Basic Training -- 1 John 4:7-21

Good morning, everybody. It's really good to see you. I'm really excited to be up here right now. I was really excited to get to sit here and witness and be a part of watching Scott and Pam become associate members here. If you don't know, they're my in-laws. So it's an exciting day. It's family day. Welcome to Deschamps Family Day at CTK.

If you don't know me, my name is Paul Deschamps. I'm the Director of Student Ministry here. Y'all got fair warning that I was preaching this week. Danny gave you a heads up. He let the cat out of the bag. So I am exceptionally thankful that all y'all still came. We're here this morning, and we get to spend some time together digging into God's word and hearing about his love. This is a big love Sunday here for us as a church, and it's really an exciting passage.

Let me pray for us, and then we'll see what the Lord has for us. Heavenly Father, we just praise you that you are such a good and loving and gracious Lord. We thank you that you love us so much that you were willing to come and speak in a language that we could understand and reveal yourself to us so that we could know you by name and we could know your love and we could give love back to you and to one another. We pray, Lord, that you would meet us here this morning. We pray that you would send your Spirit to be with us, that you would be alive and speaking through your word and that you would rest in our hearts the beautiful truth of your deep and abiding love for us. I pray this in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

If you would turn with me to First John, we've been walking through that together as a church this summer. It's been really encouraging hearing these wonderful reminders about our faith and being encouraged about knowing our love. We're in chapter four today. We're going to read verses seven through twenty-one. As has become the custom of our church, we're going to read that together out loud. You can find the words either up here on the screens or printed in the order of service that you got, or in your Bible. Let's read this together.

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. And 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. But 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 testify 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 in 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. — 1 John 4:7-21

This is the word of the Lord. Thank you, everybody.

Man, this is one of those passages that we could read it, close the book, go get lunch and say amen and it's so good. It is so clear to see how much God loves us. It's also a passage that we could camp out in for months and just unpack every little detail about God's love. I'm not going to do that today, so don't worry.

As we jump in, here we go. June 25th, 1967, approximately 400 million people from about 25 different nations all simultaneously gathered around their television sets to watch the first ever live television broadcast via satellite. The program they were watching was called "Our World," which featured the British rock sensation, the Beatles. And they were singing what would become a new smash hit for them, the song "All You Need Is Love." They'd been asked to write a song for this program that would be a simple song that could be understood by all the nations. And the most universal concept that they could come up with was love.

Is love that easy to understand? We use the word love all the time, but we don't very often get around to defining it. I'm not really sure that as a collective society we could come up with a definition for what love is that we all agree on. I would challenge that we have no clue how to define love.

Just take music for an example. If you look at music, not just now but for over decades, we've got all these songs: "All You Need Is Love," "The Ballad of Love and Hate," "Crazy in Love." Any Bieber fans? "Love Me." "Love You Like a Love Song." Any Frozen fans? "Love is an Open Door." "Love is a Many Splendid Thing." "Love Lifts Us Up Where We Belong." It's "The Power of Love." I mean, what is love? "Baby, don't hurt me. Don't hurt me no more."

Music may attempt to express the emotions of love, but I think that's the best that the social sciences can really do—say that love is some sort of universal emotion that keeps people bonded to one another. And it's complex. It's as complex as the people that it bonds. We make this even more complex because we've made ourselves the authority on what love is. But God's word roots love not from our perspective but from his.

The overall theme of 1 John is to call us back to the basics of our faith. It reminds us that God measures our discipleship by one little metric: our love. That's the love of God shown in our obedience and the love of our brothers and sisters. No matter how educated or theological or wise or sophisticated we think we are, we've got to go back to the basics and ask: Are we growing in love?

If you've been tracking with us this summer, you already know that love is kind of a big deal. This is the third sermon on love in this book. And while it may feel like John is saying the same thing over and over like a broken record, he's not. He's using a literary tool called amplification. Every time he comes around again, he builds upon it. This passage is like the spinal tap amp that's turned to eleven. This is love that is turned up as loud as it can go. What it's saying is that love itself is the evidence of our faith.

We're going to look at three points: the foundation of love, the function of love, and the formula of love.

The Foundation of Love

Long ago, I worked in construction in Philadelphia. One of my jobs was to be the inspector of structural steel for skyscrapers. When they were building a new skyscraper in downtown Philadelphia, I was climbing the iron and checking to make sure they put things together correctly.

In Raleigh, you don't just pop up a skyscraper. It may feel like that, but you're not just going to go out to a grassy field and start building. Before you can build, you have to dig into the ground and pour lots and lots of concrete and make a foundation. You have to build something strong so that this humongous building that has an amazing purpose can stand on it.

