The Apostle John's instructions, 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. By 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. 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. Beloved, If God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he is in us because he has given us of his spirit. We have seen and testified that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us so that we may have confidence in the Day of Judgment that He is, that as He is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. If someone says, I love God and hates his brother, he is a liar, for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him, that the one who loves God should also love his brother. This is 1 John 4, verses 7-21, the meat, probably the meat of the epistle of 1 John, to which we turn this evening, a very challenging section of scripture. No matter how you define challenging, whether it's trying to discern his structure, and what his main emphasis is and why the repetition, whether it's the sense of responsibility that this passage places on the shoulders of every believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. This passage is a challenge and we're here to step up to the challenge. I am a strong believer in doing hard things. I think we should. I think we should look at challenges that are worth doing and not shirk away from them and shy away from the hard things. We should run at full speed into the gathering storm when it gets hard. Let's take a moment for silent prayer, make sure we're in fellowship with God, and I'll open us in prayer. Our Father, we have opened the scriptures tonight so that we may know you, because we have taken a cue from the Lord Jesus in his prayer to you in John 17, that we can take hold of life. We can enjoy this life you've given us. This is life that we would know you. Father, we want to know you better for having come this evening, and we don't want to waste our time. Don't let us shirk the opportunity before us. Don't let us just see this as a challenge to get through. Father, let the Word work its way through us. We want to be built up in Christ. We pray it in Jesus' name. Amen. We're at the fracture of, well, the fracture at the seams of John's discussion in 1 John chapter 4. That's 1 John chapter 4. And in verses 1 through 6, John has presented, and really goes back to the previous chapter, to the end of chapter 3. He's presented the problem. of testing the spirits of discernment, Christian discernment. How do I know a message is from God or a messenger is from God? Remember, the spirits that he's talking about are messages from persons. The message, in light of who sent it, consider the source, like your mom used to say. The apostolic standard of judgment is important to understand as he shuts down that discussion on discernment. If all we had was verse one, test the spirits, then we might devise all kinds of ideas. You might find all kinds of interesting suggestions and conjectures. But actually, we're not going to be surprised that John takes us back to the apostolic confession, to the teaching of the apostles as the standard by which we will make our evaluation. He says, we are from God. The we in that verse in my opinion, is a reference to the apostles. We, the apostles, are from God. Verse 5, they, the false teachers, are from the world. We are from God. He who knows God listens to us. That is why I think we means the apostles. Because their people they teach is in the second part, he who knows God, not the false teachers. So if we refers to all Christians that have God and have the truth, have the word and have the Lord and have the Holy Spirit, and these things are true. If he's talking about all the Christians when he says we, then who is he talking about when he says everyone who knows God listens to us? So just a little bit of reasoning here. I don't want to go too much farther in this, but the we is the apostles and the he, it's you and me who listen to the apostles. We know God, so we listen to the apostles. Now that skips us and we just make a quick reading. Sit down and read 1 John in one sitting. There's a lot of stuff about love sprinkled in there. There's some love stuff. There's some challenging statements that make me kind of wonder. Let me get back into some Paul wrote in Ephesians or Romans or Galatians. It's easier to think through. It's not as convicting. It's not as self-condemning to read it. But let's don't do that. Let's benefit from the time together that we as the apostles and he who knows God, you know, God. And remember how John defines knowing God. He's talking about abiding in Christ and fellowship and walking by the Spirit. The same thing Paul means when he says to walk by the Spirit. He's talking about the Christian that's spiritual, that's walking with the Lord. And so, you know, God, because of the word of God and your walk in the word. And it's not just about him. It's to know him. It's an experiential knowledge from both the content of the word and its exercise in the life. He who knows God listens to us. See, there's more we can observe here. Verse 5, they are from the world, they speak from the world, and so the world listens to them. In contrast, those false teachers, we, the apostles, are from God. He who knows God listens to us, not the world. It's God versus the world in the context. And so here, he who knows God listens to us. Should we have to listen to anybody if I already know God? If I'm already in a vibrant, growing walk with God, should I have to listen? Yeah, they go hand in hand. You have to listen to the apostles if we're going to be those who know God. See what I mean? It's an ongoing thing. I like to quote, I don't know where he got it, but I got it from Tom Constable at Dallas Seminary when he said, he said, we're all crackpots. Meaning, as a vessel, we're all fractured and broken. We're not completely shattered to pieces, but we're cracked. And when you have a cracked vessel, it can leak. And the only way for it to stay full is for it to stay under the tap. For it to remain under the water tap so that it continues to fill it up even though at a faster rate than it's leaking out. And so right there, he who knows God listens to us is an indication that we'll never, like we're talking about on Sundays with spiritual growth, you'll never get there. We'll never have arrived. But there is a sense when you could say, I know God. And I think he's talking