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Sense
and Nonsense About God’s
Love
1 John 4:8
I’d
like to begin my message with a simple observation. No attribute of God is so widely believed as the love of God.
This observation is quite easily
testable. Take a microphone to the streets of Dexter or Bangor and ask them to tell you
what God is like. I will guess
without too much doubt that the word "love" will be mentioned
more than any other word. People who never go to church, never read their Bibles
know that God is love. Unbelievers know that God is love. Atheists know it, followers of other religions know it. They may not
fully believe it but they have heard it said so many times that when they
think of God, they think of his love.
However,
that’s not the whole story. I
would like to suggest that no attribute of God has been so badly
misunderstood as God’s love. After all, this sermon is called Sense and Nonsense About
God’s Love. In putting the matter that way, I’m suggesting
some of what most people believe about God’s love is quite simply
not true at all.
Let’s
begin our journey to understand something about what it means to say that
"God is love." J. I. Packer uses a wonderful image to speak of
God’s love. It goes something like this:
When we study
God’s wisdom, we learn about his mind.
When we study God’s power,
we learn about his arm.
When we study God’s
knowledge, we learn about his eyes.
When we study God’s Word, we
learn about his mouth.
When we study God’s love, we
learn about his heart.
When we look at any of the
attributes of God, including His love "We stand on holy ground; we
need the grace of reverence that we may tread … but without
sin" (Knowing God, p. 119).
I. Three Wrong Ideas About
God’s Love
Although
it may sound jarring to the ear, let’s talk about three common but
wrong ideas about God’s love. First
is the idea that God loves every person in exactly the same way. I think many assume this is true, but it
is not. A moment’s thought
will show us how unreasonable the notion is. We often use the word love in many different ways—and we in
fact love in different ways and to different degrees. Here’s a little example that makes
the point very effectively: "I love my wife, I love my children, I love my oatmeal in the morning with brown sugar and
raisins." There you have
three different uses of the word "love" in the same sentence.
Married love is not the same as love of your children, and loving your
food is something entirely different. Yet the same word is used of all
three. From a biblical point of
view, we may say that God loves the world, but lavishes love on his
children. Theologians use the word
"sovereign" to describe God’s love. By that they mean that God shows love as he chooses to show love.
Since no one has a claim on God’s love, no one can complain if
God chooses to express his love toward someone else differently than he
has shown it to you.
Second, some people mistakenly
believe that God’s love somehow cancels his holiness.
Unbelievers often think this. Many people have the idea that when they
reach the gates of heaven, God will smile and say, "You don’t
deserve it, but awe, come on in anyway." Unfortunately, that view
has nothing at all to commend itself to us. Whatever else we may say,
this much is certain: God’s
love is not benevolent indulgence…as we said last week , God is not
a celestial Santa Claus ….because God cannot overlook sin.
Behind
this wrong idea is a perverted view of love that says, "If you love
me, you’ll accept anything I do." Wrong! Love
makes judgment calls. Love
cares about right and wrong. That’s why parents discipline their
children. That’s why God disciplines his children.
God’s
love is holy love. His love is
built upon his holiness and could not exist apart from it.
The
third wrong idea is growing more and more popular, even in some
evangelical circles. It’s the idea that God’s love means
that everyone will one day be saved. This is the heresy of
universalism. While it sounds
attractive, it is completely at odds with the Bible. Not everyone who
says "I love the Lord" or "I’m a believer" is
going to heaven.
II. God’s Love: How Sinners Are
Saved
So,
What is the love of God? This week
I read a number of theologians on the subject and came away confused. But on reflection, I decided that just because we
can’t define it simply, that doesn’t mean that God’s
love doesn’t exist. After
all, who can properly define the love between a man and a woman or
between a parent and a child? Story of 85 year old Physicist who
was asked "Can you tell me why you love the study of
physics?" His answer was a
quick, but polite "NO!"
So, I am tempted to say that
I don’t know what God’s love is, but I know it when I see it.
