Lord, I feel it, so I tend to walk around down in the bottom here. But my name is Mike Canham, and I've known Jason and Shelly, there you have it, there they are right there, for 25 years almost. And Shelly, And for a long time back in my seminary days down at Masters, and then Jason and Shelley and I reconnected at Community Bible Church in Vallejo, which hosts the seminary. that I have the privilege of teaching at Cornerstone Seminary in Vallejo, California. God has gifted us with 30 students and about 17 faculty members, so we have very much of a model of pastors training the next generation of pastors, and I'm profoundly grateful to be there, profoundly grateful that the Lord took me the pastoral route before I started teaching, And if you could remember us in your prayers, we have a financial need. We're losing a major donor after this year. So we're trying to pray for, we're praying that the Lord would provide us the finances to be able to continue doing what we're doing. And he's faithfully provided for us from day one. And so I'm just very grateful to to really, in many ways, be at a place that is very Christ-centered, exalts the Word of God, and where you have to depend upon the Lord for your provision. There's no guarantees. And while sometimes that's an uncomfortable position to be in, I'm absolutely convinced it is a good position to be in, where you have to depend upon the Lord to provide for you're wherewithal to be able to do what God has called us to do. So as you think of us, continue to pray for Cornerstone Bible College and Seminary. We were merged with the Bible College a couple years ago, so we now have a college component also with our seminary. So I want to take you this morning to 1 John chapter 4, and I think you guys also have notes. I was remembered about six this morning. I had not emailed those, so Jason very graciously helped me out of a bind and printed those out for us this morning. They can help you follow along and also kind of give you a little bit of a record of what we're going to be talking about this morning. But I want to take you to a text this morning that the Lord brought to me at a very, very pivotal, pivotal time in my own life and ministry. And I'll tell you a little bit about that as we proceed. But 1 John chapter 4, I'm going to read the passage, then I want to pause and ask for the Lord's help as we consider these words. 1 John 4 verses 7 through 11. Beloved, let us love one another. For love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Then I want to retranslate verse 8 because there's a significant interplay with the tenses in the Greek language here. that we might miss, so I'm gonna retranslate verse eight, which reads this way. Anyone who does not habitually practice love, present tense verb there. Anyone who does not habitually practice love does not now know, nor did he ever know God, because God is love. In this, the love of God was made manifest among us that God sent his only begotten son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God. And I have to stop in case I don't get this far in our time in the word this morning, but I want to make this statement. When it comes to defining and understanding love, we cannot begin with ourselves. It's not that we love God. In fact, we were his enemies. We hated God. It tells us in Scripture that while we were still his enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son. Jesus himself said, greater love has no man than this, than that a man lay down his life for his friends. But Jesus went even beyond that. He laid down his life for his enemies. So when we're talking about love, we cannot begin with us because we have a flawed and sometimes actually unscriptural understanding of what love really is. We love, John will say later in this chapter, we love because he first loved us. Love not only is perfectly exemplified in Christ, but it starts with him. It starts at God's initiative. We love because God first loved us. This verse tells us, 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. Would you pray with me? Lord, thank you for this privilege to be here this morning. Thank you for the opportunity to be reunited with some good friends and to meet new friends. Lord, I'm so grateful that You have said that You will build Your church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. And all over the world, in places I've never been to, You have a remnant. And Lord, You've raised this ministry up to preach and proclaim Your Word and to hold forth Your truth and to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And Lord, I do pray for Peninsula Bible Churches there searching for a pastor that you would provide them a shepherd after your own heart, who loves you supremely, who loves your word and who loves your people. And I pray that as I have the privilege this morning of standing in the stead of those who faithfully lead this ministry week in and week out, I pray that you would use me. I pray that you would hide me behind your word. I pray that you'd help me to be a blessing. to your people. And we pray this in Jesus' precious name. Amen. In the years before the communists took over China in 1949, the country was ruled over by a man by the name of Chiang Kai-shek. And during most of his rule in China, during most of that time, was characterized by an intense persecution of believers, which was odd because Chiang Kai-shek's wife was a Christian. I don't know if that's a commentary on their marriage or what. But one day, Chiang Kai-shek came to his wife and said, I don't understand these Christians. We've persecuted them. I mean, we've taken their jobs away. We've taken their livelihoods from them. We've taken their resources from them. In some cases, we even put them to death, and yet I've never seen any of them retaliate against their persecutors. Instead, whenever they can render a service for China, they do so, and gladly. What is there that is different about them? And his wife looked him square in the eye and she quoted, in her response, a verse right after the passage we just read. And she said, they do that because they are Christians. They do that because the love of God has been perfected in them. And it was reputedly