Love Revealed

Morning, how are we doing today? Morning, good, good. Well, man, it’s really good to be here. I’m really excited to open God’s Word with you. We’ll get to that in just a moment. First, we’re going to come to our time of congregational prayer that we’ve been doing. Want to give a quick update on two things that we’ve been praying about. The first one, I want to thank you guys so much for your generosity as we got to raise funds and raise some gifts and some supplies for the Ronald McDonald House downtown. We, I think that we might have a couple pictures, yeah, of, okay, Amy and Angela got to take all the gifts and all the presents downtown, and their staff was blown away by y’all’s generosity. So seriously, thank you so much for that. So in a moment when we pray, feel free to pray for all the families that are going to be impacted by that, as we’ve just tried to take one of the burdens of the families that are staying in that facility because their kids are getting medical care downtown. Thank you for that.

The other one, so that’s a local need, the other one is an international need. We are raising money for the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering. If you are unaware, the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, this is a kind of giving drive that we and all the other Southern Baptist churches of our denomination do during this time. It is named in honor of a missionary that was sent, a lady, her name was Charlotte Moon, she went by Lottie Moon, and she was sent to China. So we have named this offering in her honor. Our church’s goal is, is $32, I think $45, and so far we’ve raised $1,245. So I just want to thank you so much for that. We have a few more weeks you’ll be able to contribute to that. Again, my invitation for you on that one is that that would be above your normal giving, that you would be able to treasure what God is doing overseas by sending your funds there, and as you send your funds to the work of missionaries around the world, God would give us deeper and deeper hearts for what He is doing amongst the lost around the world.

So what I want you to do now is that you would buddy up with the neighbor and you would pray either for the families downtown at the Ronald McDonald House that they would know the love of Christ during this season, and pray also, or pray instead for missionaries that we’re going to support through the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering that they too would know the love of Christ while they are so far away from what they call home. Y’all take it away, and I’ll put a bow on it here in a second.

Okay, thank you, y’all, for, for, Father, thank you so much, God. Thank you for You, Lord. We’re going to see this in Your Word here in a moment, but You, God, You are a giver, God. You just constantly give. We can’t outgive You. We can’t out-generous You. We can’t put You in our debt. You supply our every need and so many of our wants too. God, thank You for giving us a few opportunities as a church to respond to Your generosity. Holy Spirit, thank You for moving amongst us to move us in that way. Lord, there’s been a number of things over the past month and a half that You’ve given us opportunities to jump in with You on. Lord, I’m thinking about just some little fruit and gift bags for some local folks here in our community. God, I’m thinking about Operation Christmas Child boxes that are going to be sent to children and families around the world. And now, Lord, You’re using a personal relationship to connect us with some 30-some-odd families downtown that are facing some acute health situations on top of all the other stuff, and we get to help meet some of that other stuff. Lord, God, thank You as well for giving us the opportunity to directly support and fund the work of missionaries around the world so they can plant churches in, in CrossFit gyms in Thailand like that video that we saw. Lord, who in the world would have ever imagined that You would use exercise in Thailand to create a church where people are hearing the gospel and they are going from death to life, turning from idols to the living God? Lord, Lord, would You use the gifts that we sent downtown to do that same thing? Would You use the dollars we are sending around the world to do that same thing. Lord, I pray for myself right now that you would help me to preach the message that you have for our church, God, that you would help me to trust that what this book says is true and it is life. Jesus, help me lift You up. Holy Spirit, as I do that, would You please draw all of us to You. For anybody in the room that still isn’t quite sure about Jesus and what life in Him looks like, Holy Spirit, would You please bring them closer to You so they would know You more deeply today, perhaps for the very first time. Lord, we love You, and it’s in Your name we pray. Amen.

Amen. Well, you can go ahead and grab your copy of the Bible and open up to First John chapter 4. 1 John chapter 4. If you’re still navigating the map of your Bible, then just go all the way to the right cover and start turning to the left just a couple pages, and eventually you’ll hit First John. First John chapter 4. I’ll meet you there in a moment.

This morning we heard the Advent reading about the candle of love. As I was reflecting on love this past week and thinking about some of the advice that I have been given about love and about marriage over the years, and I’ve come to discern that sometimes we are offered what I would say are lies about love. A couple lies about love, and we’ll have a couple of them on the screen. Maybe you’ve heard some of these, such as like this: like feelings are enough to sustain a marriage. Feelings are enough to sustain a marriage. The feeling of love is all you need. If you’ve met the right person, you just need to feel the right things, and you’ll be totally fine. All right, that’s a—I call that like the the Hallmark love. As long as you meet the special someone and you’re both dewy-eyed for each other, then you’re good. That’s a lie.

