Genesis 12 1 through 8 Now the Lord said to Abram go forth from your country and from your relatives and from your father's house To the land which I will show you and I will make you a great nation and I will bless you and I will make your name great and so you shall be a blessing and I will bless those who bless you and the one who curses you I will curse and and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed. So Abram went forth as the Lord had spoken to him, and Lot went with him. Now Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his nephew, and all their possessions which they had accumulated, and the persons which they had acquired in Haran, and they set out for the land of Canaan. Thus they came to the land of Canaan. Abram passed through the land as far as the side of Shechem to the oak of Morah. Now the Canaanite was then in the land. The Lord appeared to Abram and said, to your descendants I will give this land. So he built an altar there to the Lord who had appeared to him. Then he proceeded from there to the mount on the east of Bethel and pitched his tent. With Bethel on the west, Well, how about that? I told you we were doing scripture readings that were pre-planned now, right? Instead of choosing them to fit with the sermon. You know where our first text is this morning in the sermon? Starts in Genesis 12, 10. So how about that? I told you God had worked some things out for us along the way. So that set the table well for us. Thank you, Chris. Let's stop and pray, okay? Father, thank you for the blessing that you brought to all the nations through Abraham's seed. The blessing of forgiveness through Jesus. The blessing of spiritual life when we were once spiritually dead. The blessing of fellowship with you and a relationship with you and your spirit in us. the blessing of eyes open to see and understand your Word, the blessing of an advocate before the Father who intercedes for us, the blessing of knowing that we have a perfect Father and nothing comes into our lives that doesn't go through His hands. You truly have blessed us with every spiritual blessing in Christ Jesus. just as you promised millennia ago to Abraham. Thank you for being a God who keeps your promises. And today I pray that you build our faith and help us to increasingly be people who can take your promises and claim them, believe them, not because our faith is so strong, but because your character is so certain. So thank you for always keeping your word to us, even when we often are unfaithful to you. I pray in Jesus' name, Amen. We began a new sermon series this morning. I mean it's related to our overall series on sin, but we begin, this is one of those introductory sermons just kind of setting the table that you've heard me do several different times in this series to introduce the sins against love. So it's about a year now that we've been trying to topically study sin, and if you missed the announcement a couple weeks ago, we'll finish that out between now and Christmas, Lord willing, and then move into something new next year. We haven't been trying to examine every detail. That's impossible anyways, because the human heart is unendingly creative in the sins we can make up. But we've been trying to get a good grasp of the overall picture of what God says about these things. And so we come now to our final major category, which is the sins against love. And the way we've done this is we just started at the beginning of the Bible, and we've just kind of watched for different categories of sins to appear. And so we come today to Genesis chapter 12, where we already were for scripture reading. So let's read from Genesis 12, and even though at this point in the story the names are Abram and Sarai, for simplicity's sake, let's just call them Abraham and Sarah, okay? Genesis 12, verse 10. Now there was a famine in the land. So Abraham went, Abraham went down to Egypt to sojourn there for the famine was severe in the land. It came about when he came near to Egypt that he came to Sarah, that he said to Sarah, his wife, see now, I know that you are a beautiful woman. That's a good start, Abraham. And when the Egyptians see you, they will say, this is his wife and they will kill me, but they'll let you live. Please say that you are my sister so that it may go well with me because of you and that I may live on account of you. And it came about when Abraham came into Egypt, the Egyptians saw that the woman was very beautiful. Pharaoh's officials saw her and praised her to Pharaoh. and the woman was taken into Pharaoh's house. Therefore he treated Abraham well for her sake and gave him sheep and oxen and donkeys and male and female servants and female donkeys and camels. But Yahweh struck Pharaoh in his house with great plagues because of Sarah Abraham's wife. Then Pharaoh called Abraham and said, what is this you have done to me? Why did you not tell me that she was your wife? Why did you say she is my sister so that I took her for my wife? Now then, here is your wife, take her and go. Pharaoh commanded his men concerning him, and they escorted him away with his wife, and all that belonged