on the basis of that testimony that Chiang Kai-shek himself bowed the knee and trusted in Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. Because love has always been the hallmark of Christianity before the watching and searching eyes of a lost and dying world. After all, wasn't it Jesus Christ himself who said that it is by this that all men shall know that you are my disciples, if you have love one to another. And yet, even though Jesus has made this the hallmark of genuine Christianity, I'm greatly concerned because in a lot of our churches, it seems that love has taken a backseat to a lot of other things. And the Lord really brought this to my heart 30 years ago at the very beginning of my own ministry. And every time I have the privilege to speak in a church for the first time, in case it's the only time, I always go to this text because I'm convinced that in the churches that I get the privilege to preach in, that false doctrine is not going to typically be the kind of thing that sidelines us or that ensnares us or traps us. Now, having said that, never let your vigilance down when it comes to false teaching. that is a very, very present danger for churches all over the place. But most churches that I find that are aware of false teaching, or not most, but many churches that are aware of the dangers of false teaching, are often at the same time unaware of a subtle danger that can attack them from the other side. First century illustration. the very man who wrote these words under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that we just read, a few years later was in exile on the Isle of Patmos. And the Lord Jesus Christ appears to him, an exalted Jesus Christ, a wonderful picture of him in Revelation chapter 1. In Revelation chapter 2, he tells John to take up his pen and write these words to his home church. the church at Ephesus, the church that John was at probably when he wrote this epistle in 1 John. John is in exile in Patmos about five years later. He writes to the church at Ephesus, his home church. Can you imagine that John is very, very curious as to what Jesus would say about his church? After all, the church at Ephesus had a lot going for it. It was founded by the apostle Paul. Its pastors had included men like Apollos and Timothy, and then later the apostle John himself. And Jesus commends the church at Ephesus. He says, I know your works, I know your labor, and I know your patience. This was a church that was a working church. It was a serving church. It was a church that was very active. In fact, there was even a church that was very, very vigilant when it came to dealing with false teaching. There was a group by the name of the Nicolaitans. We don't know much about what they believed. But they were twice described in the book of Revelation in these seven letters. And they were a group that was guilty of some kind of false teaching. And the Ephesian church had tested those, it says in Revelation 2. It tested those who claimed to be apostles and found their claims to be false. They hated the deeds of the Nicolaitans. So in addition to being a serving church, an active church, a working church, it was also a doctrinally pure church. And yet Jesus says in verse four of Revelation 2, I have against you. The King James, I have somewhat against you is too weak. The word somewhat's in italics. It kind of gives the impression that Jesus is saying, you know, I got this one little thing against you. No, this is not one little thing. This is the whole thing. I have against you because you have abandoned your first love. you've abandoned your first love. And Jesus says, except you repent and remember and return, I'm going to remove your candlestick. Candlestick is a figure that earlier in the book of Revelation is a picture of the local church. So I'm going to take your candlestick away. And you can go within a hundred miles of where the Church of Ephesus was located and you will not find one person who names the name of Christ today. The candlestick was removed. This is my burden. It's a lifelong burden that the Lord has given me for Christ honoring, Bible believing, doctrinally pure, Bible-believing churches, is that we are in constant danger of coming to the point when we abandon our first love. When our love for Jesus Christ and for His people ceases to be front and center. After all, the God The world does not have the capability of determining Christian genuineness by way of doctrinal fidelity. The world doesn't know what Trinity is. It doesn't really care whether Jesus is God or not. It doesn't care about any of the things that we would regard as doctrinally front and center. But Jesus doesn't give That is the criterion by which the world will determine whether we're believers. He says, by this, again, that shall all men know that you are my disciples if you have love one to another. So given the importance that Jesus places on this, it's not surprising to me to find out that when we come to this little epistle of 1 John, the word love appears 51 times in this epistle. Since the epistle itself is less than 100 verses long, I forget the exact number, I think it's like 89 verses in the entire epistle. Every three verses, you're going to encounter the word love twice as you move throughout the epistle of 1 John. So it's not surprising that 1 John would have that emphasis, given the importance Jesus placed on it. What I find rather surprising is the man whom God used to write these words, the Apostle John. He comes down to us in church history with a nickname, the Apostle of Love. But that was not his original nickname. If you remember in the Gospels, he had another nickname. He was called the son of thunder, which meant that he had a temper that was shorter than a mosquito's hiccup. This guy would fly off the handle at anything. And there's an interesting account of this in Luke chapter 9. You don't have to turn there, but you might want to make note of it. Luke chapter 9, Jesus and his disciples, among whom is the apostle John, show up at a Samaritan village that rejects the preaching of Jesus. And so John You can almost see this happening. John says, you know, do you want us to call down fire from heaven like Elijah did? So you