The Love Test
Text: 1 John 4:7-12
Proposition: One of the greatest characteristics of God that He uses to transform us and at the same time glorify Himself is His love.
Introduction: Remember those classic lines that start with, “Roses are red…”? Here’s a few that that were variations of that: Roses are red, violets are blue, the depth of my love? If you only knew! Roses are red, violets are blue, The way that you kiss me....Whew! Roses are red. Violets are blue. Cashews are nuts. And so are you.
Then there were the classic love poems like the one Shelley wrote called Love’s Philosophy,
“The fountains mingle with the river and the rivers with the ocean;
The winds of heaven mix forever with a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine in another's being mingle-- Why not I with thine?”
I share these with you this morning because we are about to look at one of the greatest love poems ever written because it speaks not just about the expression of love but the very source of it. Have a look at 1 John 4:7-10.
I. How Does God Love Thee, Let Me Count the Ways…
You likely recognize these words from that famous poem written by Elizabeth Barret Browning in the mid 1800’s. Her poem caught an intensity of love that has resonated with people for over 100 years. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight for the ends of Being and ideal Grace…”. Love is to many people an enigma, it’s hard to explain, often unappreciated and yet crucial to life. In the passage before us today the Apostle John in poetic form speaks about love from a different perspective. He looks at where love originates and why it moves us the way it does. Listen to how he begins this poem-like description:
“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love…”.
What John is doing is giving us yet another way to test truth, the truth about who God is and how we are to relate to Him. In this letter so far he gave us the moral test, how to see and respond to sin. Then he gave us the doctrinal test, do the spirits confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. Now he adds yet a third test, the love test. He begins with a peculiar expression that is somewhat lost in translation. In the Greek it begins, “Loved, love…”, we read it as, “Beloved, let us love…”. In other words you who are loved so uniquely now love others. God’s love is more than just a passive love that likes you just as you are, it is different. This love that God loves us with creates life, ‘born of God’. It creates relationship, literally ‘knows God’. This love brings forgiveness of sin and then it goes deeper, it imparts in you the very character trait that God has, a love that rises above sin. It’s that agape kind of love that isn’t put off by the sin of self or others, it moves past sin because it is a love that sees or seeks to see as God sees. John even restates this in a negative sense, he uses an antithetical method of Hebrew poetry common in Proverbs. Look at verse 8, “He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” If you know God it means you not only know of Him in the doctrinal sense but you know Him in the experiential sense too. In other words you don’t just know about God, you know Him personally. You confide in Him, you laugh with Him, you weep with Him, you long to be with Him and you know when you’ve drifted away from Him. If you know Him you will love because it’s a trait of God that is imparted to us to a great measure when we receive Christ. It’s true that all people love, but then all people are made in God’s image. But it’s when you believe in Jesus as Savior that God in the person of the Holy Spirit now indwells you and things inside your mind and heart change. To be born again means that now your spirit has come alive, it now has the capability of understanding Who God is, what God has been saying to you, bringing more of a clarity to know His will in your life. His presence is characterized by a transforming love that enables you to overcome sin, to no longer be its slave. ‘How does God love thee, let me count the ways’… redeemed, transformed, glorified, justified, sanctified, one day resurrected to reign with Christ forever! You’re set free, set on course, set for eternity, set securely in Him.
II. All You Need is Love, Love is All You Need…So God Gave Him To Us. Those lines written back in the sixtiesbyLennon and McCartney became an iconic song because it lifted love above all things, “There's nothing you can do that can't be done…nothing you can make that can't be made…nothing you can know that isn't known… all you need is love”. They were so close and yet so far. The love that is all we really need actually does make all else fade in comparison. But it’s not the romantic love that the Beatles would soon discover as failure in many of their relationships. The love they could sense and wrote of is greater than friendship, romance or familial love. Look at how John describes this love that is all you really need. “In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him.” Thisword ‘begotten’ is the Greek word ‘monogenes’, a compound word meaning ‘only type or kind’. For some they think that begotten refers to the incarnation of Christ, conceived of the Holy Spirit in Mary and born by her. Many cults like Mormonism and JW’s and even Islam would point to the term ‘begotten’ to say that Jesus was created and as such was not absolute deity. But John is saying that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, meaning that begotten describes Jesus before the incarnation. We run into this word same word in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son into the world that whosoever believes on Him should not perish buy have eternal life.” The word doesn’t refer to actual birth or even the singleness of birth order. You see this more clearly in a passage from Hebrews 11, “By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had received the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, "It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned." We know that Abraham had a previous son, Ishmael, so in what sense was Abraham sacrificing his one and only son Isaac? The answer is that Isaac was the one that God had promised, the preeminent son, the son of Abraham through which God would fulfill His promises. There was only one Isaac, he was ‘monogenes’, one of a kind. This is how this term is describing Jesus, He is One of kind, there is no other like Him. He is fully God and has all the attributes of God. This was such a key point of truth that the early church built it right into the Nicene Creed, “I believe...in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made." It is this Jesus, the only begotten Jesus that came into the world that we might have eternal life through Him. Then look at verse 10, “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” The love that is all you really need is the love that originates from God in His character and then in His sending Himself, Jesus the exact image of the invisible God. The All in All is all you really need. This Jesus, this one a kind God then came to be the propitiation for our sins. The word has the picture of One who turns away the wrath of God against sin. It would be like Christ comes into the burning house of your life and wraps Himself over you and the flames burn Him as He secures you safely out of the fire. That is what the term propitiation points to, a love that does what no other could do, a love that lays down it’s body and even life in order to have wrath pass over you. So John says, ‘Herein is love”, this is what love looks like, this is the love that is all you really need. John closes with verse 11, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” This is the love test, to know the God who has loved you like this and to believe in Him and have His love move through you to those around you.
Listen to these closing words from Elizabeth Barret Browning, they are how Jesus loves you:
I love thee to the level of everyday’s most quiet need, By sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.