Another lie is that true love always happens instantly. Again, Hallmark. Maybe maybe these are all just Hallmark lies. I don’t know. True love happens instantly. You see that one, and you just fall in love just like that, and that’s all it takes, and from then on you are sold, and it’s just you and them, and you’re good. That’d be another lie.

Maybe maybe something like this: that soulmates are perfect matches. That whenever you find that person that you want to marry, that you guys, man, you just—dare I say it—you you complete each other, right? That’s not always the case either, right?

Fourth one: you’ll never argue if you’re in love. Anybody else heard that going through premarital counseling or maybe talking with your friends? Hey, if it’s right, you should never argue. It shouldn’t be work. I saw that on a like a like a wall thing at a store this week. Find the right person, and the relationship didn’t work. Man, that’s baloney. Goodness gracious.

Maybe this one, fifth one: love is about finding someone who completes you. Kind of what’s hidden in that is that if there’s this kind of ache in your heart, if there’s this kind of emptiness in your soul, then all you need is to find the right person whose other Lego blocks matches with yours, whose other puzzle pieces matches, and at that point you’re just kind of complete. Now, that’s a lie, one, because people can’t actually complete people. You are made for a type of relationship that no person can satisfy. And two, it’s a lie because what I’ve also come to see is that birds of a feather typically flock together, and extroverts usually don’t marry introverts. Now, I will say, Savers and Spenders usually do marry each other. That creates some conundrums in most of our households.

These are some of the lies about love. This is kind of light-hearted. I get that. The the issue, though, comes when lies about love infiltrate churches. Lies about love sometimes infiltrate churches. That’s what happened to the churches that John was pastoring. John, he was an apostle. He was the half-brother of Jesus. He was involved in a number of churches in the early church, and these liars, these infiltrators, had come into the congregations he was shepherding, and they were teaching some lies about love. They were teaching that Christ didn’t actually come in the flesh; He was just kind of a spirit. They were teaching that Jesus didn’t have to die for us to be saved, and they had been teaching that holding those beliefs isn’t necessary. It’s not necessary for people to become Christians. John, as a pastor, was having to confront some lies about love. This Christmas, you and I, we are all fed like lies about love—not just love between people, like in a Hallmark movie. We’re also fed lies about love with our relationship with God. So here’s my invitation, man, this morning: let’s return to the truth about love, and let’s have that define what the reason for our season really is. You with me? All right. 1 John chap. 4:16 through 19. You’ve heard it read already. Hopefully, it is in your hands right here. If it’s not, it’s on the screen.

“And we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love.” Man, say that with me: God is love. “And the one who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him. In this love is made complete with us so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment, because as He is, so also are we in this world. There’s no fear in love; instead, perfect love drives out fear. Because why? Because fear involves punishment. So the one who fears is not complete in love. In this incredible statement: we love because He first loved us.”

This morning, I just want to offer some truth about love. All right? The truth is, if you’re a notetaker, write this down: the truth is, Christmas is God’s love revealed. Christmas is all about God’s love being revealed to us. This love is revealed, like I said, it’s revealed to us, and what we’ll see in a moment is that God’s love is also revealed through us. We’ll get to that in a minute. God’s love is revealed, and it’s revealed to us, and it’s revealed through us.

God’s love is revealed to us. We see that verse in verse 16. It says that God has love for us. We’ve come to know and to believe the love that God has. God certainly has standards for us to keep, and He certainly has some wisdom He wants us to abide by. But more than that, He’s got love for us to embrace. God has love for us. I want to ask you this morning: do you believe God has love for you? Do you believe that God has love for you? Man, the ultimate lie about God’s love is that you’ve got to earn it—that you’ve got to do enough good things to put God in your debt so that He would respond to your goodness with His own love, as if God’s love was like a paycheck that you had worked in God’s factory to earn. That’s not how it is. The truth is, God is wild about you. God loves you like crazy, without you earning it or working for it. And the truth also is that we could never earn God’s love to begin with. Man, if we could earn God’s love, there’d probably be a lot more people in churches across our nation. If all you had to do to be loved by God was to check a few check boxes—read your Bible, pray, put some cash on a plate, show up to church—if it worked like a point system, then there we would, we would need, we would have so many more churches, because there’d be people trying to earn their way into heaven. And what I know about Americans is that we like to earn things, right? But that’s not the way it is. An infinitely holy God can’t be bought off by our good deeds. We can’t put Him in our debt so that He will love us, and that’s not love anyways. No relationship based on love works this way: if I do good things for you, then you do good things for me. That’s not healthy whatsoever. That’s a work relationship. That is not a loving relationship, the one that you choose to be in. No, God loves you. You can’t earn His love. You don’t have to work for His love. He’s al—he’s already wild about you.