see, when he said that, it makes it biblical. Let's call down fire from heaven like Elijah did and nuke these guys. You know, Cam's revised paraphrase. And then he's ready to pull down the wrath of God in these people. Now, have you ever been tempted to pray that way? Maybe you have prayed that way. Somebody's hassling you and you're sitting there praying, Lord, give them lockjaw and nausea at the same time so they know who's in control. Maybe you're not quite that creative in your imprecatory prayers, but you wanted to pray this way before. John was no exception. We want to call down fire from heaven on these guys. And Jesus responds in that text, John, you have no idea what I'm about. For the Son of Man did not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them. So what I find amazing is the man whom God uses to write these words that we have just read in 1 John 4 is not a man who came by this naturally. Naturally, he was the guy who was anything but the apostle of love. But this was a man who was transformed by the gospel of Jesus Christ. He'd seen Jesus Christ, who was the love of God on display for three years during his earthly ministry, witnessed, was the only one of the disciples who directly witnessed the preeminent display of love when Jesus poured out his life for us on the cross. And here he is writing these words about 60 years later as a man who has been transformed by the gospel of Jesus Christ. And so when we come to 1 John, we have three major passages in 1 John. This is not the first time that John has raised this issue in 1 John. You have a discussion back in 2 verses 7 through 11, a slightly longer one in 3 verses 11 to 18, but then you have this big one here in chapter four, that starts with verse seven and goes all the way to the end of the chapter. Three major discussions on loving one another. And so in the brief eight hours that I had with you this morning, we're simply going to be looking at these verses around three major headings. First of all, the priority of love. That's verses seven and eight. Why is love a priority? John gives us three reasons in these verses. And frankly, this is where we're going to spend most of our time this morning is looking at these verses because part of my goal and desire is to persuade you as to why This is so important, why we dare not neglect this particular aspect of Christianity. The second thing, in verses nine and 10, is the picture of love. What does love look like? Because we can talk about love from now until the end of the day, but if we don't understand what it means, especially when there's so many different ideas and most of them wrong, or at best incomplete ideas about what love is in the world around us, we're gonna have a wrong idea of what it is that's supposed to be a priority. So we need to have a picture of what it looks like. So you have the priority of love, verses 7 and 8, a picture of love, verses 9 and 10. And then verse 11, now that we know why it's important, verses 7 and 8, now that we know what it looks like in verses 9 and 10, then we turn to the practice of love in verse 11. So the priority of the picture and the practice of love. So I begin with the idea here of the priority of love. Why is love a priority? Now there's, of course, a number of different ways that we could stress this and answer this particular question. We could go earlier to Paul's writing in 1 Corinthians 13, where he also stresses that love is a priority. He begins that chapter And you're very familiar with this chapter. It talks about, Paul uses several of the gifts that the Corinthians were bragging about, several of the more sensational type of gifts. And he says, though I have faith and speak with tongues of men and of angels, and though I understand all mysteries, a lot of the things the Corinthians were bragging about. And he says, but if I have not love, he makes two statements in those verses. Number one, if I have all these gifts and have not love, I am nothing. It's an accounting term. It has the idea of you put all the merits on one side and the demerits on the other side, you add them up and you get zero. So Paul's saying it's a big fat zero if you have all these positive, beneficial gifts, but you don't have love. But in another verse in that same section, he says, I'm become as a clanging gong and a tinkling cymbal. If I can give you a little bit of a picture about what this looks like. If you can imagine, for special music this morning, if we kicked out all the people who led us in worship this morning and replaced them with somebody who was standing up here in front with a trash can lid and a stick, and they're beating out the tempo of something for 45 minutes straight. If any of you are still here, after that, you would be tempted to break several of the Ten Commandments simultaneously with this guy. Because that is not only not edifying, it's positively annoying. And that's pretty much how Paul describes even ministry carried out without love. It's become nothing more than something that actually annoys. And I'm convinced that one of the things that Satan uses to turn away people from the truth of the gospel and the truth of the Word of God is the lack of love exhibited by so many who proclaim it. This is so tragic. And Paul comes to the end of that chapter and he says, and now abides faith, hope, and love, these three, but the greatest of these is Love. I once had the privilege of auditing a class with D.A. Carson, who's a New Testament scholar who's written on 1 Corinthians. And he made this particular comment about this particular verse. He said, the reason why love is the greatest of these three is because it's the only one that God himself exercises. Stop and think about that one for the moment. God doesn't exercise faith, he's the object of faith. God doesn't exercise hope, he's the one who's the author of hope. But God not only exercises love, he is by his very character and nature, in essence, is love. And it's the only one that steps into eternity. Our faith becomes sight, our hope becomes realized, but love continues into eternity. So love is a priority. And John here in these verses gives us three reasons why love is to be a priority. Number one, love is a priority because of God's command. Love is a priority because of God's command. Verse seven begins very simply with these words, beloved, let us love one another. Now you would think that anything that God commands once would hold authority enough that we would live by it. But are you aware that this command appears not once, but 15 times in the New Testament? 