In verses seven and eight, we're told that the foundation of love that we need to see in our life begins with God and is in fact God himself. We use the word love so casually that I think this is really confusing. The word must be absolutely exhausted.

We use it to talk about so many things. I love my mom—I do. I also love pizza. Both statements are absolutely true, but they mean very, very different things.

The Greeks had several words to talk about love—different words to talk about which aspect or facet they wanted to discuss. They had words for brotherhood love and friendship love. They had romantic love. They had words for things that delight us. But the word used in this passage—and you probably heard it a lot as we were reading—is agape. It appears 29 times in these verses.

Agape love is not this emotional, sentimental, cutesy love. This isn't an Oprah group hug kind of love. This is more than just a description of how we feel. Agape love is unconditional love.

It's a love of total commitment. And in order to know this agape love, we have to know God. Now this is not the same as knowing about God, but this is the kind of knowing that comes from having an intimate relationship with him. And you cannot separate these two things. You cannot separate God and love because real love is rooted in God himself.

We often confuse love with terms of selfish, sentimental, or sexual definitions. But here, love is best defined not through an experience, but through a person. And in order for us to fully know love, we need to know God.

Now you might be wondering, "What about those people that don't know God? Are you saying that it is impossible for them to show love?" And I would say no. Absolutely not. In fact, sadly, sometimes I think it's the people that don't know God that do a much better job of demonstrating love than we Christians do. They can show love well because of something that we call common grace.

The Bible teaches that God made all people in his image. We are all image bearers of God himself. Every single one of us, despite our sin, despite how far removed from a relationship that we might think or even want to have with God. We cannot remove from ourselves the truth that we are made to reflect the image of the one who made us.

It is only in God where we can find the meaning for the love that we are going to show other people because God is love. I mean, it's impossible if you think about it. You say "God is love." It's impossible for us to come up with a full definition of who God is. Why is that? Because as people, we're finite. We're simple. We can only be in one place. I can only be in one place at one time. And I'm imperfect. I don't even do that well. And yet we take people like me, we try and paint a picture of who God is, and God is the exact opposite of everything that I just said about myself. He's infinite. He's perfect. He's everywhere. How do we even talk about that?

The best thing that we can do is use this word called attributes. We talk about his attributes. We talk about the things that we recognize about him to help us know who he is and what he's like. And so to say God is love is to recognize that God in his very nature, his activity, and everything that he is or does communicates love. That's a foundational statement.

God is Love, Not Love is God

Verse eight is one of the most well-known verses in the entire Bible. It's known by both Christians and non-Christians alike. I also think it's one of the most abused verses in the Bible. To say that God equals love is not the same thing as saying love equals God.

Our culture loves to go for the gold medal of biblical gymnastics by attempting to rationalize anything that we deem to fall under the umbrella of love and to say, "I recognize that this is love. And if God is love, then how can this not be from God?" You can fill that blank in with anything. When we do this, what we're actually doing is putting love before God. The order matters. When we do this, we're making an idol out of love and we worship love and say we know God. But no, John is telling us that real love comes from God. It's consistent with God and it flows out of God.

Because God is love, his love doesn't change. Just the same as water cannot get wet because it is wet, God cannot fall in love with the things we want him to because God is love already. He's the very definition of it. Not all love is godly love, but God is always love, and his love is in eternal action. He is unconditional love, and he is a love of total commitment. And to who? To us. To you. To me. I mean, isn't that great news? God is inviting us to a real relationship with him, and in knowing him, we also know what love is.

God Demonstrated His Love Through Jesus

Now if all of this sounds a little mysterious to you, and I admit it kind of is, that's okay. But John, like all good preachers, he lands his point on a great illustration. In verse nine, he tells us that God demonstrated his love. How? Through sending Jesus.

We have a problem. We have a huge obstacle when it comes to loving God, and that problem is sin. A few weeks ago, Jeff gave us a really great simple definition for what sin is, and he said sin is saying no to God. This action, saying no to God defines our standing with him. He created us to be in eternal fellowship with him, to be in everlasting love with him. And we took that amazing offer. And what do we say? No. We said no. Because of sin, we broke up with God and where we find ourselves?

We found our lives standing on the rocky shores surrounded by the remains of our shipwrecked relationship. Now we know a little bit something about heartbreak. Heartbreak is something we know very well. Taylor Swift has made an absolute fortune writing songs about heartbreak. We are experts in heartbreak. That's our language.