Maybe I can boil it down this way. Human love generally is a response to conditions and
circumstances around us. We
love because someone pleases us or because they seem attractive or
because they pay attention to us or because they make us laugh or because
we feel fulfilled around them.
By
contrast God’s love is utterly uncaused. He loves because that’s the kind of God he is. Nothing
in us causes him to love us. Not our beauty (most of us have very
little), not our wealth (what we have came from him), not our wisdom (the
same), not our good deeds (we have done nothing to recommend us to the
Almighty), not our promise to love him back (we can make no such promise
without his enablement). Our love is conditional and often temporary.
God’s love is unconditional, uncaused, and eternal. It is utterly unlike human love, even
though our love may be a dim reflection of his.
Human Love God’s Love
Influenced Uninfluenced
Conditional Unconditional
Changing Unchanging
Temporary Eternal
Perhaps
the central passage in the New Testament on God’s love is Romans
5:6-8. Here Paul focuses on the death of Christ as the supreme
manifestation of God’s love.
You
see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died
for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though
for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates
his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for
us.
We
discover two vital truths in these verses:
A. The Truth
About Who We Are
Verse
6 says we were "powerless" and "ungodly." To be powerless means we
couldn’t change our basic nature. Ungodly means we had no
desire to change in the first place. Verse 8 adds that we were sinners,
meaning we were desperately in need of a change that we couldn’t
effect and didn’t want anyway. No more hopeless situation could
ever be imagined.
Powerless …
ungodly … sinners. Not a very pretty list, is
it? But those three words describe
what you were by nature from the moment you were born. They also
describe the spiritual state of every person in the world apart from
Jesus Christ.
This is God’s judgment
on the entire human race. No one is excluded. Search the four corners of the
globe and you find no exceptions to the truth. Not only are all men
sinners, but all men by nature are powerless, ungodly and the enemies of
God.
We
may therefore draw one major conclusion from all this: God’s love is not dependent on
anything in you because there is nothing in you worth loving. That
is, there is nothing in you that forces God to love you. It’s not
that you are such a naturally lovable person. You aren’t. And
neither am I. Sin has infected your life so that it has distorted and
destroyed even the parts of you that you believe to be beautiful. Sin "uglyfies" everything it touches. Sin has made us
so ugly that God finds nothing in us that forces him to love us.
There
is, then, no reason for God to love us. No reason except this: His love is both greater than our sin
and in spite of our sin. God shouldn’t love us … but he does. This is the wonder
of the ages. That God would love his sworn enemies.
God loves us in spite of our
unloveliness. That means that God’s love is sure
and certain because it doesn’t depend on anything you say or do.
Second,
these verses reveal to us …
B. The Amazing
Extent of God’s Love
Now we turn to God’s
incredible solution to man’s impossible problem. Verses 7-8 reveal
the unearthly nature of God’s love. His solution to our problem is
so unusual that it goes far beyond human reason. We would never think
this up on our own. Only God could
conceive of this solution. Two statements summarize this truth:
1. He Went Far Beyond What We Would Do. <div
align=right>
"Very rarely
will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might
possibly dare to die." Here’s a good question
for you to discuss over lunch tomorrow. How many people are you willing
to die for? If the chips were down, the moment came, and in a split
second you had to make a decision, how many people would you be willing
to lay down your life for—with no hesitation or reservation?
So
how many people would you die for? Only a few. A handful and no more. Your parents, your children, your
husband or wife, and perhaps one or two very close friends. But
that’s about it. As I thought about it, my list is very small. In
the first place, you never know until the moment comes, and you pray
never to be put in that agonizing position. But what if you were?
Our text is telling us that
all of us would die for a few other people—close friends and family
members, people we greatly admire—but even that is very rare. The circle is very small. To
be honest, there are many people you love dearly but you’re not
sure you’re ready to take a bullet in the back for them.
There
are some people we would die for. There are many more we admire but we
probably wouldn’t die for. There are others we barely know that we
would never consider dying for. There are millions and billions of others
whose lives don’t even figure into the equation.