15 times by many different authors. John records this one here on several occasions. Peter commands it on a few occasions. The writer of Hebrews, whoever he may be, I'll just call him Barnabas for short, but Hebrews commands it in Hebrews chapter 13 and verse one, that brotherly love ought to continue. And of course, Jesus Christ himself, on one occasion asking, on another occasion answering a question about what is the greatest of the commandments. He said, the greatest of the commandments is to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. There is a primary, there is a secondary, but you cannot separate the two. You cannot claim to love God and not love his people. In fact, John later is going to say in this very chapter, in chapter four, verse 20, he's going to say, the one who says he loves God and hates his brother is a liar. Because you cannot separate your love for God's people from your love for God. Even though your love for God is primary and your love for your neighbor grows out of that love for God. Even though there is a primary and a secondary, it doesn't mean you get a choice to choose between whether you love God or love his people. Love is a priority because of God's command. John records this command no less than five times in this epistle. So God commands it, and therefore it should hold authority enough that we would live by it. But John goes even further. It's not only a priority because of God's command, but number two, it's a priority because of our conversion. And John puts this in two ways. If you look with me at the end of verse seven and the beginning of verse eight, he'll put it both positively and negatively. Positively, he says, verse seven, whoever loves has been born of God. In other words, the one who is loving gives evidence to the fact that they've been born again. He has been born of God and knows God. In other words, the presence of love is evidence of the new birth. Now, John, in his epistle, who often will communicate the same thing by contrast, positive and negative, follows it up with a negative statement in verse 8. The one who does not, present tense verb here, habitually practice love, and then he says, does not now know, nor did he ever know God. Very frightening words. in a lot of ways. Because what John is stressing here is that love is a genuine hallmark, it's a genuine picture of the new birth. We've already seen what Jesus said in John 13.35, by this shall all men know that you are my disciples if you have love one to another. Love is that genuine hallmark of true Christian conversion. Many of you perhaps have heard of Francis Schaeffer, who was a missionary, apologist, statesman of the last century. He ministered for most of his life over in Europe and even founded the Brie Fellowship in Europe. I got a chance to visit there about 20 years ago when I was in Switzerland for a doctoral course and we went to Libri over on a weekend because our host professor was actually converted through the ministry of Libri back when he was at Harvard. So he went there, he was preaching that Sunday, and I got a chance to visit Libri in Switzerland. It was a ministry that was started to reach the intellectual community of Europe with the gospel. And Francis Schaeffer was one of the major factors in the 20th century of what we would call apologetics. It's not apologizing for the Christian faith. Apologetics would be giving evidence for the Christian worldview and specifically the gospel is to be preferred. And Francis Schaeffer gave his life and ministry over to that whole emphasis. But toward the end of his life, Francis Schaeffer wrote an interesting and significant little book that's been reprinted in a number of ways. I read it first when I was in college as an appendix to another book that Schaeffer wrote. It's a little book called The Mark of a Christian. And he based it on two texts. One of them is the John 1335 text that I referenced several times. And in connection with John 13.35, Schaeffer makes this statement. He says, what's significant about this text is Jesus gives the world the right to determine whether we are Christians based on our observable love for one another. Again, by this shall all men know that you are my disciples if you have love one to another. But there's a second verse that's even more chilling, and that was the second text that he built that little book upon. John 17.21 is one of five times in the Lord's high priestly prayer the night before his crucifixion when he prays that believers would be one that they may be one. And again, your ecumenics have built a lot off of that passage without understanding the significance that they may be one as we are. There's a spiritual unity that is the basis for the observable unity that Jesus calls praise for in that passage. But I think sometimes conservatives go to the other extreme and basically because it's not an organizational type of thing that Jesus is praying for there, they kind of see it as something that can be ignored. This is where we have to go back to the reason why Jesus prayed for this, that they may be one, and he gets several reasons, but one of them in that text is in order that the world may believe that God has sent Christ. That's the gospel, folks. And Schaeffer concludes that this is even more chilling because it's bad enough for the world to look at us and conclude that we're not believers. What's even worse is that the world looks at us and concludes that the very message that's at the heart of our gospel is false. In order that the world may believe that God had sent Christ. And so Francis Schaeffer, who gave his entire life in ministry over to the defense of the Christian faith against all sorts of attacks, secular and otherwise, against the gospel. Schaeffer came to the end of his life and he said, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter what arguments