Here now the Word of God, first John 4, 7, through 21. 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. 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. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us because he has given us of his spirit and we have seen and testified that the Father has sent his son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him and he and God. 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. By this is love perfected with us so that we may 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 has to do with punishment and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. 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 this commandment we have from him, whoever loves God must also love his brother. This is the word of the Lord. Lord our God, this is indeed your word. It is strong, it is true. And we beg you, Lord, to make it powerful in our own lives this morning. May we in fact see and hear marvelous things from your word that we might know we are loved and know how to love with that same love. We pray in Christ's name, amen. We are in a series on Sunday mornings that Mark has been leading us in for several weeks now where we're studying this little letter that the Apostle John wrote. It was one of the very last documents in the New Testament that we have. John is an older gentleman. He is probably exiled on the island of Patmos as he writes this letter and he is writing to his younger friends in Christ, his disciples and those he's taught. And he is answering the question that it appears that several of them have been raising to him. And the question is how do I know I'm really a Christian? We might call that the question of assurance. Can I be assured that I'm really a Christian? How do I know? What do you do when you have doubts? People are asking those things of John. And John gives them three tests in this little letter as you have heard us say in the last weeks. The first one is do you believe the truth? And particularly do you believe the truth about Jesus who has come as God's son in the flesh? In other words do you believe the incarnation? Secondly do you obey the truth? Do you live by what you say you believe? And third do you love one another? Now these three tests are basically all he talks about in this little book, but he weaves them together and he repeats them in different orders and with different nuances. And what that actually means for you is that if you've been coming for several weeks you've been hearing the same sermon over and over and over again. Now not exactly the same words, but you've been hearing the same three things. Makes me think of a very well-known pastor in South America by the name of Juan Carlos Ortiz who went to preach at a very large church in Buenos Aires in Argentina. And he was very well known and even before he got there and he stood up on his first Sunday in the pulpit and he preached this stemwinder of a sermon. It was just great. And everybody loved it. The next week he got up on Sunday he preached exactly the same sermon, word for word. People sort of scratched their heads and thought well that's interesting. And third Sunday, same thing, got up, preached exactly the same sermon. And the elders went to him and said one, it's a good sermon. But you know maybe you have another one and he said I'll preach another sermon when we begin to live this one. And I think that's a little bit of what John's doing here. He's repeating these themes again and again and again because he wants to make sure that we really begin to live these truths. And this morning as I said we revisit this third test that is that we love one another. Do you want to know if you're a Christian? Then the question can be answered by looking at the way we love one another in the faith. Beloved verse seven, let us love one another for love is of God. Whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Very simple, isn't it? You want to know you've been born of God? You want to know if you know God? Then he directs you toward your brother or sister and says how is your relationship with him or with her? And it helps us if we remember that John is not writing here a theological argument. So much as he is, as I said, an older Christian writing a very, very personal letter to those he loves. And like with many personal letters that you or I might write, there's a lot of redundancy, there's a lot of repetition, there's things that we say again and again for emphasis. And here John gives us in this particular section about loving one another as a true sign or of our being believers, he gives us three aspects of this love, three aspects of this love. And if you're a note taker or if you're inclined to do this, this may help you a break these three out. If you put a pencil line or a pen line in your printed program on the text itself between verses 12 and 13, 12 and 13, and then another one between 16 and 17. So a line between 12 and 13, and between 16 and 17, and it divides the passage fairly neatly into three sections. And if you'll bear with me this morning, in some ways this is more like a Bible study than a sermon. I think we'll have some punchy things to say here, but I want to guide you through this passage somewhat closely. So these three sections, first one is love is God's identity and our calling. The second one, love is the way that Christ abides in us and we abide in Him. And third, love is the way we cast out fear from our lives. So first of all, this first section, love is God's identity and our calling. Again, verse seven, beloved, let us love one another. For love is from God