see God is love.  As a matter of fact from Chapter 4 verse 7, just to Chapter 5 verse 3, the word, love, in one form or another appears 32 times.  That word is important.  And that convicts me. Because there are times I am not loving, and I’m assuming because we share a common nature there are times you are not loving. It means I’m not like God. 

Three times in our passage of scripture we are told to love one another.  One of those is an exhortation we read in Verse 7, “Beloved, let us love one another.”  It’s a play on words for John.  He’s telling them “I love you, so let’s love one another.”  The word, beloved, and the word, love, come from the same root.  The second time is in Verse 11.  The Bible says, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”  It’s a statement to us of duty.  Since we have been loved of God in a certain way, this way of sending His son for us, then it is upon our shoulders and duty that we are to love other people that way. 

Paul wrote it in Ephesians 4 this way,

“Be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake has forgiven you.”  So we are to love.  And in Chapter 4, verse 12, it is a hypothesis and it is a strong one.

1 John 4:12

“No one has ever seen God.  If we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us.”

We’ll get back to that in a minute but that is one powerful verse!  So, we need to understand the origin of love if we are going to be able to love other people; love is from God.  But we also need to understand that the origin of our love and our ability to love is from God.  Let’s go back and look at verse 7.  This is an important verse.  You need to understand this concept.  It is one of those corrective verses to our human thinking.  “Beloved, let us love one another.”  That is easy to understand as far as its basic truth.  The kind of love he’s asking for is difficult, but look at how he explains it.  Let us love one another for love is from God.  Okay you’re doing this not out of a resource that you have.  It doesn’t come from in your heart towards other people.  If you are going to love people the way God wants you to love people, it has to come from God and here’s the key and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.

Now, it’s a little detailed here but I don’t want you to miss the glory of this statement.  Whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.  Now, what the verse is not telling us, is that we love people and because we do that God loves us.  What the verse is literally saying is, “God loves us and gave us His life, now we are loving other people.”

Look at what it says and notice the tense of the words.  Whoever loves, that is whoever is in the action of loving, it is present tense, has been born of God, perfect tense.  Something happened to you in the past.  You were born again; you were regenerated; you were given life by God and from there the abiding results in the present is that you are in the process of loving God’s people.  Then he goes on and explains that just a little bit further.  He says, following that verse, “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” And he reverses the argument.  He says, “Now if you love people you have been born of God, and not only have you been born of God, you are in the process of knowing God more and more.  But anyone who does not love is not in the process of loving God, does not know God and the way that’s written means he has never known God.  What’s the beauty of that?  Follow me.

God commands me to love you.  He commands you to love me.  Now, I can be honest enough to know that there are times I’m not the most lovable creature in the world, and if you’ll be honest neither are you.  But, whether you are lovely or not, God calls on me to love you.  Well, frankly, I don’t feel like it.  Now aren’t you glad love doesn’t depend on feelings.  And if it weren’t for God, I couldn’t do that, but I’ve been commanded of God to love you, so what does he do?  He has expressed  his love towards us, He has put His life in us. The old word is, he quickened us, He regenerated us.  He gave us life in this new birth and therefore because of that we have been made partakers of the nature of God, and what’s the nature of God?  God is love.  Therefore, I have His nature in me, so for me to love someone else, I have the source of God and the natural tendency, it is the natural thing for a Christian to love another Christian.  That is the supernaturally natural response that my heart is to have to you.  So the question is, “Can I love others?”  The answer is ”Yes, you can.”  But, if the answer is “Yes, I can,” then why don’t I?

Now we have to be really honest with what the Bible says.  There is one BIG why.  Why don’t I-- and we all have to examine that.  It says “anyone who does not love does not know God.”  If there is no love in our heart for God’s people and we are not in the practice of loving them, then he is telling us we don’t have the love of God in our hearts.  We don’t have the life of God in our heart.  We have never been born again.  Love becomes an evidence of my faith’s reality.  Love is the fruit of the Spirit and when the Spirit has made me alive, I begin to bear His fruit.  It means that you and I can love others.

Now, just so we get the picture, Paul prayed for the Christians in Ephesians.  And he prayed that they would know things.  He prayed in Chapter 3 that they would know the love of Christ and that they would be rooted and grounded in love for each other.  In Chapter 1 he prayed that we would know certain things and one of the things he prayed was this….now I’m making a connection, just follow me…

He prayed that we know what is the immeasurable greatness of His power toward us who believe, according to the working of His great might that He worked in Christ when he raised Him from the dead. 