you can present in favor of Christianity. that love is the final apologetic. And those are his words. Observable love amongst believers is the final apologetic for Christianity. If you don't see love, then you are not looking at a person who is a believer. And that's true at the individual level. And tragically, it's true at the corporate level in a church. This is where it gets so painful for us, but we have to take a close look at this because we have tended to substitute many, many other things. Perhaps those things that we looked at, we referenced in Revelation chapter two, the work and the good works, the labor, the patience, even the doctrinal fidelity. We tend to substitute those things of observable love. And yet those things are not necessarily a sign of life. They can be, and they are a sign of life when they're motivated out of love for Jesus. But you can have those things and not have love. You can have those things and not have life. I remember years ago hearing a preacher once, and that is this, if you see a body without a head, it's dead. Now that seems pretty obvious until you start to see things that appear to contradict that. Let me give you an illustration of this. I grew up in Middlesex, New York, which is a little town about half, ten miles from the middle of nowhere. I mean, we had, you are now entering and you are now leaving on the same signpost. It was one of those things. And in fact, I started to say that the village mayor and the town idiot were the same guy, but that's also true in San Francisco, near where I live, so I can't really use that illustration. But we didn't even grow up in the town. We grew up about five miles above the town, 72 acres, four kids, bored out of their gourd half the time with nothing to do, and we raised chickens. Now, you guys are a little more sophisticated, but I've been in places where I've had to convince people that when they go to a store, a grocery store, and they buy a chicken to come home and cook it for dinner, The chicken doesn't grow up that way, neatly wrapped and all ready to go. There's a certain amount of violence that has to take place to get the chicken into that package. And I'm sitting here as a purveyor of the violence. I hope there's a statute of limitations on this, because a couple years ago in California they had a thing about giving chickens rest breaks on the ballot. And we didn't do that particularly where I was growing up. And I'm here to tell you that chickens are second only to woodchucks. You guys have woodchucks out here? Okay, well, they're second only to woodchucks is the dumbest animal on the face of the earth and Are the chickens we raise were morons and when you have moronic chickens? Coupled with four bored kids. There's a recipe for disaster. So we would One of the funnest things we used to do is sneak down in the middle of the night We had a chicken coop and all these chickens were in this chicken coop at night and they were asleep in there And they didn't move So the hobby around where I grew up was cow tipping. Anybody do that? My parents knew better than to trust us with a cow. I mean, cows sleep standing on their feet. You'd sneak out, try to push one over, and then try to get back over the fence before the cow got to you. If you missed, well, you had a sore rear end for a long time. But we didn't have any cows, so we didn't do any cow tipping. We did chicken stacking. So we would sneak down in the middle of the night. These chickens are all in this chicken coop, and they're just... So our goal was to see how we would just pick one off the roost and, you know, stack it on the bottom row. And our goal was to see how high up we could get before the chicken on the bottom wakes up. So we're sitting... Yeah. And we could get about five rows up and about that fifth row, you know, the chicken on the bottom started, you know, starting to get a little bit uncomfortable because it doesn't know yet that it's got four chickens on its back. It just knows it's not exactly very comfortable right now. So it's starting to do that. And so the, the chicken in row number two is even funnier because it's got a chicken underneath it moving in three above it moving. So it's, so you got a nice chicken fight going on in the back and we're sitting here rolling on the ground laughing. You're thinking the chickens are dumb? But anyway, the day came when the chickens went the way of all chickens. And my dad had a stump here with two nails in it. And my job was to carry the chickens up. And guess what my dad's job was? So he would remove the head from the body of the chicken. Now, for the next few minutes after that point, that chicken was more active than it had been in its entire life. I remember chasing chickens into the bushes. I mean, its head's there, the chicken's going there. They run into the bushes, grab the chicken, stand it up. The chicken jumps up and runs again into the bushes. I mean, I did that lots of times growing up. Now, to the untrained observer, they would look at that and they would say, that's a live chicken. More active than it had ever been. But if you have a body without a head, it's dead. The chicken was too much of a moron to realize it. And yet I suggest that so many times in our churches we get more and more active just to prove to the rest of the world we're not really dead. We become like Martha. And Luke 10, who's very, very active in service, but forgets to sit at the feet of Jesus. This is what happens when good things, and I'm the last one to knock active service, or good works, or even doctrinal faithfulness. Even if we don't have those things, those will destroy a church as well. But the thing is, When you have those things that are severed from a love for Jesus Christ, they become not only worthless, but damaging. Back to 1 Corinthians 13 again, clanging gong, tinkling cymbal. Because love is a genuine hallmark of the Christian faith. It's a priority not only because of God's command, but because of our conversion. And it's amazing to me, and I grew up, I fortunately did not experience this in the church, but I did experience this in the college that I went to, and I won't tell you where it was or what city in South Carolina it was located in or