But the good news offered for us is that God did not wait for us to return to him. Do you know why? Because we couldn't. He came to us first. Sin, our sin had created this uncrossable gap that would prevent us from returning to God. And the only way to restore our broken relationship with God was for him to come to us first, and in an overflow of love for us, he sent Jesus, his one and only son, the only one like him, the only one perfect and able and capable to do that.

He came in real flesh among us, and he paid the price for our sins on the cross. And sometimes people ask me, why does Christianity have to be so gross? What's the deal with blood? Why is it always gotta be so bloody? Here we are on a beautiful Sunday, talking about love. Ain't that nice? We're talking about love, and you go to this cross and get all bloody. I mean, why do we have to talk about the death of an innocent man so much? Why couldn't God just wave a magic wand and say, "I created everything with the word. Why can't I just wipe it away? It's fine."?

See, I think it's because we can't talk about God in a vacuum. We can't talk about his love without talking about the rest of his attributes. We can't say since love is part of his very nature, we can't detach his love from his holiness, from his righteousness, from his justice, and from his wrath. And it would be unloving to do so.

Our sin was a direct attack on his holiness. It was a tarnishing of his righteousness. It was a violation of his justice, and it was deserving of his wrath. There is nothing in us that deserves his forgiveness, and yet the apostle Paul writes that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And in an act of total grace that is rooted in his love for us, he would come and he would take our punishment, and he alone would satisfy God's wrath.

John 3:16, which Fritz read for us just a few minutes ago as our assurance of our pardon—maybe it's a toss-up between this book and John 3:16 about which one's the most famous verse. I mean, 3:16 is so often like the first verse that we memorize, we ask our kids to memorize. It's so foundational for us.

For 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. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world but to save the world through him. — John 3:16

What does that verse mean? It doesn't mean God super loved the world like his love was so much better. What it's saying, you could reword it to say this: this is the way God chose to love the world. This is what God's love looks like. What is it? He sends Jesus.

Do you know this kind of radical, other-centered, unconditional, totally reckless love that's defined by God? This love that took every valid conditional obstacle we could throw at it, and it blew it away so that we could be forever reunited with our maker.

Friends, if you're here and you don't personally know this to be true in your life, would you please hear this? That there is a very real God, and he really loves you. And Jesus Christ is very real, and he is God's son, and he has come, and he lived the life that you were unable to live, and he died the death that you should have died so that you would never ever be separated from him again. And so that God would welcome you back and he would do it not on your record but he would do it on the perfect record of Jesus Christ.

All you have to do to receive that love is say yes. I will let you love me like that.

If you're here and this is the thousandth time that you've heard this, well, that's still not enough. The apostle Paul in the book of Galatians talks about faith working through love. And that means that our faith in the bloody sacrifice of Jesus Christ as the payment for our sins, it's the engine for our love. It's the thing that keeps it running. It's the foundation of our love and it's liberating because your life is no longer centered on yourself but on him.

See, I don't know about you but I forget things. I would forget my head if it was not attached to my body, and I need to hear this again and again and again and again and again and then again, or else I might forget it.

I need to be reminded that this gospel, this good news is the foundation of everything that I am, everything that I love. It holds me up. But like all buildings, you don't just stop at building the foundation. Buildings gotta have a function. You build a building to do something. It's got a purpose. And we have a purpose. We have a function. Our love has a function. We have been designed to radiate this amazing love that we've been given.

If God loved us like this, we 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. — 1 John 4:11-12

Our functioning is to love as we have been loved. Now, I don't think that was mind-blowing for anyone. I don't think I just pulled the rug out from anybody right now. You came to church and you heard you ought to love one another. I mean, we get that. We're supposed to be loving. There's literally no debate that we are supposed to love one another. We have an obligation to be loving. It may seem at times like love is optional, but it's not. Because of Christ we know this and it's our obligation to love. We're to be obedient to love. Might be hard, but the shape of our life should look like the self-giving love of Jesus.

But then you get to verse 12, and John comes out of the blue. He's like a wrestler coming off the top ropes. He says, no one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God abides, dwells, lives in us. So what John is doing is he's asking us a question. He says, having begun your life of faith, how do you get to see God? If God is spirit, how do we get to see him? How do we get to deepen our relationship with him? What is the content of our faith, and how do you do the Christian life?

How We Do the Christian Life

We do the Christian life in faith-filled, others-focused, selfless, loving relationships with one another. And we do this—we don't have to do this in our own power but with the power of the Holy Spirit that he has given us.

