Share the Love

He sent his son so that we could live. He sent his son because he didn't want to live without us. He sent his son because he wanted to be with us.

But the whole Bible, if you look at it, I look at it like this love story of God reaching out to the people, saying, come on back, come on back, let's do this again. And the people saying, oh good, we get another chance. And then they reject God, and then God has to find another way to bring him back in.

And that it's a current story of God bringing people in, and then rejecting God, and God bringing people in again. And so this was culminized in Jesus Christ. No one could love more than a God who sends his only perfect son to take on every sin.

Every sin we've had since we were a baby. Every sin that everyone has had their whole lives, to take those on the cross, to pay the price for us. And to show us that love.

We are the followers. The son is the leader. Live with God, and abide with God.

It means that we follow Jesus, and we try to be more and more like Jesus every day. And that goes against living through anyone else, or anything else, or these other things that attract our attention. And we are jealous of those things, and we want to live vicariously through them, even if they might be our own children.

But that is so much different than living through God, and letting God live through us. What was kind of surprising for me is he's talking about loving one another, and that seems more like brotherly love. Like philia.

Philia is more the Greek word for brotherly love, sisterly love, family, or friends, and drawing closer in. But all the way through 1 John, and in chapter 4, the word for love is agape. And he's saying, it is this love that by definition is sacrificial.

Who's the best example of a sacrifice? Jesus. Selfless. Who's the best example of selflessness? Jesus.

We're on a roll. Unconditional. Not based on a feeling, not based on a circumstance, not based on a mood, not based on a situation, not based on anything, but love is unconditional.

And love says, it isn't God saying, you can do whatever you want to do. You can sin, and you can just go crazy in the world, but it says that Jesus was unconditional. He didn't die for the Jews alone.

He didn't die for people who are great people. He died for all of us. I mean, some people say, we get so angry with other people in the world who do so many things that are wrong, and we think, God, why can't there be justice? And I believe it was John MacArthur that always says, we shouldn't be praying for God's justice.

We should be praying and thanking God for his mercy. Because that's what we need, is that mercy that comes because Jesus did all that on the cross, that he loves us that much, that it's so sacrificial. And he calls us to have that kind of love for others.

How are we sacrificing for one another? How are we being selfless for one another? How are we helping one another to know Jesus, to grow in faith, and to become more like Jesus every day? 1 John 4, if we go on to verse 14, which wasn't part of this, but it does say, And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. Which means, we testify to God's love. I mean, if God loves us, it's natural, or better yet, supernatural, that we would love others, is what John's saying.

God loved us first, so we love others. If we go on to verse 10, it says, In this, God's action, in this, is love. In this, pointing again to what Jesus did for us, 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. I stumbled, but thank you. The propitiation, I'm not, Pitiation, well you can say pitch.

Well, I'm telling you that in a lot of the circles I came out of, they don't believe that atonement has anything to do with Jesus. They believe that it just has to do with getting to know God. But the Bible says differently.

John is very clear. If you didn't get it from what he was saying about the Son coming and giving his life for us, He says, the propitiation means to be made right. In fact, it means that we are apart from God and something had to be made right.

And that is how we are justified with God. Jesus was sent to appease God, to repair our connection with the Father, and to atone for our sins. And one of the definitions of sin that I just, I like the definition.

Not that I like sin, but I like the definition. Separation from God. Sin is anything we do that separates us from God.

And if we don't know love, if we don't understand the love that we receive from Jesus Christ, then we remain separated from God. In verse 11, he goes on to say, Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought to love one another. It's a response to God's love.

It is a response. Like Jesus said, with forgiveness, our response should be. In Matthew 6, in the same Sermon on the Mount, we've checked on a couple of times.

Jesus said, in fact it was at the end of the Lord's Prayer, after the Lord's Prayer. He said, so if you forgive others of your sins, you will be forgiven. But if you don't forgive others of their sins, you will not be forgiven.

Meaning, we respond to God's forgiveness by forgiving others. We respond to God's love by loving others. Do you see the connection there? That what Jesus did for us is not something that we contain.

Not something that we just talk about. Not something that we just say, but it's something we act on. And the way we love one another is what the world sees in us.

No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. Again, Daniel L. Aikens says, we cannot see God's pure, unveiled glory, but others can see God when we love one another, when we agape one another.

When they see us as helping each other, as loving each other, as sacrificing for each other, as being selfless for each other, then it's contagious. Then it's something that people want to be a part of. It's the opposite of so many things going on in the world.

To abide means to remain, to live without rejection, that we aren't rejected from God. And that when he says perfected, it means to be completed, filled, matured, the goal, the telos, the full sanctification. In Methodism, the goal of sanctification is to be perfected in love.

The telos of sanctification is to love like Jesus with one another in the world. The good contagion means we spread biblical love, not hate, not judgment, not just tolerance, not just acceptance of all sins, not acceptance of all personal truths people have, but God's love is about God's truth, about God's grace, about God's goodness, and about the glory of God. When we love one another, we glorify God.

We let God be glorified in us. As we turn to our last song, the one thing that I've been thinking about this week is, I've shared this with you before, but it just fits so well, that in the first century and the second century, when Rome was chasing down Christians and breaking into homes and trying to trap Christians and arrest them, and martyrs were happening everywhere where they burned people alive, they would start spreading rumors about Christians, and they would say, well, they get together, and they say they're drinking the body and the blood of Jesus Christ. They're cannibals.

And Christian tradition says they sent out a spy to the church, and the spy snuck around and witnessed the church worshipping and coming together and fellowshipping. And he came back for the report, and his commanding officer said, so, were they drinking the body and the blood of another human being? And he said, I didn't see that, but I sure saw how they loved one another. I hope that's what the world can see in us, is how we love each other.

Amen.