anything like that. While I was there as a ministerial student, it was a requirement that we had to enter a sermon into a sermon contest. Don't even get me started on what I think about sermon contests. That's another sermon, that'll take another three hours to do that one. I think it's a prostitution. has called, you know, it's like American Idol, see who can preach the best. That's hardly what God has called us to do. But we had to enter it or I get kicked out of school. So I figure, okay, if I'm going to have to enter this thing, I might as well preach on something people need. And that's when the Lord took me to this text. This was in the spring of 1987. So that was the last millennium for those of you who are doing the math. So spring of 1987, I'm going to this text, and I was talking with several of my fellow students about what I was, they were asking, Ken, what are you going to preach on for the sermon contest? I said, love one another. And several of them snorted. Why would you want to preach on something like that? That just leads to compromise and sin. So how can the obedience to the greatest commandment lead to sin? But I remember at the same time talking with a friend of mine who was an older student. He was in his early 30s at the time, which when I was 18 or 19, I mean, that was old, you know, really old, someone who was in their 30s. Holy cow. But he got saved as an older, you know, in his mid-20s, and he started attending a church in the Midwest where the preacher, who was a screamer, called himself a fundamentalist, but was a screaming preacher. I'm not even going to try to scream it. But he would repeatedly in Sunday say, we don't want to be known as a loving church in this community. That stuff is for sissies and for wimps. He said it with much more vehemence than I just said it. But to my friend's credit, he soon left that church and went to one where the pastor was a Christian. Because no one who can make a statement like that understands anything of the gospel of Jesus Christ. To the extent that fundamentalism, and I would unabashedly call myself a fundamentalist if you define it in historic terms of commitment to the fundamentals of the Christian faith, but certain brands of fundamentalism have eclipsed that. And to the extent that fundamentalism has lost its first or left its first love for Christ, to that extent it's become a false anti-Christ religion. It's no coincidence that the passage we are looking at this morning follows right on a passage where John is warning about antichrists and ends that discussion by saying, he who is of God hears us. He who is not of God does not hear us. This is how we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. Beloved, let us love one another. It goes right into that discussion. Because the mark of true Christianity is whether you're obedient. And what's the greatest of the commandments? Love God and love your neighbor. But a gospel without love is no gospel. And the reason for that is found in the third reason why love is a priority. Not only because of of God's command, not only because of our conversion, but number three, because of God's character. 1 John 4, 8 ends, for God is love. This is the third God is statement that you read in John's writings. John 4.24, God is spirit and they who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. 1 John 1.5, God is light and in him there is no darkness at all. But here, not once but twice, because this is repeated later in verse 16 of 1 John 4, we read that God is love. What that means is that love is more than a mere attribute of God. It is the very character, the nature, the essence of God. No wonder John says that the one who doesn't love doesn't know God. Because God in his very character, his nature, and his essence is love. There's nothing outside of God that makes him love. God loves because it is His very character, His nature, His essence to love. I have loved you with an everlasting love, He says in Jeremiah 31, three years earlier, He said to the nation of Israel in Deuteronomy 7, that the Lord did not set His love on you because you were greater in number or better than the other nations, but the Lord loved you because He loved you. Does God love us? Yes. Why does he love us? Because he does. And there's no other answer to that question. God, in his very character, his nature, his essence is love. And that's why love has got to be a priority. And yet too many people, too many of God's people, too many of preachers in history have missed this whole point. One of them early on in his ministry was D.L. Moody, who was a famous evangelist of the 19th century. And he was known for very harsh and severe sermons early on in his ministry. And one time he was over in England. And he was preaching over in England and this young green Irish evangelist by the name of Henry Morehouse comes up to D.L. Moody and says, Mr. Moody, one of these days, this kid was about 20, 19 or 20 years old. He says, one of these days, I'm going to get to America. And when I do, I want to come and preach at your church. So Moody figured, ha, I'll never see him again. Sure, you come to America, you can preach in my church. Promptly forgot about it, till about six months later, Moody's back in America, he comes into his office on a Monday morning, and there's a telegram on his desk, and he opens it, and it's from this guy, Henry Morehouse. The telegram reads, I've docked in New York, will be in Chicago on Wednesday night, I want to preach in your church. So Moody, who kind of remembered this guy, said, well, you know, he called his leaders together and said, I'm gonna be gone for a group of meetings this week. This was the time when the church that became known as Moody Memorial Church, it wasn't known as Moody Memorial Church yet, because Moody was still pre-memorial. But anyway, so Moody's there. This church met every week, had services every night of the week. So Moody says, okay, we'll let this guy come on. Wednesday night, if he's any good, put him on Thursday night. So Wednesday night, Morehouse gets up and preaches. And he says, ladies and gentlemen, I've asked the Lord what he would have me to preach to you tonight. And I can think of no better text than