and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. God starts this section by restating that test of love. But then he puts it negatively in verse eight. Anyone who does not know God, excuse me, anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love. So if you love one another, it is a sign that you know God. If you do not love one another, it is a sign that you may not, in fact, know God because why? Because God is love. Now this is a very interesting statement. One, we often repeat, repeat God is love. But if you think about it, we never say God is mercy. We never say God is justice. We say God is merciful and we say God is just. But we don't use two nouns in our description. We don't say object and subject are the same. God is love. It's the only place, only kind of language we find like that in the Bible. In other words, God's deepest identity, apart from the fact of his very being itself, is love. God's deepest identity is that he is love. And the question really becomes for us. How do we know this? How did God show us this? Verse nine, in this is the love of God that was made manifest among us, okay? He shows us that God sent his only son into the world that we might live through him. God sent his son into the world. What is this statement of? What huge Bible truth is this a statement of? The incarnation, that God sent his son into the world to become flesh for us, to live among us, to live the lives that we are to live. He lived this life perfectly as we did not. And then, verse 10, in this is love, not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be a propitiation for our sins. How do we know God is love? Send his son first place. In the second place, how do we know God is love? He sent his son to be what? A propitiation, a 50 cent word that means something very direct, that Jesus made himself a sacrifice to bear the wrath of God which we deserve. That's what propitiation means, a wrath bearer. Jesus became a wrath bearer for us. So by propitiation at the cross, God removed the barrier of his love to us. No more barrier, no more sin, therefore he loves us. And by the removal of that barrier, he gives us the life of his son. If God loved us in these ways, if his deepest identity is that he sent his son to give us his son's life, and he sent his son to die in our place and be the propitiation person. If that's God's deepest love identity, then what is our high calling? Our high calling is to love as he loved or as verse 11 puts it, beloved if God so loved us, we ought to love one another. Now in this passage, there is an intrinsic or you might say necessary connection between God's love for us and our love for others. They are not two separate things. They are completely entwined. What is the necessary connection between them? Is it that God loves us so much that we become so filled and so happy with his love and so thankful and joyful with it that we then muster up our best and we go out and love others? Is that what is in mind? Absolutely not. No. What does in mind is something far better. It is that we are loved with this amazing love, love that expressed itself how in God becoming man and incarnation and in the cross. God so loved us. And now we are to love others with that same love. Not with a pumped up love of our own, but with that same love. In other words, the love with which God loves us by its very nature demands expression in us and through us. Some time ago I was at the DFW Airport waiting to take off on a plane and actually I went through the security line and the TSA agent was there and I gave her my boarding pass and my driver's license. She was a very, very pretty African-American woman and she looked very quickly at my boarding pass and scribbled on it and then she looked up at me and she said, how are you? And I said, I'm fine. Thank you. How are you? And she said, I am wonderful. And she paused and she said, may God bless you. I will remember that encounter that lasted for just a few seconds, all of my life. Why? It's not because she was being nice to me. It's not even because she was loving me. It's because she was loving me with a love not her own. And I knew it. I knew it. We all perhaps have had a few experiences like that in our lives where we are being loved with the love of God through another person. This is the self-authenticating way we know we are believers when we begin to love that way. What follows here in verse 12 is this, no one has seen God. That seems out of place. He's just been telling us how we're to love one another and then he says, no one has seen God. What does that mean? Well, he's really teasing us, I think. No one has seen God, but do you want to see him? Then love one another because as he says, he will abide in you as we love one another and his love will be perfected in you. In other words, you will see God more with your heart than you can with your eyes. And you will know that love more than if you could see him. God's deepest identity gives rise to our highest calling and make no doubt about it. Our highest calling is to love with the love with which we have been loved. Love received leads to love given. And love given seeks more love to receive and then give. And on it goes. There is an absolute connection between God's love for us and our love for others, an absolute connection. You simply cannot have one without the other. Now this leads into the second aspect. I'm going to be more prompt. I hope on this one. The second aspect of love love is the way that Christ abides in us and that we abide in him. Love is the way that Christ abides in us and the way we abide in him. Remember as I've said before to you, look for the unexpected