We’ve all read those
heroic stories where someone gives his life to save a stranger. This week I read a story
about a mining disaster. Two men were trapped in a mine. They had two
oxygen masks but one had been broken in the collapse of the walls. One
man said to the other, "You take it. You’ve got a wife and
children. I don’t have anybody. I can go. You’ve got to
stay." The one man voluntarily died so the other might live. When we
hear a story like that, we feel as if we’re standing on holy
ground. And indeed we are, for such sacrifice is rare indeed.
Or
we can imagine a situation during the Vietnam war. It’s late at
night and a Marine sergeant is talking with his men. They are far into
the jungle, deep in enemy territory. It’s
cold and the men huddle around a tiny fire to keep warm. Suddenly a
grenade flies in from the darkness, landing at the sergeant’s feet.
Without thinking, he throws himself on the grenade, taking the full force
of the blast with his body. He is blown to pieces, but in his death he
saves his men. He gave his life for his friends.
But listen carefully. Romans 5:7 is telling us that
God’s love is not like that. Those examples show us
friends dying for friends and loved ones dying for loved ones. As great
as that is, God’s love is much greater. We can at least understand
what those people did when they sacrificed themselves for those they
loved. But God went far beyond what we would do. We would never think of
doing what he did.
2. He Did What We Would Never Do. <div align=right>
"But God
demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners,
Christ died for us." When we read it, we like to
emphasize, "Christ died for us,"
but the emphasis is clearly on the first phrase—"While we were
still sinners." The wonder is not that Christ should die for
us—though that would be wonderful enough. The wonder is that Christ
died for us while we were still
sinners, still ungodly, still powerless and still enemies of God! He
didn’t die for his friends. He died for his enemies. He died for
those who crucified him. He died for those who hated him. He died for
those who rejected him. He died for those who cheered as the nails were
driven in his hands.
Let’s
go back to Vietnam, only this time the Marine
sergeant has been captured and is taken up the Ho Chi Minh
trail to Hanoi. Because he is a sergeant,
he is beaten unmercifully. His teeth are broken, his cheekbone shattered,
his legs disfigured, his ribs cracked, his back permanently stooped from
hanging upside down in mid-air. His captors torment him day and night,
trying to break his will.
At
length a rescue operation is mounted. As the American forces move in, his
captors surround him. Suddenly out of nowhere comes a projectile. It’s
an American grenade. It lands in the middle of the group. Two seconds,
one second. Just before it explodes, the Marine sergeant throws himself
on the grenade, taking the full force of the blast, dying in the process
but saving his Viet Cong captors. Blown to bits, he dies so that those
men who savagely beat him might be spared.
He Didn’t
Die For His Friends
You
say, "Who would ever do anything like that?" I know only one person who would do
something like that. His name is Jesus Christ. He did something like
that when he died for us while we
were still sinners 2000 years ago.
He didn’t
die for good people. He died for bad people.
He didn’t die for saints. He
died for sinners.
He didn’t die for his
friends. He died for his enemies.
He didn’t die for those who
loved him. He died for those who hated him.
We
would never do anything like that! We might die for our friends but
never for our enemies. But that’s what Jesus did for us.
The death of Jesus is the
final proof of God’s love. Sometimes in this crazy, mixed-up world, people say,
"Where’s the love of God?" We see so much killing, so
much heartache, so much tragedy, so much pain, so
much anger. Where is the love of God?
Look
to the cross. Gaze upon the bleeding form of the Son of God. There you will
see the love of God.
See from his
head, his hands, his feet.
Sorrow and love flow mingled down.
Did e’er
such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?
And
I said, "Lord, how much do you love me?" "This much,"
he said. Then he stretched out his arms, bowed his head, and died.
Let
no one who reads these words ever doubt that God loves you. Does he love
you? Yes he does. He proved it when
Jesus died on the cross for you.
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Baptist Sermon page.
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