And it’s not just that God has love for you, but we read this incredible line: God is love. God’s very nature is love. His love is not something that we again have to earn from Him. It’s not something that we force out of Him. God is love. Imagine this: when you relate to the holy God of the universe, it is always in a context of Him showering love on you. When God looks at you, it’s as if His eyeballs are made of love, and He looks at you, and He sees You through love. God is love, and that’s how He sees you. It’s not just that He has love in His pockets and He gives you some of His love and then He returns to normal. It’s that God is love, and that love just bubbles over from His heart because that’s His character. Love is not something that God turns on and off based off of the situation He’s in, but when God looks at us, it is done from a position of love. Man, someone in this room right now needs to hear me say this: God is love, and He loves you. He loves you. This is not church talk, man. Imagine we are sitting in your living room. I’m sitting on the couch looking at you. You have just given me a cup of coffee, and we’ve gotten through all the small talk. I want you to picture me that way. God is love, and He loves you. You get it, man.

Christmas is not about the presents that we’ve purchased. Christmas is not about the family gatherings, man. Those things are great. Christmas is about the God of the universe coming up close to you and saying, “I love—I love you. I’ve seen what you’ve done, and I love you. I know who you’ve tried to be, and I love you. I know what people say about you, but I love you.” God’s got love for us because He is love. John, the author, also says that He loved us first before we could do anything to coerce or force His love, before we could ever even earn it. Before you were born, God loved you, and He made a plan to reveal that love to you. 1 John 4:10. I’m just going to zoom up a little bit. It says, “This love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sin.”

Another one of the lies about love in church is that because God loves you, you could do whatever in the world you want to do. You could be anybody you want to be. God loves you, so just live however you want to live anyway, baby. That’s not the way it is. God loves you so much that He would send His own Son to die as a sacrifice for you because our sin—the things we do that go against God’s heart, that go against what the Bible says is good and true and right—we sin. And before time began, God made a plan to deal with that sin, and He said, “I’m gonna go, and I’m gonna die a sacrificial death for them. My blood will cover over them, and it’ll be as if we have been one the whole time.” And atoning sacrifice, at one, me—we were separated from God because of our sin, because of all the things that we do and we say and we think that are against—that are against God’s heart. We are separated from Him. Jesus came to bridge that divide and to bring us back together, and it was only through His sacrificial death for us.

Love is not love unless it crosses hurdles and goes through hurts on its way from one heart to another heart. God showed us love first by sending His Son to cross the greatest hurdle, the barrier of our sin which blocks us from Him. He sent His own Son to go through the greatest hurt, which is our sin, in the stake of God’s heart because we’re rebelling against Him. In love, God pursues us when we don’t deserve it, and we couldn’t earn it. He came to Earth to die a sacrificial death for us so that we could be forgiven. Now, we heard Julie sing this song, “Mary, Did You Know?” The child you delivered would soon deliver you. Christ was born that we may not die. God came as a baby to grow up in a Jewish community, to be loved by His earthly parents, to learn how to become a carpenter and fish, ultimately to live a perfect and sinless life, to be given so that we could be forgiven by God. Christmas is all about this: the God of love revealing His love for us.

It doesn’t stop there, though, because Christmas is also about how God’s love is revealed through us. You see, if the love of God stops at your heart, you’re like a cul-de-sac, and God wants your life to be more like a boulevard. He wants your life to be a channel through which His love gets from Him to somebody else, but If you’re a Christian and you are holding it all for yourself, that might actually indicate that you don’t know God’s love to begin with, because God is a giver, and God’s love always crosses, and it always goes. If that wasn’t true, then He wouldn’t have given us His Son. Or, as Al Smith says, you may be the only Jesus that someone ever meets. God’s love is meant to be revealed through us. Why else would John, the author here, say that we have come to know and to believe this love? We’ve come to know and to believe the love that God has for us.