to him. All right. So one factor in this story is Abraham's lie, but we've already talked about sins against the truth back when we talked about Cain's lie to God. So what I want to focus on here is Abraham's remarkable selfishness. Remarkable may not be the best word because this kind of degree of selfishness is actually fairly natural for us as human beings. Selfishness is a key word that we'll use throughout this sermon series. It's not the only sin involved, but it is kind of at the heart of these sins against love. So just like with the last series where we used the word pride, not that that was the only thing involved, but it was kind of at the heart of the sins against God's name, we'll use this selfishness word frequently here. And the sins against love could maybe be summarized with that word, with the word selfishness, because love isn't primarily about a feeling or even an attachment, though those are parts of what we mean by love in different situations. But love at its foundation is a selfless commitment to the good of another person. For the last year, we've talked frequently about shalom, the way God created things to be, the way things should be. Shalom is when everything is right, the way things are supposed to be. And the reason why we've talked about shalom so much is because a true understanding of sin comes when you recognize the way things were supposed to be without that twistedness and perverseness that sin introduces. And so that's how we really kind of get our perspective on why sin is sin. The perception people have is that God you know, doesn't want human beings to have fun, so he made up this list of naughty stuff you shouldn't do. And when we go back to the way God created things and we see shalom the way things are supposed to be, then we can understand, oh, that's why that's sin, because that's a violation of the Creator's purpose. So to come here to our specific theme, I said that love at its foundation is a selfless commitment to the good of another person. Maybe we could say love is a commitment to somebody else's shalom. The way things are supposed to be. If I yell at you in anger, there are many things going on there, but one of the things is that is not the way things are supposed to be for you. If we went back to Adam and Eve, to the culture that would have developed through them before sin, you would not have seen anyone yelling at anyone in anger. That's not the way things are supposed to be. And so we could say that love is a commitment to someone else's shalom. So in this story, in Genesis 12, is Abraham committed to Sarah's shalom? The way things are supposed to be for a wife. Thankfully, God doesn't give us many details. We don't want to try to imagine them, but surely it was horrific and terrifying. Just in general, for a woman to be plucked off the street for her good looks is horrific and happens all around the world. And then to be taken as some sort of mistress or something into Pharaoh's house, he uses the word wife, but that's probably not really a fair word. This is an awful scene. And for Sarah, this is about as far from Shalom as you can get. What would prompt a husband to throw his wife to the wolves like this? Well, thankfully, from the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks, so Abraham tells us. Verse 13, please say that you are my sister so that it may go well with me because of you and that I may live on account of you. I think he's being more honest than he even realizes. His philosophy is very simple. Have you ever heard this philosophy before? My good at your expense. My good at your expense. How horrific, how could he do that? Well, does this not characterize our lives from the beginning? Someone else can do the dishes, it's not my turn. I get the bigger piece of dessert, meaning you can have the smaller one. My shalom at your expense, because shalom, the way things ought to be, is a bigger piece of dessert. Somebody else clean up the mess I left behind, but don't ever ask me to clean up the mess somebody else left behind. I'll go first in the game so you can go later. I'll make fun of you so other people will think I'm cool. As adults, we only get slightly more sophisticated. I'll cheat on my taxes so that the rest of you can carry the burden. I'll cut ahead of you in traffic, but how dare you think you can cut ahead of me? Let's get married, because I can think of all the ways you could make me happy. And later, you get up with the kids in the middle of the night so I can sleep. You clean the house. I'm watching TV. Selfishness is as natural as blinking your eyes. It corrupts mankind in billions of ways every day. It tears apart Shalom and it leaves the shreds behind. It's interesting that as you continue in Genesis, Abraham gets the tables turned on him. We'll read that in a moment, but let's continue in Genesis 13 verse 1. Now, so Abraham went up from Egypt to the Negev, he and his wife and all that belonged to him and a lot with him. Now, Abraham was very rich in livestock, in silver and in gold. He went on his journeys from the Negev as far as Bethel to the place where his tent had been