I have the nature of God within me to love other people.  You do too if you are a Christian, and you have the resurrection of power working in you and toward you to enable you to love other people, so if a Christian is going through an unloving period of their life, they are stubborn and willfully rebellious.  Ouch!

The church, and the individual believer, is to be marked by love. I’ve got a lot of room to grow, how about you?  Oh, but don’t get down on yourself.  The Holy Spirit will convict you if conviction is needed.  You should be thrilled with joy.  I’m looking at something I cannot do, and God says, “Of course you can’t.”  But I put my nature in you, my son’s resurrected power is working in you, I will enable you to do it, make yourself disposable to me.  Just begin on planning and acting like your Mine.  This will happen.  That has thrilled my soul; that I can do what I feel like I can’t.  The Bible is true, here; we need to act it out.  So first of all, we need to understand the origin of love and that is God.  So that then we can experience the operations of God’s love.  Love is an experience, it is not a thing out there to theorize about.  So, what does love look like?  Gentlemen, listen close, Valentine’s Day is coming up!

By the way, that was you driving wasn’t it, Lisle, in the video?  Do you always read while you drive?  The church is not endorsing the memorization of scripture while driving the car.  I just want to affirm that.  I saw a car pass us the other day, I thought it – I didn’t say it to Joie- It was one of those that had the old sign on the front of it.  “God is my Co-pilot.”  Man, I was watching that car go by and I thought, “God is not a very good driver.”

The operations of love, as you will see, will begin to happen as we take that Word of God, hide it deep within our soul, exercise the mind and the emotions, this is part of what Eric was talking about a minute ago, as we see the gospel we begin to do those internal exercises with the soul to see this truth, to picture the truth of God, to picture it at work in us, to develop an attitude within that leads then to action, what we know then becomes what we are, then becomes what we do.  When we understand the origin of love then we can experience the operations of love.  What does it look like?  What does love do?  Does love have a purpose?

Two things:

1.                 Love is objective.  It is real.  It is not a feeling.  Love produces feelings.         Don’t discount the feelings, but love is not a feeling.  If love is a feeling, some of you love Super Bowl commercials. 

[By the way I need to announce to you none of the staff is going to be here tonight.  Anybody read the Courier this morning?  Did anybody read the front page of the Courier?  Did you read the article about Darrell Drake?  I played college football with Darrell Drake.  He is the wide receiver coach at Chicago.  So, down for the Colts!  I called him a couple of weeks ago and he has sent tickets.  All the staff are leaving at 2:00.  I’m just kidding!  We’re having service tonight.  We haven’t ever been in the habit of cancelling church for football games.  Okay?  In all eternity, God is not going to ask you who won tonight.  He is not even going to care.]

Love is objective.  It can be seen.  It can be observed.  Verse 9:

“God is love” verse 8 tells us.  Well, what does that mean?  In this the love of God was made manifest.  Now that’s not language we normally use.  What does manifest  mean?  This is something that God did, it happened, its results are continuing, it is still going on. 

Manifest  means: To make visible or known what has been hidden or unknown.  This can be done by words, deeds or in other ways.

To make manifest means to make actual.  To make visible.  To make realized in the mind and soul.  To make manifest means to be thoroughly understood.  The love of God was made visible and understood among us in this way:  That God sent His only son into the world so that we might live through Him.  You know that God loves you because of what God has visibly done, not by how you feel about what He’s done.  Not by what you generate inside.   We have created a culture to where complete unbelievers and rebels before God feel like God loves them.  It doesn’t matter what you feel like primarily.  Primarily it matters objectively what God has done and if you have objectively rested your faith on that.  God visibly displayed his love so love is objective; you can observe it, and when God sent His Son, it means He did something in the past that continues to have abiding and present consequences and results.  So if we defined love based on this passage of scripture, we would say that love is initiated in the heart of the one who has the character or nature of love.  Love, then, is focused and demonstrated to another who is unlovely.  Then love is demonstrated by serious action.  Anything short of that is not Biblical love. 