John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. And he spent the next 45 minutes going from Genesis all the way through to the maps at the end of the Bible, giving example after example after example after example of how God demonstrated His love, even to people who are ill deserving of it, who rejected Him, who hated Him. And it was a powerfully moving sermon. And so the leadership was like, this guy's pretty good, we need to get him on again. Thursday night, Morehouse takes the pulpit again, says, ladies and gentlemen, I've asked the Lord what he would have me to preach to you tonight, and I can't get away from this text. Quoted John 3.16 again, and went through the same sermon, but this time with different texts and different illustrations of God's love in the scripture. Friday night, same thing. Saturday morning, D.L. Moody walks into his house. His wife is sitting there at the table. He kind of has a sarcastic way of saying, well, how'd the new kid do? And she said, well, you ought to listen to him. You might just get religion. Moody's like, what do you mean by that? And she said, for years, you've been preaching on the harshness and the judgment of God, and how much he hates sin. And while that is true, and folks, that is true. Don't take anything I'm saying to be an unbalanced view of God. But she said, while you preach over and over again the judgment of God, this young man has told us the love of God in a way that we have never heard before. And so that night, Moody sat in his own congregation while Morehouse for the fourth night in a row, and then again the next Sunday morning, the next morning, preached for the fifth time in a row on the love of God. Moody was later to point to that event as what transformed his own life in ministry. Have you met the God of love? If not, you've not met the God of the Bible. Priority of love because of God's command, because of our conversion, because of God's character. Now very quickly, I need to move on to the last two considerations this morning, because we can talk about love from now until the end of the day. But what does love look like? What does love mean? What is the picture of love? And again, if you ask a lot of different people, you get a lot of different definitions of love. Most of them tend to focus on the romantic aspect of love. It's like the guy who says, you know, his girl is one in a million. Well, how do you keep her from finding out? Some of you will get that eventually. But anyway, you know, but people have all sorts of different definitions of what love is. And we could go to a number of different places to define it biblically. Of course, 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul describes love over, in fact, he can't even define it. Paul, it's like defining a flower. So Paul just describes it, gives 14 different descriptions about what love looks like in 1 Corinthians 13. And we could do that kind of a thing in coming to a definition of love. But I want to do something a little bit differently. this morning in defining love. I want to go to what I call the first mentioned principle of Bible study. And the idea here is that the first time that a word occurs in Scripture, the context in which that word occurs often gives much insight into the way that word occurs throughout the rest of Scripture. Not always, but often it does. And what I find significant is if I look for the first occurrence of the word love in the Bible, it isn't speaking of a man's love for a woman or a woman's love for a man. In fact, it doesn't even speak of a man's love for God. The first time the word love appears in Scripture, it speaks of a father's love for his son. Genesis 22, God appears to Abraham and he says, I want you to take your son, your only begotten son, Isaac, and I want you to go to Moriah and offer him there on a place that I will tell you. And of course, you know what happens in Genesis 22. Two things I want to highlight here. Number one, it speaks of a father's great love for his son. But number two, the context, especially with what it leads up to, speaks to that father's love for someone that was so great that he was willing to sacrifice the son. That's very interesting. There's, of course, a number of other things in Genesis 22. The word lamb occurs for the first time in Genesis 22. And when you come to the New Testament, the word lamb, every time it appears, is referring to Jesus. You have all these connections in Genesis 22 of a picture of an event here that points ahead to something even greater. Hebrews 11 picks up on this with making these connections with Jesus in the New Testament. Jesus himself in John 8 refers back to this event and says, Abraham rejoiced to see my day. He did see it and he was glad. That's another sermon. But what's interesting is if you come to the New Testament and put the four gospels side by side and look for the first occurrence of the word love in Matthew's gospel, you have God speaking from heaven once again. But this time he's declaring his love for his own son. At the baptism of Jesus in Matthew three, this is my son, literally the one who is loved. Mark chapter one, verse 11, Luke chapter three, verse 22, I think it is. Each of them, same thing. This is my son, the one who is loved. But then you come to John's gospel. the gospel where Jesus is spoken of as the Son of God more times than in all the other gospels put together, and where the word love occurs more times than in all the other gospels put together, and where do you think the first occurrence of the word love is in John's gospel? Where else could it be but Henry Morehouse's favorite text? John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. Do you see the picture? Three times God shouts forth from heaven, his love, the love of a father for his son. But then he declares that he loves the world so much that he was willing to sacrifice that son. That's love pictured in its meaning. It's a sacrifice. And this gets to the gospel of Jesus Christ, because this is what transformed John. I earlier said that a gospel without love is no gospel. But you can't understand love apart from the gospel, because love without the gospel is not love. This is what transformed John from the son