at the beginning between Bethel and Ai, to the place of the altar which he had made there formerly. And there, okay, so he's coming back up from Egypt back into the land. That's what all these places mean. And there Abraham called on the name of the Lord. Verse 5, now Lot, who went with Abraham, also had flocks and herds and tents. And the land could not sustain them while dwelling together, for their possessions were so great that they were not able to remain together. And there was strife between the herdsmen of Abraham's livestock and the herdsmen of Lot's livestock. And then there's that note that the Canaanite and Perizzite were also still dwelling then in the land. So there was a lot of competition. So strife, strife between the herdsmen of Abraham and the herdsmen of Lot. Why does strife happen? James tells us, James 4, 1 and 2, what causes quarrels and fights among you? Is it not this? Your passions that are at war within you. You desire and don't have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. Strife comes when two people are both seeking their shalom at the expense of the other person. When two kids both want the biggest piece of cake. When husband and wife have very different ideas about how the money should be spent. when two employees are competing for the same promotion, when two moms both kind of want the reputation as best mom, when two young ladies both want to get the attention for their clothes and their hair and their beauty, when two boys both want to prove that they're the strongest, the fastest, can throw the furthest, whatever. That's when strife comes. That's when nasty words are said. That's when hurtful things are done. It's when I want shalom for me, even at the expense of you. And so watch what happens next. Genesis 13, 8. So Abram said to Lot, please let there be no strife between you and me, nor between my herdsmen and your herdsmen, for we are brothers. Is not the whole land before you? Please separate from me. If to the left, then I'll go to the right, or if to the right, then I'll go to the left. Lot lifted up his eyes and saw all the valley of the Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere. This was before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. It was like the garden of Yahweh, like God's garden, like the land of Egypt as you go to Zohar. So, Lot chose for himself all the valley of the Jordan, and Lot journeyed eastward, thus they separated from each other. Okay, so what did Lot choose? I know that fertile soil doesn't matter to most of you. We live in tract homes with dirt that was unfertile before we got a chance to try to do anything with it. Some of you, however, have fertile soil. But what did Lott do? I mean, he said, let's see, big piece of cake, little piece of cake, I'll take this one. But it was bigger than that. I mean, he said, here's an opportunity for a life of great prosperity and great wealth. I'll go this way. You can have the rest. So there it is again, right? That's the selfishness that spreads to every corner of the human soul. Now, there's some encouragement even right here in Genesis 12 and 13 because in both of these stories, God is a rescuer. It's easy to see in Genesis 12 because Genesis 12, 17 says, the Lord struck Pharaoh in his house with great plagues. God rescued Sarah. It's not quite as easy to see in Genesis 13, but if you think ahead in the story you might know what happened with Lot. and how well that worked for him. And Abraham ended up so rich with God's blessing, it ended up all being Abraham's. He got all the cake. And so, God is the rescuer. God is the savior for sinners and our selfishness. We need a rescuer and a savior both for eternity and for this life. Selfishness has earthly consequences, it tears apart shalom and our relationships here, but then selfishness has eternal consequences. You won't find it on most people's list of sins. If you just ask the average person on the street to name, you know, a top 25 sins, you're not going to find selfishness on that list. And yet, is it not true that you will someday meet your Creator and He will care about a life lived, choices made for me at your expense. Will the creator care? We are all guilty of failing to love. And the creator cares. And so somebody might get away with a very self-centered life. This is part of the problem, right? Egomaniacs sometimes win. And you look at their life, and you look at their attitude, and you look at the way they treat people, and you're like, God, why? Why do they keep winning? And God says, you wait. I'm not done. And by the way, I was patient with you. Let me be patient with them. But God says, I'm not done. This is not the end of the story. Can I just remind you again, a little illustration I love to use at the hospital because it's relevant for this. Take a pencil, put a dot on the wall. Draw a line all the way around the wall. Don't do that. Draw a line all the way around the wall, all the way around the wall, all the way around the wall, all the way around the entire room until you come back to my dot. That line represents the life to come. It goes and goes and goes and goes