Now, those words are interesting: knowing and believing. I’m not going to get into all the crazy stuff of the Greek, but what I will explain is that that word “know” has to do with experiential knowledge. Now, I can sit in my office and I can read a book on how to process a deer all day. It could be a little different if I make my way down County Line and I watch Kenneth and he actually shows me how to process a deer. That’s a type of knowledge that I don’t have just by reading a book. John says we come to experience. That’s the type of knowledge that God wants us to have for His love. And again, it’s not just a surface-level understanding; it’s a type of grasping that would lead to action.

Again, I demonstrated this a couple weeks ago. I put a stool right here, and I said, “I don’t just hope in God; I’ve got to stand on the stool of God.” My knowledge of God’s got to lead to some sort of action, leaning on Him. John is saying the same thing: we have got to personally experience and start actually grasping God’s love for us.

Now, here’s the deal: you and me and everybody in this world, we want to experience something real when it comes to spirituality. We wouldn’t be here this morning unless you thought there was some truth to Christianity, right? That it mattered somehow. At least, that’s how the people of America feel right now. You put a graph on the screen. There is a research group that’s a Christian-based research group. It is called the Pew Research Group, and what they do is they survey folks across America to try to understand what’s the state of religion and things like that here in our country.

What we are finding, and it might be a little hard for you to see from where you’re at, 41% of adults in America over this past year have said they have become more spiritual. 41%—that’s almost half of America. God has not gone out of America. People want God. But here’s the deal: 33% of people that responded said they are less religious. That means while people are more interested in spirituality, they’re less interested in coming to church. People want a living experience with the Divine. People want a type of intimate knowledge with God that comes through experience, and they don’t necessarily feel like they’ve got to come here to get it.

Say all you want about people needing to be in church on Sundays. I read a graph like that, and I think, “Man, I’ve got to spend more time where people are Mondays through Saturdays. If they’re not going to come here to hear me talk about Jesus, I need to take the message of Jesus to where they are.”

You are here this morning, though, because you want to know and to believe something bigger than yourself. So my invitation is: lean in, own your experience of God. There’s a commentator—that’s just a fancy word for somebody that reads the Bible and makes smarter notes than anything I could say—he said this about this passage: “Theological knowledge and doctrinal convictions”—that’s knowing and believing—“theological knowledge and doctrinal convictions are proved by living experience, and they are deepened by it too.”

Let me rephrase that: we’ve got to practice what we preach, and our walk’s got to match our talk. So when we talk about God being a God of love, we need to experience and know that God of love deeply. So the question is: are you spending time deepening your understanding and your experience? Coming on Sunday mornings is a great rhythm for you. There’s a lot of survey data, there’s a lot of longitudinal studies that will say just coming on Sunday mornings will prevent a lot of hardship in your life, and you will grow as a follower of Jesus. However, I hope and I trust this is just one rhythm for you.

In your walk with Christ, I hope this is just an extension of what you’re doing Monday through Saturday, where you would be reading the Bible, you’d be praying, you’d be talking with other believers about how good God is, you trying to help other folks come to know this love of God.

Man, for the person in the room where you’re not sure that you really know God’s love yet, I’d say you—you’re not yet a believer in Christ. You’re here, not sure why you’re here. You may not be sure why you’re here, but you hear a guy like me talk about God being love. Man, my invitation to you is, why not embrace that today? You may have some doubts, some hesitations, some concerns. Have those things from a—a inner relationship with God, and let Him show you how kind and generous and trustworthy He is.

And for the person in the room where you, man, you’re sold out, you’re like, “Yes, I love Jesus. I know that God has love for me.” My invitation for you is, man, why not go deeper in that relationship with God? John, the author of the—the passage this morning, said that God is love, and the one who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him. It seems that if we know and believe the love that God has for us, then we will remain in that love, and we will strive to experience and know that love on a deeper and deeper way.

Before I got up to preach this morning, we put a video on the screen, kind of documenting or detailing, whatever the verb is there for you, a sermon series that I’m going to be doing in the month of January. This is something that I felt pretty burdened for for a while now. It’s just a—a way for us as a church to pursue, I get it, a deeper relationship with God. You know, Jesus says in John 15:5, “I [am] the vine, you are the branches. The one who remains in me and I in him produces much fruit, because you could be nothing without me.”