of thunder to the apostle of love. This is what made him the man who could write these words under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, because this is a man who was transformed by the reality of what he writes next. In this, verse 9 of 1 John 4, in this was manifested the love of God toward us and that God sent his only begotten Son in order that we might live through him. When it came to our redemption, God didn't just send another angel or another human being. He sent his Son, who was God, who took on human flesh. He was the God-man. So pictured in its meaning as a sacrifice, pictured in its manifestation in the Son of God himself. But then we get to the heart of it in verse 10. In this, in this is love. Not that we love God. Already talked about this briefly. Just a reminder, we can't start with ourselves. either for an example of love or even for an understanding of love. What was our relationship to God? Our relationship to God was one of hatred, of anger. We were, by nature, the children of wrath. Ephesians 2 tells us, when we were dead in our trespasses and sins. And of course, that hatred, that wrath, that enmity wasn't exclusively directed toward God. It also characterized our relationships with other people. Why do you have murder? Why do you have adultery? Why do you have all those other commands against, and the Ten Commandments? Because people hate people. because they hate God supremely. And their hatred of God supremely boils over into their hatred of other people. And their hatred takes different forms. They kill people, they commit adultery, they steal, they lie, all these things. Because their hatred of God, just as much as you can't separate love of God from love of other people, you can't separate hatred of God from hatred of other people. This is what we were. which is why we cannot start with ourselves when we understand what love is. And this is love, not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. Great word, propitiation. Too many translations are taking it out. It's a word that means satisfaction of wrath. God is angry. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. We are under that outside of Christ. We were under that before Christ. But the beautiful thing about the gospel is Jesus came and he endured the wrath of God on our behalf. God made him, Jesus, who knew no sin, to be sin for us in order that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. It's almost like somebody asked Jesus, how much do you love me? And he says, I love you this much. And he stretched out his arms and he died. for us. God demonstrated his love for us, and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. He satisfied the wrath of God. He was the propitiation for our sins. That is the pinnacle. That is the ultimate display of love. Again, demonstrated by God, who was not forced by anything outside of himself to display this love. And he did this because of who he is as love. And he shielded us from the wrath of God. And if you're here today, and you've trusted in Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ bore your wrath. in your place. If you're here today and you have not trusted in Jesus Christ, this is what you have to look forward to because outside of Christ, you will experience the wrath of God, unabated. But the beauty and the centrality of the gospel for you is that Jesus Christ sacrificed himself to shield you and to take that wrath upon himself. He is the propitiation for our sins. There's an old hymn, I don't hear much anymore, but the chorus of it goes, out of the ivory palaces into a world of woe. Only his great unfailing love made my Savior go. G. Campbell Morgan, an expositor of a past generation, made the comment that we only come to the knowledge of love when we find it redeeming us at an infinite cost. And that cost was the shedding of the blood of the Son of God on our behalf. That's the picture of love. It's Jesus. It's Jesus Christ who not only came to show us how to live, verse 9, but he also came to redeem us from the wrath of God, verse 10. His person, verse nine, his work, verse 10. Each of these exemplify the love of God. What does love look like? You can't start with us. You have to look to Jesus to find the answer to that question. Love is a priority because of God's command, our conversion, and God's character. Love is pictured in its meaning as a sacrifice, in its manifestation in the Son, and in its mission to save us. So now that we know why love is a priority and what it looks like, verse 11, the practice of love. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. I wanna close with a story that comes out of early church history, and it's of the Apostle John's last sermon. I mentioned earlier in the sermon that John had been taken off into captivity in Patmos, where he wrote the book of Revelation. Sometime after that, the persecuting emperor died, and whenever there was a change of emperors, there was always a release of political prisoners. So John was released from imprisonment and exile, and he comes back to that church at Ephesus. He's in his early to mid 90s at this point. He had been severely tortured during his time on Patmos. And so he could no longer see, he could no longer walk. He had to be carried to church every week. And yet the believers at Ephesus, out of love for him and deference for him, would always ask him to preach. And on this particular... It was known that that would be the last time he would be able to speak. He would very soon step into eternity and be reunited with his Savior who had transformed him. The people knew this and they were weeping because they knew this would be his last sermon. So he was carried up and placed in front of the congregation and he's looking out over this group with sightless eyes. And he begins, how dark it is. I cannot seem to see the faces of my flock. Is that the sea that murmurs so? Or is it weeping? Hush, my little children. God so loved the world. He gave his only son. So love one another. Love God. And love men. That was John's benediction to the church at Ephesus. And that would be my benediction to Peninsula Bible Church. So love one another. Love God. And love men. And all God's people said, Amen.