and goes and goes and goes and that dot represents this little speck here in this life. Okay, so a person may be very self-centered and seem to always prosper and always get what they want, but someday the line starts. and their Creator cares. And you and I are all guilty of selfishness, of my shalom at your expense, of ignoring the Creator's purpose. So we need a rescuer. We'll come back to that in a moment. But let's back up first. Okay, if we're going to talk about the sins against love, we run into a bit of a quandary from the beginning because it's not always easy to give these things a name. I'm using the general word selfishness as a starting point, but some of these things aren't easily named because they're just the lack of love. Sometimes we call them sins of omission, like James wrote. Whoever knows the right thing to do and doesn't do it, to him it's a sin. So we're talking about when something is missing, and what is missing is the love that God requires. So what is the sin that you commit when you don't love God? What's the name for that sin? Well, we could say idolatry or a lot of things, but I think a pretty good answer is not loving God. Whatever else you do instead, it's a sin to not love God. As a matter of fact, couldn't we say that that's the greatest sin against love, to fail to love God? And maybe we could say that's the greatest sin, since Jesus said that the greatest commandment is to love God. This is such a vital principle to remember since our attention tends to drift towards sins that are more tangible and visible. When little kids in Christian families start to try to process what separates a good person from a bad person, what do they think of? What do little kids, I'm talking about like three, four, five-year-olds, what do they think of? Do you say bad words? Do you wear bad clothes? Do you listen to bad music? And they can identify it, right? That's bad music. Those are bad clothes. The little kids, they got it. They got people nailed down. Because for a developing child's mind, it's hard to wrap your mind around more abstract ideas. It's easier to just keep things simple, clear cut, external. But as you grow up, you have to mature in your understanding of sin. And you have to see that the greatest sin is not something that is easily measured and easily observed because the greatest sin is your failure to love God. And yeah, that seems a little abstract, and it seems a lot nicer to just say, wear these clothes, and you're spiritual, and you know, whatever. But what is the number one reason why people are guilty before God? The number one reason is because they haven't loved Him like He deserves. Now that leads us to the question, what does it mean to love God? And that's not the focus of this sermon series. It's not even the focus of the sermon this morning, but let me just comment on one little part of that. Earlier this year, we talked about, do you remember we started this series on sin with a whole bunch of, several weeks of sermons in which we put together a series of propositions. Sin is what we do when. Do you remember that? Does that ring a bell? And one of those was, sin is what we do when we don't love God. And so we talked about this very focused there on that week. And we learned that from the earliest references to loving God in the Bible, there are a couple of key themes that emerge right away, really three, but I'm gonna mention two right now and then we'll add the third. And those two are loyalty and obedience. What does love mean? It's a word that is so flexible and can mean many things. But what does God mean when He tells us to love Him? He means be loyal to Him. And by the way, that's what you want in love from someone else, right? Be loyal to Him and obey Him. The Ten Commandments begin by talking about loyalty, right? Not having other gods. Jesus said, if you love me, you'll keep my commandments. So it continues throughout scripture. Loyalty and obedience, that's how we love God. And when we fail to do that, we're committing what may be the greatest sin and failing to love God as he deserves. Now we're not gonna talk more about that, but let me just comment practically on how helpful this is. I think I mentioned this before, but This idea that the greatest sin or all other sins can be summarized up in this greatest sin of not loving God is helpful evangelistically. So many people think of themselves as good people and what do they mean by that? They have some sense of there are really bad things human beings can do and I don't do those things. I don't rape or I don't murder or whatever it might be and therefore I fit into the category of good person. And it's really important to help people understand that the greatest command is to love God. And that loving God means being loyal to Him and obeying Him. You see, many people who, for example, many people who say, well, I'm a person of faith. I have faith. Never touch a Bible. Never look at what God said to try to obey that. You cannot love God and never touch a Bible to see what God said. Because he said, if you love me, you're gonna keep what I said. And so it's helpful