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Sermon
by Dr. Jeffrey Jeremiah “God’s
Love – Your Love?” If
there is one word that defines the Christian faith, that word is
undoubtedly love. Love
for one another is almost universally recognized as a hallmark of
Christian life through the centuries.
It’s a need all people have.
Love is the motivation for entering into another person’s
life and accepting, affirming, supporting, and encouraging them.
Love is the glue that holds relationships together.
More than that, it brings growth, intimacy, and maturity to
those relationships. Given
the tremendous richness and meaning of love in the Christian faith, it’s
important to know what it means.
At this point, I’m aware of the fact that there are
many today who talk about love, and yet the way they define and
describe it can leave you scratching your head wondering, “What?”
or shaking your head in flat-out disagreement.
But when we look at love in God’s Word, we find little
confusion or disagreement. The
Bible makes very simple and clear declarations about it.
I want to look at some
of those statements with you today. First,
the love that is the hallmark of Christian faith and life is founded
in God. “God is love,”
I John 4:16 tells us. But
what kind of love are we talking about?
That’s an important question because we have the privilege
and opportunity to experience for ourselves God’s love in our lives.
The rest of verse 16 says, “Whoever lives in love lives in
God, and God in him.” Verse
12 of chapter four says, “If we love one another, God lives in us
and His love is made complete in us.”
Not only do we have the privilege and opportunity to experience
His love, we also have the privilege and opportunity to demonstrate
His love in our relationships! Jesus
said, “Love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12).
Ephesians 5:25 says, “Husbands, love your wives.”
How are you to love your wife?
“Just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her.”
So this love is important, because it’s love that is supposed
to be a basic part of our lives and relationships.
But what does it look like?
Like I said, God’s Word tells us clearly what it looks like. In Jeremiah
31:3 God says, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”
God’s love is eternal; it has no beginning or end.
God’s love is not the “here today, gone tomorrow”
sentimentality that is often attached to the word love in our culture.
As His love is everlasting, God’s love is decisive, a
decisive exercise of His goodness to us.
It’s love that makes a commitment and sticks to that
commitment through tough as well as good times.
As an exercise of His goodness to us, His love always seeks the
good of the one He loves. He never seeks or encourages harm or evil for the one He
loves. That’s God’s
love; that’s how we’re to love: a decisive, permanent commitment
that always seeks the good of the one you love. Next, I John
4:19 says, “We love because He first loved us.”
The love we have for one another is typically sparked by
something in the person we love. We find them attractive, lovable, and so we decide to love
them. But God’s love is
entirely different. He
first loved us. He loved
us before we had even an iota of love for Him.
He loved us not because we were attractive and lovable.
Indeed, there was nothing whatsoever in us that could attract
or prompt God’s love, which means that God’s love is
unconditional. Let’s be
very clear about this precious truth. God’s love for you and me was in no way inspired by
anything in us. To the
contrary, there was everything in me to repel Him, everything
calculated to make Him loath me, hate me.
I had broken God’s perfect law, I was in rebellion against
Him, my inner being was corrupt in His sight.
I deserve only condemnation and final banishment from His
presence. It is
staggering, astonishing that God should love sinners; yet it is true.
God loves people who are unlovely and unlovable, people who are
in rebellion against Him. There was nothing whatever in us to inspire His love for us,
nothing in us that could attract or prompt it.
So God’s love is a decisive, everlasting exercise of His
goodness to us, and His love is not conditioned in any way by who we
are or what we do. That
may sound great, but how do we know it’s true?
Do we know this because we’re able to love one another?
Because we value love? Not
at all! We know that God
loves in this way because He has demonstrated His love in a concrete,
tangible, unambiguous way: through giving.
The measure of love is how much it gives, and the measure of
God’s love is the gift of His precious, only Son.
The motivation behind the incarnation of Jesus Christ is found
in John 3:16: “God so loved the world that He gave His one and only
Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal
life.” But it is not
just His coming to earth that demonstrates God’s love.
The New Testament constantly points to the cross of Christ as
the crowning proof of the reality of God’s love.
Romans 5:8: “But God demonstrates His own love for us in
this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
He “sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (I
John 4:9-10). Jesus
Christ came into the world to die for you and me.
He died not in order to make His heavenly Father love you, He
died because He already loved you.