things when you read the Bible. You would actually expect John to say here, if we love Christ, then he will abide in us. If we love God, then God will live with us. Wouldn't you expect that? Yes, you would, but that's not what he says. In verse 12, he says, if we love one another, he abides in us. The way to abide is to know, first of all, how much you have been loved. So what does abide in Christ or abide in God or abide in love actually mean? It seems rather obvious, but when you think about it and press down a bit, it gets a little harder to define. It means to love to live in. A abide means to live in, right? Like we might say, well, we live in our houses, but a abide means more than to live in, doesn't it? Think about the word. It has a connotation of desire. If you abide somewhere, it implies that you really want to be there, as opposed to just living there, of wanting to live in your house. You see, you live in a house, but you abide in a home. See the difference? Last Saturday, I was trying to get home from the East Coast, and it was one of those times of Murphy's law of air travel. If it could go wrong, it did go wrong. I had to fly from Richmond to Chicago, and then change planes to fly from Chicago to Dallas. Well, there was such bad storms last Saturday in Chicago, and so much flooding, they closed the airport. There's nobody taking off, nobody landing. So the pilot had to divert us from Chicago to Champaign, Illinois. And we're getting there in the area, gate area, and the agent says, well, we're going to get a bus. It'll be here in about an hour. And we're going to bus you to Chicago to Ohio Airport. And it's about a two and a half hour bus drive. So I'm thinking, okay, I'm going to wait for three and a half, probably four hours, to get to an airport where no planes are taking off, and no planes are landing. I don't think that's a very good idea. So I was at a gate, a gate six, I remember it, and it said in Champaign Airport, and I looked up, and it said 615 AM, Dallas. I said, well, why don't I just spend the night, I said to the agent, why don't I just spend the night, and I'll get this 615 AM. She said, that's a good idea. And so they actually paid for my hotel room, and I came back at 530 the next morning, and we got on the plane, and we taxied out, and the pilot came on, and she said, you know, we're ready to take off, but not really. There's a little wire in my earphone here that isn't working right, and I'm not really hearing what I need to hear from the tower, and so forth, and she said, you don't want me to take off if I can't hear, okay? So we're going back to fix it. It won't take long. Whenever they say that, you know what that means, right? Sorry, Rick. You know what that means, okay? So we go back, and it's sure enough, it's two hours to get this little part shipped in from somewhere else, and we, well, I really wanted to go home. And the reason I tell you the stories, I really was aiming to get home in time to come to church on Sunday morning here. So I figured, well, if I couldn't get home Saturday night, I can get home Sunday morning, leave at 615. Surely I'll be here in time for church. Well, I got here just in time to miss church altogether. But the reason I tell you this is that I was tired and I was hungry, and I was a bit lonely, and I wanted to go home. I didn't want to go to my house. I wanted to go to my home where I could rest, where I could be fed, where I could let down and relax a little bit. You see, home is not just a place, though it is. Home is a place of being there, of abiding there. And so the point that I'm obviously trying to make is that the love of Christ is our home, that the love of Christ is where we belong, that the love of Jesus is where all things come together in our lives, where we are fed, where we do find rest, where we do find stillness, where we do find hope and life for our souls. How do we abide in this love? How do we do it? By recognizing we can't. We can't do it. I don't know how. We don't naturally abide in the love of God or in the love of Christ. It has to be given to us. Two weeks ago, Mark was talking about the same idea, and he talked about the Holy Spirit as a bright flashlight that shines the truth of Christ into our hearts, verse 13. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us because he has given us of his spirit. And when the Holy Spirit is given to us, what does he illuminate in us? Verse 14. Look at it carefully if you're inclined to look otherwise. Listen carefully. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. Saying two things that we talked about before. We know God loves us because the Holy Spirit tells us that the Father has sent the Son, the incarnation, verse 15, whoever confesses that Jesus, the man is the Son of God. God abides in him and he in God. And then second, the Holy Spirit tells us that his Son is our Savior because of the cross. So where do we know Jesus as the Father's Son in his life of incarnation? Where do we know Jesus as the Son of God who is the Savior of the world at his cross? We must learn to abide in his incarnation and in his cross. Hear me now. We must learn to meditate in the gospels on these two things, on his life and on his death. That's what the gospels are. The account of his life and his death. And God calls us to use our imagination as with any story that we would read. Use our imagination in order to enter into the very truths. That's what our children do when we read them stories, isn't it? They read it. They just get bugged and they're real, you know, very, very interested and get done. They say, read it again, Daddy. Read it again.