when talking to people who are maybe, okay, Christians are always saying you need to be saved. And non-Christians are saying, saved from what? I'm fine. I don't rape and I don't murder. What are you talking about? And it's helpful to be able to say, do you know what the greatest commandment is in the Bible? Because they won't know the answer. I think 99 out of every 100 unsaved people will not know the answer to that question. And then explain to them that sin is not just a few dirty little vices that everyone secretly enjoys. Sin is a failure to love the creator and be loyal and faithful and obedient to him like he deserves because he's a creator. So it's helpful evangelistically. And then a second way that's just really, it's practically helpful is just for measuring our own spiritual health. Again, it's, we're so wired, for example, we're so wired to, when we think about our own personal standards, we're so wired to see where somebody else's standard is different from ours and boom, We just made a judgment about who's more spiritually healthy. Clearly me, right? That is not how you measure spiritual health. And so we all have to fight all the time to ask the question, how is my love for God? And you answer that question by asking, how is my loyalty to God? How's my obedience to God? Those things are the measure of spiritual health. So it's practically, just in terms of evaluating ourselves, it's helpful to ask, how is my love for God? All right, so I know this is, I'm covering a bunch of things at once here this morning, but we started by talking about shalom, the way God created things to be, talking about selfishness, how that cuts at the heart of shalom, my shalom at your expense. And then we started talking about, okay, how do we name these sins against love? Uh, it's kind of hard because it's just lack of love that's at the foundation of it, right? And the greatest example of lack of love, the greatest sin against love is failing to love God. But for the rest of this series, that's not really our focus. Our focus is on lack of love for others. Remember I said earlier that even at the very beginning of the Bible, when God talks about loving him, there are three aspects of that loyalty, obedience, and the third aspect from the very beginning is your love for other people. You know that love your neighbor as yourself command that even a lot of non-Christians do know? You know where that comes from in the Bible? Leviticus. Who knew God was talking about love in Leviticus? Really big sections of the old covenant law are all about people treating people the way God designed it. So from the very beginning, love for God and love for people have not been distinguished as if they are separate things. They are all together as one thing. Jesus taught that the great and foremost commandment is to love God. And the second, which is like the first, is to love your neighbor as yourself. It's interesting that that was Jesus' answer to a man, a question asked by a man who was a Pharisee, but more than that, a lawyer. He was a Pharisee who was a lawyer, meaning that if you wanted to know details about the old covenant law, you wanted somebody who was an expert on it, you went to this guy. He knew his laws, right? He asked Jesus, what's the greatest? How many answers was he looking for? When you ask for an EST, you know, thing, right? We teach our kids this in elementary school grammar. What is the greatest commandment? He was looking for one answer. Jesus gave him two. Now Jesus made it clear that loving God was first. If there has to be one answer, that's it. But there can't just be one answer because the second commandment, Jesus said, is like the first. It's very similar to it. It's inseparable from it. So that just means there is no such thing as love for God without love for people. Because God's the creator of people. God's the designer of shalom. And so if you care about God, you care about people, and you care about the way he created things to be. If someone I love has a garden, I'm not gonna go trample their garden while saying, I love you! Or a few weeks ago, I aroused some rather intense opinions when I referred to someone who might kick a cat. And to dare to tread near that topic again, let me just simply say that if I love someone who loves cats, I will not kick their cat. I will especially not kick their cat while saying, I love you, right? But isn't it true that human beings say, oh yeah, I'm about God, I trust God, I like God, while kicking Shalom, while saying I'm gonna live for myself at your expense. You can't do that, that's against God. That person you're yelling at in your anger was created by God. That's personal between you and God. That person you're cheating out of that money, that's personal between you and God. That person that you're making have the small piece of cake every time so you can have the big cake, God cares about chocolate cake. Because that person was created in his image and is precious to him. And you are saying, I get the best and you get second every time. And God says, I will hold you accountable for that because they are precious to me. John