It's kind of like surfing. Stick with me. In surfing, you need four things. You need a surfboard given to you. You need the knowledge of how to surf. You need to know what to do. You need to practice. You get put in the hours to practice surfing. But all that's for naught if you don't have the last thing: waves.

You can't stand with your surfboard on the beach and call yourself a surfer. No. That's being a poser. You can't put your surfboard down on the sand and practice getting up and standing up and popping up over and over again and go home and say, I just had a great day surfing. No, you had a great day doing burpees. You can't take your surfboard home and put it in the pool and stand on it and say, I'm surfing. No, that's balancing in still water.

So you have to take all of those things, all of that knowledge together and go into the ocean and get up on a wave. You need all of these components together and it's the power of the waves applied to these other tools that make surfing happen.

I think the love of God is kind of like the wave. It's an awesome and incredibly powerful force. It is the engine for our surfing. And Christ's sacrifice on the cross—that's our surfboard that we can stand on. And we stand with the cross and we claim it for ourselves because we know that his death is our death and through his resurrection, real life begins.

But how many of us would be just perfectly content to stand on the beach and hold our surfboard and just stand there and watch the waves crash? I mean, we'd be happy to just sit in our knowledge of God's love for us and never have to have it take us anywhere. It looks scary out there. It looks hard. I heard there's riptides. It's gonna take me somewhere I don't wanna go. What if I get hurt?

If we would just step into the water, use what we know, stand on the board, God will keep us moving.

If we've been loved like this, we ought to love. I think "ought" isn't a perfect translation for how we apply this. I think a better word here would be we're bound to love. Because you have been loved like this, you are bound to love.

Friends, if we've really come to know that Jesus Christ is our savior, then you don't have to worry about if you are doing the Christian life correctly because God's love is not a love that only makes us imitate Christ. Yes, we want that. We want to see us be imitators of Christ. My mom used to say imitation is the highest form of flattery. But wouldn't that be cheap grace if all we had to do is say just go out and try harder to be like Jesus?

No. God's love is a creative love. It's a love that is in us when God sends his spirit and it lives in us.

It creates in us the ability to love. It changes our hearts to love who he is and what he loves. Our life becomes a natural outworking of the grace and the truth that we claim to believe.

So two weeks ago, if you were here, you heard Dax preach a sermon on love. It was excellent. And he quoted this verse. We're gonna revisit again. John 13:35. This is Jesus talking to his disciples and he says:

By this, all people will know that you are my disciples. If you have love for one another. — John 13:35

When I read that verse, it feels like the oxygen goes out of the room. Like, that's hard. Anybody else think that's hard? I think that's hard. See, it's easy to love someone that you like. But can I tell you a secret? Sometimes I don't like everyone. I hope I'm not alone in this. I hope that I have made this something that's safe to talk about.

Think about this. Jesus is talking to his disciples. He's talking to the 12 men that he handpicked to follow him, to learn from him, to receive the grace and the teaching and love from him, then go and share this with the world. And he's saying, this is how they know that you're my disciples if you love each other. I think this would have sounded absolutely impossible to them. I think they've been sitting in that room together looking around the table and John's sitting over there looking at Peter going, that guy's kind of a loudmouth and a know-it-all. I don't wanna love him all the time. Peter's probably looking back at John going, that guy's like kind of a dreamer, poet guy. I don't really know what to do with him a lot.

Maybe you got Matthew and Thomas looking at each other, and Matthew's saying, guy's kind of a skeptic. I don't know about him. Thomas is looking over at Matthew saying, that guy's a tax collector. He robs his own people. He's turned his back on us. How can I love him? Like, how could they love each other with this kind of love and how can we love each other with this kind of love?

I think it's these words. We have to remember:

If God so loved us. — 1 John 4:11

See, these words remind us and they keep us grounded. Martin Lloyd Jones, a pastor who preached a sermon on this text, said this: "These words help us remember that I am not the one who has been wronged. My life used to be all about me, and the gospel says not so fast. Before Christ, I was in the center. I was on the throne. I was living a self-centered, self-indulgent, self-assertive, self-pleasing, self-satisfying, self-seeking, self-sensitive, and self-sufficient life. Now in Christ, I see the old me, and I can put that old me to death on the cross with Jesus and be risen in new life with him to live as he lives and to love as he loves."

You guys remember surfing? Well, you know what's the hardest part about surfing? It's the practice. It takes tons of work to learn how to get up on the surfboard and even catch just a tiny little 12-inch wave for like five seconds. It takes years of work to learn how to have the skills to ride the waves to a gold medal like we just watched in the Olympics. Can you imagine how many times those people crashed on the way to Olympic gold? How many times they crashed before they got it right?