Use your imagination on God's word. Walk with Jesus in his incarnate life as he teaches, as he touches, as he turns water into wine, as he walks on water, as he sleeps in the back of a boat, as he cooks fish for his disciples on the shore. Go to the cross then with Jesus by hearing him and seeing him say that he must go to Jerusalem to suffer and die. Watch him take bread and wine and break it and give it and say, this is my body. This is my blood. Agonize with him in the garden. Watch him be hit with a stick. Watch him be slapped across the face. Watch him as he is spat upon. Stumble with him into Golgotha. See him die on the cross. See the Centurion say and hear him say this truly was the Son of God. So do you see that as we enter into these most profound aspects of God's love, loving identity toward us, incarnation and cross. As we enter into those in the word, we find that love grows within us. The love of the Savior grows within us and then we rise up to our highest calling, which is to love with the love with which we have been loved. So love is God's deepest identity and our highest calling and love is the way that Christ abides in us and we in him. Now, very quickly, the last point, love casts out fear. Verse 18, there is no fear in love but perfect love casts out fear. The opposite of love is not hate. It's fear. Where the Holy Spirit shines the truth of the incarnation and the truth of the cross, where Jesus was our Savior, there will be no fear but instead his love. Verse 18, whoever fears has not been perfected in love. Well, I think that includes me. Maybe you too. In other words, there are things we fear. There are things of which we have been afraid in this life. And so the question is, if you want to abide in Christ, it's good to ask this question, what do I fear? What do I fear? And John, he brings it right up. He goes right to the heart of it because he says in verse 17, by this is love perfected with us so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment. And a little bit later, he says, we therefore will not fear punishment at the end of our lives.
He was talking to a friend the other day and we were talking about the prospects of our own deaths. And that may sound a little morbid but actually it wasn't. It was actually a very encouraging conversation. We agreed that there may be many aspects of death we fear but two of them are not judgment and punishment. And Sarah would told me just before her husband Mark died a few weeks ago and speaking for them both, she said, once you settle the death question, there is nothing else to worry. Really, that may sound extreme but the gospel is extreme. That may sound unrealistic but the gospel is the most realistic thing in the world. Settle the death question and everything else will fall out from there. So the question that we have to ask is, what do I fear? And whatever you think of when I say that, ask yourself this next question, is it really worth my fear? If God has taken care of the really big thing by sending His Son in the flesh and by His Son dying on the cross, what else is there? As the apostle Paul says, he who did not spare his own son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also give us all things with him? That's Paul's argument from the greater to the lesser. He's given us the greatest thing. He didn't spare his son, incarnate son to the cross for us. Now will he not give us everything else we need in the midst of all of the potential fears of this life? Here's a great truth. Love makes us courageous. Love gives us courage. Love makes us courageous with others to say the right thing and the truthful thing, rather than the thing that we don't want to say because we fear what they will think of us. Love gives us courage to say the right thing with love to them and love makes me courageous with myself. To be as my friend Dan Allender puts it, the truest version of myself rather than the water down version of someone else. Love makes me really become at peace with myself. To be myself, as we might say, to be content in our own skin and that contentment coming from the love of God gives me the ability to do the hard thing if I need to. To sacrifice my own desires, my comfort, even perhaps my safety. Yes, like taking a turn in the nursery where your safety is not guaranteed at all, but where in your life is your life at risk? Where? If you say nowhere, then I wonder, are we really beginning to comprehend the love of Jesus Christ if we say nowhere?
This illustration and then I'm done. Nick Willenda, famous Willenda family of the high wire people been doing it for generations and circuses and so forth. I heard him interviewed on the radio. And he's getting ready for his June 23rd walk on a wire across the Grand Canyon which has never been done before. And he will be shown live on the Discovery Channel on June 23rd if you want to watch. And the interviewer asked Willenda, are you scared? Are you fearful? And his answer was my grandfather always used to say that real life is on the wire. Everything else is just waiting. Well, I say to you this morning, brothers and sisters, that real life is lived without fear because it's lived with the love of the Lord in risky places and places where love takes us and where courage is needed. Everything else is just waiting. Love is God's deepest identity and our highest calling. Love is the way that we abide in Christ and he abides in us. Love casts out fear. Here's a summary sentence. See if this makes sense. Do you want to know if you're a real Christian? Then abide in God's love and in God himself by living with his son in the incarnation and at the cross and by rising to your highest calling by loving one another and do not fear where Jesus will take you in his love for his love gives you courage. Maybe the age of Apostle John said it better and more briefly in verse 12. Little children, if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. The name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lord our God, thank you for this passage for these marvelous truths. May we live in them. May we love them. May we be loved by you and may we love others as the verification that we have been so loved and may we ever more dwell in you and you and us, now and forever. Amen.