Stott has noted that Jesus spoke of first and second greatest commandments, but never a third because everything is summarized in these two. Okay, let's hear what God says about this. A couple of specifics before we finish up this morning. Turn to Romans 13. We'll look at specifics in the weeks to come, but this morning, just a couple general passages that really help maybe confirm these things for us. Romans 13, and we want to read verses 8 through 10. Romans 13, 8, owe nothing to anyone except to love one another. For he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. For this, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not covet. And if there's any other commandment, it's summed up in this saying, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law. All right, first of all, who's your neighbor? Remember the story Jesus told to make that clear? The men walking down the road, here's the man that's been beaten and left. He became their neighbor because he was on their path. Okay, your neighbor is any people that God has put into the path of your life. Your family is your neighbor, your neighbors are your neighbors, your coworkers are your neighbors, your people in your church family are your neighbors. Anybody God puts in your life is your neighbor. Here's what he says, verse eight. owe nothing to anyone except to love one another. Okay, that means you should try to take care of your debts. You should try to get rid of your obligations to other people. But there's one obligation you'll never get rid of, and that's your obligation to love. You'll always have that obligation to other people. Every person has an enduring obligation to love because the Creator created us to love one another. And then as a Christian, you've got a second, you've got a whole nother layer there, right? You're not only accountable to God to love because he's your creator, but because through Christ, he has loved you. He loved you so much that he gave his one and only son. And so if God loved us by giving his son for us, we have even more reason to love others. So it's good to try to take care of all your obligations, but this one will always remain the obligation to love others. Then verse nine says that all of the commandments could be summed up in the command, love your neighbor as yourself. That means that every sin we commit against one another could be summed up in a one sin of failing to love one another. And it's helpful to think that way about it sometimes. And then verse 10, love does no wrong to a neighbor. That is so simple, but maybe it clarifies it even further. Again, people think of sin as a little list of no-nos. And God says, here's sin doing wrong to anybody else. Whew, that just got bigger, right? And so, sin is doing any wrong to the one true God or doing any wrong to anyone He created. Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Look with me over at 1 Corinthians 16. When we say love does no wrong to a neighbor, we're saying love never says, my shalom at your expense. Love never says that. Okay, think about this, parents. What if your kids said every time, who wants the biggest piece of cake? Who wants the next biggest piece of cake? And then left themselves with the smallest. What if every game your kids said, who wants to go first? Sure, you can go first. You're thinking, there is no way. Okay, I get that. But can we all wrap our minds around the fact that is exactly how God intends every one of us to live. Your shalom at my expense. That's how God intends every one of us to live. And what's amazing, we talked about a few weeks ago, God wired you so that you find the most joy that way. God's the one who said, it's more blessed to give than to receive. He wired you that way. And so you can be an egomaniac and crawl to the top and always be on top and always win and always dominate, but you are not blessed. If you want God's blessing, it's their shalom at your expense. And he promises that you'll find your joy there. All right, 1 Corinthians 16 and verse 14. Let all that you do be done in love. You know, good Bible interpretation, you look at the context, right? You read a statement like that and you say, what's the context? Like, what's he particularly talking about? Is he talking about kids and dessert? Is he talking about adults and traffic? You know, what's he talking about? Well, the answer is we're at the end of 1 Corinthians and he's just giving summaries of his heart for that church in general. And that was a heart with some mess, I mean a church with some messed up relationships. And so when he says this, I don't think he's talking about something in particular. It really is just a big general summary. Listen, church in Corinth, church in Menifee, let everything you do be done in love. How would Corinth have been different if everything was done in love? How would grace in Menifee be different if everything was done in love? And then 1 Corinthians 13, just back a couple pages probably, 1 Corinthians 13, And these very well-known verses in verses 1-3, if I speak with the tongues of men and of angels but do not have love, I've