And how many times will we crash in loving God and loving our neighbor? And yet with each failure, we get that his love is made perfect in us because his spirit dwells in us and we get to remind each other of that. That God so loved someone as broken as me.

See, we need each other to love well. We need each other to see our blind spots. We need each other to recalibrate our wandering hearts back into knowing and resting in the love of Jesus.

You guys know the saying, "true love is blind"? I think that's trash. I think that this passage tells us that true love is seeing. It's seeing need. And that as people who know that they are loved, we can see the need in one another. And through loving one another, we become like the gospel. That in knowing our own need, we are no longer blind. But we can see and through Christ by dying to our selfish needs, we become able to focus on the needs of others.

So do we have any architects in the room? Any engineers? There we go. I know we got them.

There is a long debate between architects and engineers when it comes to designing a building. What is more important, the form or the function? Architects say form. Engineers say function. What is it? Yes. The answer is both of them. A building needs to look like a building, but it also needs to work like a building. It needs to stand up and not fall down. These things have to come together. Same thing.

It's the same thing when it comes to love. The formula for us to demonstrate the love that we have in Christ is this: our foundation—our knowledge and our belief in the gospel—plus our function, the obligation and our obedience to be loving to one another, equals the fruit of love.

If we confess that Jesus is the son of God, and Jesus and God abide perfectly in each other, so too can we believe that God loves us and abides in us, and we with him. And through this knowledge, his love is made perfect in us so that we have nothing to fear. — 1 John 4:16-17

We can't have only the foundation. If all we did was spend our lives and our time in our quiet times, in our devotion, and growing in our knowing and dwelling on the beautiful truths that God loves us and saves us, we would not be living in response to this great news. If all we did was prize after more and more knowledge of God, then we would lock ourselves in an ivory tower of our own knowledge, and we would look down on those who we think don't know as much about God as we do. And we would sit there and worship our own piety.

On the other hand, if we only focus on living out the functional side, the loving side, the doing side, then we divorce the source of love with the act of love. And we would begin to debate amongst ourselves what does it look like to be a Christian? And we would judge one another on our works. Are we doing enough? We would become legalistic in our need to prove that we are loving like Jesus and that we are doing enough to bear the name Christian.

You can't have only half of the equation. You can't have only the part you like. We need the form and the function. We need believing the gospel and becoming like the gospel.

The fruit of our love is this: it's the assurance of our faith. By trusting in Jesus to be the perfect and loving savior who loves you despite your sinfulness and knowing the love that God has for us, it binds us to him and it equips us with every need we have to love one another and show the world what God's love really looks like, and we can do it without fear.

We can do that without fear of man. What are you gonna say about me that I don't already know about myself? What I know is probably worse. What are you gonna do to me? I have been rescued from death. We can do this without fear of God's wrath. I know the depth of my sin, and I know how far you went to rescue me. I know that it's not on my works, but it's on your goodness, Jesus, that I stand forgiven. What a gift of love.

My family has spent a lot of time this week watching the Olympics. I love the Olympics—I'm a nut for it. I recently learned something really cool. Does anybody in here know what the word "amateur" means? It means to love. So while there are becoming more and more professional athletes at the Olympics, I love to see the stories of the amateur athletes who have put in the hours and the sacrifice and driven to the gym and the pool at 5:30 in the morning. You got the 15-year-old girl from Colorado who's got a silver medal now. How cool is that? We can celebrate her stories because she's doing this because it's something that she loves. Because she's putting in the work and when they win, they go nuts, and even when they lose, they go nuts because their friend won. It's like this community of fellowship that happens.

But like the professional athletes, they're like, "Sweet, I just booked a Range Rover deal. I'm getting a new car. I got a new sponsorship." My point in this is, friends: would we be amateur Christians? Would we stop striving to show the world that we're professional Christians? Would we live our lives with a joyous, overflowing, reckless, selfless, unconditional love that we have been given from our Lord? And would we be people that do it for the love that we have from Jesus and the love that we have for one another?

Let me pray for us. Jesus, we're overcome by the love that you've given us and the joy that we can have in knowing how crazy you are about people like us, and we thank you and praise you and worship you. God, be with us. Let us leave this place, and may we live out the truth that you have given us today, that we would be people who would be marked by gospel love and changed in ways that the world can only marvel at. May we know your love, and Jesus, send us out in your protection and care. We pray this in your name. Amen.