2.                 Love is not only objective, love has an objective.

Look back at the scriptures, again at verse 9:

“In this the love of God was manifest among us.”  God sent His only son into the world. Why? So that we might live through Him.  You need to keep in mind that practical truth.  All true love has an objective.  Do you love your children?  Why?  Because they’re cute?  That’s the way people in public love your children…when you’ve wiped the snot off their nose and combed their hair.  Children aren’t always cute, are they?  You don’t love your children because they are cute or to make them cute.  You love your children with a purpose, and, hopefully in a Christian family, you love them with the purpose of teaching them to grow up and be a dependent, independent individual.  Dependent on God, independent so that they can be mature and stand on their own two feet.  You raised them with the intention of them coming to know Christ, of knowing how to handle money, of knowing how to love a spouse, of knowing how to be responsible.  Your love has an objective.  Husbands…Love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her that he might present her to her as a bride, spotless, blameless.  Purpose in love.  There is purpose in love and God’s love had a purpose.  He did not randomly throw it out there and, “this is a really cool thing, God is love, so you love me back and we’ll be really cool.”  God sent his son with an objective.  That objective was so that we might live through him, and the way live is written, that just tells us, it insinuates that the people God came after to make them live were dead before He got there. 

Now, how did He do that?  “In this is love, verse 10, not that we have loved God, but that He loved us and sent His son to be the propitiation for our sins.”  I don’t have time to go into this.  We’ve done it so many times, but we’re talking about love, and one of the most astounding things to me is that people are no longer astounded at the love of God.  People ask silly questions like, “How could a God of love ever send anybody to hell?”  If we know anything at all about God and life we should ask, “How could a holy God ever let someone into heaven?”  We act as if God treats sin like dirt.  He raises heaven’s rug and sweeps it under it and plops the rug back down on top of it. 

Love has an objective and in that objective was to express love to God’s people and eliminate God’s wrath towards those people who were dead in sin.  And so, Jesus became the propitiation in that active, purposeful love of God and what that means is it should puzzle us how a holy God can forgive sin.  He doesn’t just say, “Oh, I forgive you” like He created the world.  The forgiveness of sins took the crucifixion of Christ to expend the just wrath of God and to express the immeasurable love of God.  It puzzles me how God can do that, but I’m delighted that he chose to.

So, you see, when you understand the origin of love that it is from God and you experience the operations of love, that love is visible, you can see it, that love has an objective, it goes to work to accomplish it and it does accomplish it.  He sent His son into the world so that we might live through Him.  He does what He came to do.

3.                 When you understand that and you experience God’s love, then you are enabled to fulfill the obligations of love.  You can love other people.

There are 3 ways to talk about these obligations:

1.                 First would be the obligation of identity.

Verse 7:  “Beloved, let us love one another for love is from God and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love.”

The obligation of identity means simply two things:  That you know who God is and that you know who you are.  You know whose you are and you know who you are.  God is the one who has obligated us to love other people and if you say, “God is my God” then it’s your delight  to do what your sovereign asks. We would be imitating us.  If he so loved us, we ought to love one another.  It’s our great imitation.  That’s the obligation of identity.

The other one is not only has commanded me, but God has created new life in me.  The one who loves has been born of God.  Peter said ‘we’ve been made partakers of the divine nature,” so I am obligated to love simply because of who I am and my loving proves that I am the real deal.  It is the obligation of identity.

2.                 There is also the obligation of security.  This is very important. 

We are obliged to have faith in God’s sending of His son, because that’s the means through which we have life.  You have to rest on Him, you have to trust in Him, you have to believe in Him.  But, some of us who have cast our faith in Christ go through these great longing periods of doubt.  Does God love me?  How do I know He loves me?  Yes I know Jesus died on the cross.  I know he died for me.  I have prayed, once, twice, a hundred, a thousand times to ask Jesus to save me, but I just don’t know for sure and I want to sit down and I want to think about it and I want to look at my heart and I want to analyze my prayer and I want to see if I’ve got it right so I can know that God loves me.  There is a treasure hidden in this passage of scripture that helps the heart of the child of God immeasurably in that.  Look at, you just have to see it again, look at Verse 7:

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

Do you want to know that you are saved?  You say, “Preacher I’ve wanted to know if I’m saved for the last 20 years.  I’ve asked Jesus to save me 100 times, how do I know?”  Stop  trying your state.  Stop  looking inside and seeing and feeling around and wondering how Jesus came in, and if you prayed right and if you’ve got everything right.  You’ve spent hours and hours of your life obsessing over, thinking about, am I saved?  The Bible’s remedy  for doubters is doing.  Not thinking.  How do you know God loves you?  By loving other people.  Because the person that loves is the one who has been born of God.  Just go after it.  Act as if what God has said about you is true because it is true.  That’s not hypocrisy, that’s obedience; and assurance comes through action, not introspection.  When you are introspective, my friend, you are self-centered.  When you are active, you are other-centered and God-centered and that’s where assurance comes from.  All at once you begin to look around and you have the obligation of security  because you’ve placed your faith in Christ and then you have that assurance of security because you are bearing the fruit of Christ.  Fruit is where the assurance comes from in the practical sense.  God shows us the assurance in our hearts an dour minds of our salvation, comes from loving or living.  Our living is the proof that we have life. 

3.                 The final obligation is the obligation of necessity.

Verse 11 and 12: “1 John 4:11-12

 “Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. [12] No one has  ever seen God.

The church, you and I, have banked all our hope on one who came and died in our place and lives again.  His love is indescribable, immeasurable.  The Bible tells us that God has predestined that we be conformed to the image of his Son.  I’ve got a long way to go, how about you?  Especially in a work of loving other people unconditionally; not because they are lovely, because your nature is to love.  You’ve got to get that right about people and about God.  God did not come and love you because you were lovely.  God came and loved you because God is love.  We did not, by our worth, generate something in God to love us.  God, His love is self-generated, and He overflowed with that to us and that’s what we are to do.  Jesus said, “all people would know we are his disciples by our love for one another.” 

We have the obligation of necessity and what is that?  Look at verse 12, it’s very plain.  The first explanation of this necessity is no one has ever seen God.  No one eliminates all people; has never eliminates all time; no one has ever seen God.  So seeing God eyeball-to-eyeball is never a possibility for finding out that God exists.  The reason is, if you saw God eyeball-to-eyeball, you would cease to exist because you would be consumed with His glory.  Thank God, He came veiled in flesh.  But that’s not the point here.  The point is that’s just an established fact; no one has seen God, ever.  Then we get to the condition, ‘if we, that is as God’s children, love one another, that’s a big “If” isn’t it, and if we don’t do that “If” the next is not possible.  If we love one another, God abides in us.  That’s the proof that God is in us and is dwelling in us.  It proves the genuineness of our church, of our faith, of us as Christians, and if God is abiding in us, then His love is perfected in us.

Now, let me ask you something.  Can a world that cannot see God see a group of people loving each other unconditionally?  “YES!”  [That “yes” woke you up, didn’t it!]  Yes, they can see that, and when the see that, they say “There is God!”  Do you understand the level of that obligation?  That your love, our love for one another is how the world sees God!  Now, thank God he didn’t leave it up to you and me to do it on our own.  He’s given His nature.  So, how do we go about getting this?  The obvious is, you have to be born again.  But, what do we do?  What do we do? 

First of all you’ve got to get it in your head that God is love.  You’ve got to get it in your head to be loving you need to born again so you get the gospel in your head of Christ’s death, burial and resurrection and you put your trust on Him.  You begin to understand that God expects His children to love.  You learn this Biblical truth and the only way to get it is in the Bible.  As you begin to learn that, you exercise that up from the depths of the soul into the tips of your fingers.  You begin to visualize how you can love other people, who you can love.  You begin to plan in your mind what steps you can take to go express your love to that person, and then, as that happens in you, you then are knowing and you start the issue of becoming, by exercising these inner muscles of saying, ‘This is what God says; this is what I feel; I don’t care what I feel, this is what God says, but I feel this way; I don’t care what I feel, God says I’m to love other people so I’m going to obey Him.  I’m going to get these inner muscles to exercise my faith and believe God more than my feelings or more than the world.  I’m going to concentrate , I’m going to focus, I’m going to aim, so you know the truth, you become the truth, and then you do the truth.  You choose to act on what you know and on what you are.  And you have a mind focused on others, and a life focused on God.  A mind focused on others makes you a very healthy individual and causes others to be helped and makes you both much happier.  The sickest people in the world I know are those who think about themselves all the time. And a mind focused on God and centered on God, brings humility.

You say, “Tony, if God is love and He shared His nature with me and I am love, then why doesn’t it just come natural?”