become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but I do not have love, I'm nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing." So there, Paul is trying to think up the most extreme examples of Christian giftedness in ministry. You're not just a good speaker, you speak like an angel. You're not just gifted to know and understand, you have all knowledge. You have all faith. You give all your possessions. You die as a martyr. Without love for others, Paul says, I gain nothing. The test of spiritual health is not giftedness, nor is it minister accomplishment, nor is it even level of sacrifice. I grew up in a home where, and I think my mom would probably be okay with me saying this, I, my, my mom has a little bit of a, a little bit of a martyr syndrome when it comes to serving. Like, she will serve herself to death. Like, no, I'll do it, it's okay, and go and go and go and go and kill herself, you know, serving to death, while being tempted to feel a little bit of you know, self-righteousness, that I'm serving myself to death while you're standing there watching me, you know. And many of us, I think, can sympathize with that. I can sympathize with that. I am my mother's son. And my mom is a tremendously godly lady. I mean, no criticism of her. She's talked about this. I've heard her talk about this. She is aware of it. And so, you know, boy, you can just feel spiritually healthy. You know, I mean I was up till 2 a.m. serving. Nobody has any idea what I was doing. Okay, it doesn't mean I'm spiritually healthy. Because if I don't have love, what was it? Right? So don't measure your spirituality by all the easy measurable external stuff. At the heart of all that God expects of us is love for Him and love for other people. And then, all right, let's read from 1 John without much comment. 1 John 3, verses 10 and 11, first of all. 1 John 3, 10 and 11. By this the children of God and the children of the devil are obvious. Anyone who does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor the one who does not love his brother, for this is the message which you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another." Interesting, that's actually the text we began this series with because of, the specifics with because of Cain, because he goes on next to say, not as Cain, who was of the evil one and slew his brother. So we were in this text earlier, but I'm supposed to be reading this without comment. Verse 14, we know that we have passed out of death into life because we love the brethren. He who does not love abides in death. Okay, so take 1 Corinthians 13 and put it in 1 John 3, 14. We know that we have passed out of death into life because we speak with the tongues of men and of angels. We give our bodies to be burned. We give up all of our possessions. We have gifts and knowledge. We can move mountains with our faith. He doesn't say any of those things. He says we know that we passed out of death into life because we love our brothers and sisters in Christ. Then 1 John 3, 23. This is his commandment that we believe in the name of his son, Jesus Christ, and love one another just as he commanded us. John is especially good at putting things black and white. He's good when we're struggling to wrap our minds around the abstract, right? So he says, listen, this is it. Believe in Jesus and love your brothers and sisters in Jesus. That's it. First John four, verse seven. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. In this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we love 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." And then verse 20, if someone says, I love God and hates his brother, he is a liar. For the one who doesn't love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. There's no exception in that verse, folks. There's no, well, you don't know what my brother did to me. It's not there. It's just simple. If you say, I love God, and you hate your brother, you can't love God. And so you see there that love for God and love for other people are inseparable. They are all part of one right response of creation to our Creator. All right, so what are we looking for then in the weeks ahead as we look at specific examples of this? So let me just list you four things. You might want to write them down. I'm sorry I didn't give you a handout this morning. It wasn't an outline really to fit a handout. Number one, four things we're looking for. We want our lack of love exposed. Because it's a lack of something, it's easy to not notice that it's missing. You know what that's like in life when you get something you never had before and then you suddenly feel like you can't live without it? You didn't even notice that before. It's possible that we can be failing in our love for others. We can be just stuck in a my shalom at your expense and not even notice it because it's the lack of love that is the problem. And you can be very successful in many areas of life and yet be failing to let all that you do be done in love. So first of all, we need our lack of love exposed because your business can be prospering, your children can be succeeding, your ministry can