His love to sinners, to you and me was expressed by the gift of
His Son to be our Savior. And
one additional thought: God’s love discriminates.
For some people that may come as a shock.
God’s love discriminates.
Please hear me what I say His love does NOT discriminate
against race or gender or age or personality type or disability.
But God, in His love does not love everything.
Let’s look at two passages that tell us what God’s love
discriminates against. First
Corinthians 13:6 says, “Love does not delight in evil but rejoices
in the truth.” Romans
12:9 says, “Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil, cling to what is good.”
Again, God’s love discriminates, more than that, it hates,
hates what is evil with a proper, righteous hatred.
Proverbs 6:16-19 tells us, “There are six things the Lord
hates, yes, seven which are detestable to Him: haughty eyes, a lying
tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked
schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who
pours out lies and a man who stirs up dissension among brothers.”
This is not an exhaustive list, but a representative sampling
of the countless sins that God rightly hates.
God’s love loves the good and true and hates what is evil and
false. And God has also
determined and declared what is good and true and what is evil, and
false. This fact puts God’s
love on a collision course with the way most people think about love
today. A principle of our
post-modern, 21st century culture is that I decide for
myself what is good, true, evil and false.
Rejected completely is the idea that God has anything to say in
the matter. So I decide
what is good and true. What
I decide can certainly include things God affirms, but invariably I’m
going to decide that the good and true also includes what is false and
evil, if I perceive that those things benefit me. And then when I attach the sum of all that to the word “love”
or the phrase “God’s love,” then I can really put you on the
spot. If you don’t
agree with me, what does that mean?
It means you’re obviously not a “loving person.”
Who enjoys being called an unloving person?
None of us do! It’s
bad enough that this happens in our culture, but it’s also happening
in the American church, specifically the mainline liberal American
church: Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, and liberal
Baptist churches. Ministers,
teachers, scholars, and writers are calling evil “good” and then
defining love as supportive of that evil.
A woman’s right to choose when it comes to abortion and
homosexuality are the classic examples.
Among those who are targeted as being unloving are Christians
who take God’s Word seriously, and take God’s love seriously.
God’s love loves what is good and true, and hates what is
evil, hates what is false. I have three
applications here today, growing out of this hard truth that God’s
love means saying no to evil, hating evil.
First, in our interaction with our culture. Does hating evil mean that we get angry and shake our fist at
evil? Does it mean that
we lash out violently against it?
No. We mourn it,
we confront it in peace. We
call upon and pray that our government will suppress evil and
encourage good, as Romans 13 teaches.
In response to the State Supreme Court’s surprising
affirmation of marriage this week, we know there’s going to be an
election this fall. Do
you think the foes of marriage are going to do everything they can to
ensure the justices who voted to uphold marriage are booted from
office? Do we act against evil to support those five justices and
work to replace the four who wanted to destroy marriage? We’d better! Second,
there’s saying no, hating evil in our relationships. It breaks my heart to see Christians come face-to-face with
sin in loved ones’ lives and deciding that “loving as God loves”
means embracing and encouraging and “living with” that sin.
It may be habitual lying, gambling, alcoholism, or other
addictive behaviors, adultery, homosexuality, whatever.
To love as God loves is to love the sinner and hate the sin.
The sin is destroying the life of your loved one.
You’re doing the truly “loving thing” by confronting that
sin (speaking the truth in love) and pleading that it be rejected,
repented of, confessed to Christ, who can forgive and cleanse of all
unrighteousness. Third,
confronting the evil that is sin in your own life. One element of growing in God’s love means seeing sin in
your life the way God sees it. Hate
it, reject it, repent of it, and be forgiven of it. Love and embrace what is good, what is God.
Living in a cynical, fractured, and lonely world, is it any wonder that people are desperate for love, desperate for relationships that are accepting, supporting, and encouraging, relationships that bring intimacy and richness to their lives? People desperately want to love and be loved in this way. The solution is not found in embracing evil and calling it love. The problem is highlighted by the words to a song I remember from the late ’70s: “Looking for love in all the wrong places.” That’s a shame. Because the love people are looking for can be found, found in Jesus Christ, found in Jesus Christ’s people, in us, His church. This is a big part of our opportunity to share Jesus Christ in the mission field that is our community: to show people this love is possible, real and possible for any and all who receive and embrace Jesus as Savior and Lord! |