My heart for our church is that we would go as deep—deep into the—the relationship with God as we can, that our life as a branch of Christ would go as—as deep into the vine of Jesus as possible. So in January, I’m going to share about three habits that I fully believe that if we integrate regularly into our lives, we produce a deeper walk with Jesus, in which we look more like Him, and we produce the fruit that He wants us to produce. We’ll be talking about prayer and fasting, we’ll be talking about financial giving, and we’ll be talking about sharing our faith.

So in January, that’s what I’ll be talking about. February, March, and April, my invitation that you would join me on a 90-day intentional pursuit of going deeper with Jesus through those habits. We’ll get to some more of that in the next—in the New Year. My desire there is that we would incorporate habits into our lives that would help us to know and to believe this love that God has for us, that we would remain in this love, because this passage says that a sign that we are remaining in the love of God is that we—it’s crazy—we will have confidence in the day of judgment.

You did not come on a Sunday before Christmas wanting to hear about the day of judgment, but John, our author, brings this up. He says in verse 17, look at it again with me: “In this love is made complete with us so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment, because—as He is, so also are we in this world.” Now see, there’s no fear in love; instead, perfect love drives out fear, because fear involves punishment, so the one who fears is not complete in love.

A plan was made in the past for God to save us; that implies that there is a plan which has been made for the future where God will judge. Are you ready for the day of judgment? I would not be holding this role with the dignity that it deserves if I did not say that the baby born to die for you will come again, not as a Savior, but as a judge. A day is coming when everyone will be held accountable for their belief in or denial of Jesus as the Son of God and the sacrifice for our sin. But remember, God is love, and He wants you to approach that day.

of judgment or your death, whichever happens first. He wants you to approach those things with confidence, joy, even as wild as that could sound, we can have joy in that day. You see, 2 Peter 3:9 says that God doesn’t want anyone to die in their sin. That’s why John 3:16 says that God sent His Son so that nobody would have to die in their sin. We can have eternal life with God. That includes you, your neighbors, your family members, everyone else that you ever meet. To be accepted on the day of judgment, we have got to claim Jesus as the sacrifice for our sin and experience His love in a personal way. We can’t just know about it; we have to know it. We can’t just talk about it; we have to grasp this. The question is, do you know God’s love personally? Is God and His love, is He like a resident in your home that you see in the morning, you see throughout the day, you say good night to at night, someone that Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday you’re interacting with, you’re talking with, you’re coming to know? Is He that, or is He like the teller at Publix, a friend, someone you know about, probably haven’t been in their home or probably haven’t been in yours? Which describes your relationship with God: someone you live with or someone you know about? The Bible says that the only way we can have confidence in the day of judgment to come is for God to be a resident of our hearts, someone we live with, not someone we go to Publix and hear the cashier talk about.

Knowing and experiencing the love of God revealed in Jesus that gives us confidence to approach death. And what’s the point of that Judgment Day confidence? It is this, friends, that we would be as Christ in this world. We would love others. God would reveal His love for the world through us. Christ is the revelation of God’s love. He is the full display, the clear picture of God’s intense desire for the souls of people around this world. God so loved us that He would give His only Son for us. So in response, we love others. Man, that would mean that we forbear with people and we forgive people that hurt us. That would mean we tell people truth with grace. That would mean that we pray for our enemies that they would be blessed by God. That would mean that we try to meet people’s needs around us like the families of the Ronald McDonald House.

As I start to close this morning, hopefully you have heard it personally: God is love, and He loves you. We’re gonna get to respond to this truth in a minute by singing back to God about how good God is. I want you to do something right now, though. If you would just, man, just close your eyes with me. I’m not going to force anybody to do anything. I’m not going to out you, nothing like that. I just want to give you an opportunity to personally talk with God about this. I just want you to repeat a prayer after me. Again, if you don’t want to follow my lead, that’s fine, but you would pray something like this: Lord, do I know Your love personally? You’d say something like, God, I know about You, but do I know You? You’d say, Holy Spirit, help me to see the truth. Do I know You?

For everybody in this room right now, my invitation to you is simple. And during this final song, I’ll be up front. If you’re not sure that you know the love of God personally, I would love to pray with you and just begin a conversation. Or if there’s somebody in your family or your network, a friend of yours, a cashier of yours, a family member, if there’s somebody that you know that you’re not confident that they know God’s love, man, would you also come forward? I’ll pray with you for them. For everybody else, we’ll be singing this song that just declares in some really simple terms that God is good, He loves us, we can trust that.