be growing, and love can be missing. We need our lack of love exposed. And then secondly, we need our forgiveness assured. Could somebody get saved through a series of sermons about the sins against love? If John makes this a clear test of genuine salvation, then surely God could use this to show someone that he or she is not genuinely born again. We have failed to love God or others as we should. You know, it's like we were talking about earlier. You think of sin as a little checklist, and maybe you think, I've done pretty well, and then you start to study what God says about love, and you go, whoa, maybe I haven't done so well. Well, that's a great point to be at, because then you're ready for a Savior. Then you're ready for the good news that Jesus came and took our sin. He died for our failure to love, right? So that we could be forgiven. So it's possible that someone could be saved. And it's possible that that could be somebody new, like a visitor or a guest who doesn't know the gospel. It's also possible that that could be Somebody that's been here for a long long time because you know like and I know this is my background So it's why I talk about it frequently, but you know you can be the good kid in church And your goodness can be all about you You can be a dominantly selfish good kid And maybe God could open some eyes to see, whoa, I'm a sinner who needs a savior, despite the fact everybody thinks I'm such a good kid. So we need our forgiveness assured, and not just in that ultimate sense of salvation, but every day, because as we go through this series, we're all gonna go, oh man, that hurts. I am not doing well there. And we need the gospel to speak to us with the assurance of God's forgiveness for those things. But then God not only forgives our failures, but he breaks their power in our lives today. He's not only a savior in the past or for eternity, but a savior from our selfishness today. So our first goal is our lack of love exposed. Second, forgiveness assured. And third is our selfishness removed. Now it's not gonna be completely removed until we're glorified and sin's completely gone, but the Bible uses strong pictures like lay it aside, cut it off, put it away, even put it to death. So we want our selfishness to be laid aside and cut off and put away and put to death. And then there's one more goal. because it's not enough to just remove the selfishness. Suppose I have a problem with my car and I take it to the mechanic and I come back to pick it up and I ask the mechanic, what was the problem? And he says, fuel pump went bad. And I say, what did you do about it? And he says, I took it out. Bad fuel pump is gone. And I say, great, I pay him, I get in my car and it won't start. And I go back inside and I say, what else did you do after you took the bad fuel pump out? And he says, nothing, I got rid of the problem. Wait a second. Now, thankfully, that's not gonna happen with your car, but sometimes, probably. But sometimes we think that way about sin. We try to just remove the old man without replacing it with the new man. That's why we keep talking about shalom, right? We've gotta say, what is God's purpose? What is this supposed to look like? And so that then we want our selfishness. Okay, so the final goal is Christlike love imparted to us, using the matching my outline, passive, right? Christlike love imparted. So the four things were our lack of love exposed, forgiveness assured, selfishness removed, and then Christlike love imparted. You know, the gospel salvation takes you back to creation, back to the way things were supposed to be. back to the image of God, back to your shalom at my expense. Imagine a world where everybody says your shalom at my expense. What does everybody experience? Shalom, right? And so Jesus is changing us back into the image of God, putting off the old selfishness and changing us to be like Christ. So can you express your openness to God as we begin this series? It's a little sticky, especially in some real life relationships where we've been really hurt and it's really hard. And so it is a little hard to say, okay, God, I'm open. I mean, what we all want to say is, please, God, use this series in those other people who are hard on me. And it's hard to be open and say, please, God, show me what I'm not seeing. Okay, so are you willing to say that? Are you willing to say, God, I want to see my lack of love. I want to see myself as just, but then say, God, please don't leave me there. Don't just show me the problem and then leave me. Assure me of your forgiveness and impart Christlike love to replace the selfishness. Can you pray that? Let me give you just a second to pray those things. Okay. I'll just be quiet and let you pray and talk to the Lord. And then I'll close in prayer. Father, I pray that You would fulfill every desire for goodness, that as there is a flicker of desire in Your people's hearts to be done with our selfishness and changed into Christlike love, that You would grant that desire by the power of the resurrected Jesus. Change our sinful hearts to love in a way that would honor You. I pray in Jesus' name, Amen.