about the experience of the Christian life and the momentum from walking with the Lord. So he who knows God listens to us. He who is not from God does not listen to us. This is a wonderful way to categorize people through church history, different speakers, and think about this. Listen means to submit yourself to, in a sense of listening. It's listen at the feet of the apostles in a sense of being their disciple, their student. A disciple of Christ who's getting what he knows of Christ from the disciples, from the apostles. Understand. Now, how many people through church history, through the last 2,000 years, have said something like, well, you know the Bible, but... I had a guy tell me not too long ago. Well, Ephesians 5, that's just Paul on marriage. Can you imagine if Paul was married, the man said? Well, it's not a foregone conclusion that he wasn't married at some point. We know that when he wrote 1 Corinthians, he was not married, but it doesn't mean he had never been married. A lot of people will look at the the traditions, the rabbinical traditions, and say a rabbi had to be married to be a rabbi. Paul was a rabbi, and that's an assumption. But if he was a rabbi, then at some point he was married, and he could be talking to those that were widowed, remain as I am, when he says to the unmarried or to the widowed. Anyway, the point is, that's just Paul. So we're going to do our own thing with marriage because we can't get it from Ephesians 5, which defines it most clearly in the whole Bible. Except for Genesis 2, where Paul is building from in Ephesians 5. What's the point? Well, I think you can make two big boxes now. People that listen to the apostles and people that don't. Let me do three examples. one of the first people to make a list of New Testament books that we should put in what we call today the canon. that were saying these are the ones from God and the other books aren't. Thomas, not from God. Gospel of Mark, from God. Canon. And the Church did not decide what was in the Canon. The Church understood what was in the Canon. And the Canon was completed in 96 AD by the Apostle John when he completed the book of Revelation. One of the first guys to make a list in there in the second century was a guy named Marcion. M-A-R-C-I-O-N. Martian is how you say it if you're academic, but then everyone thinks you're talking about a guy on the fourth planet. a Martian, but his name was Marcion, and he believed that the Jews, he was one of your first big anti-Semites in church history, and he thought that the Jews, he loved when Paul said in First Thess that they were cursed to the uttermost. And he took that and did things that the Bible wouldn't do with it. And that's not the only place, but he was very anti-Semitic, and so he hated all the Jewish flavor of several of the New Testament books, but he loved the reasoning and the logic that you get from Paul, who was the apostle to the Gentiles. So he rejected Peter and James and John, the book of Hebrews. Because they're more Jewish in flavor. They're appealing to a Jewish audience for the most part. And so his New Testament was much shorter than ours. And he was your first Pauline authoritarian. Paul is the priority for our understanding of the New Testament and what we need to know we got from Paul. And we don't even know the Old Testament. We just got Paul's letters and he was a powerful teacher and we know about him, not because his works were preserved. They were rejected and so not copied and maintained. We have the early pastors and theologians writing against him. One example, he doesn't listen to the apostles. He doesn't listen to John. We already know whatever else he's going to say, and he said some wild things. Sorry, you don't have the apostles, you're not under the apostles, I don't, I must not listen to you. What about. What about the hyper dispensationalist? Do you know that term? You do, you just said it, Pastor Dave, let me write it on the screen up here real quick. Sorry, I ran out of space. The hyper-dispensationalist. Another way to describe this interesting type of theologian is an ultra-dispensationalist. I'm about as dispensational as you can get, so I must be one of those, right? Well, no. This is just a label. I'm a classic dispensationalist. I believe in a distinction between Israel and the Church that God has established. Israel is Israel, the Church is the Church. If you're a Jew or a Gentile today and you believe in Christ as your Savior, and that's always been the standard of salvation, faith alone. Okay? And there's no two ways of salvation, Old Testament and New Testament. There are two different administrations that are happening. And if you're a Jew or a Gentile today and you believe in Christ as your Savior, you are the Church. And the church is a distinct body. And Paul, the Jew, is in the church. And Mark, the Jew, is in the church. And John, the Jew, is in the church. And the writer to the Hebrews is in the church. And the point is, the hyper or ultra-dispensationalist really appreciates Paul again. He's the apostle to the Gentiles. And you see the 11 remaining, Judas, of the 12, Judas broke the dozen, right? One of the eggs broke. And so now you only have 11. And then they had this election in Acts 1 about Matthias. But you have these 11 disciples there with Jesus, and they're all Jews. And they become the apostles who Jesus uses to start the church. And we read about that in Acts chapter 2 with Peter's preaching, the beginning, the birthday of the church, the day of Pentecost. The observation of Paul in Romans 1.16 is that the gospel is the means by which is the power of God for salvation first to the Jew and then to the Greek or the Gentile. You following me? First the Jew. The first apostles are Jews. and they go to Israel. And if you look at Acts 1.8, the outline for the book of Acts is Acts 1.8. You're going to go and be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and then Judea, and then even out to Samaria, and then to the ends of the earth. Jerusalem, the Jews, out to the ends of the earth, the Gentiles. We've got an obvious progression from a Jewish origin of the church to all the peoples of the earth being included in the church. And that's an obvious progression. The scriptures where you dogmatically understand this, this is how God did it. I'm not yet to hyper dispensationalism yet. OK, but that's that's the flow. That's the progress of revelation. So here's what happens, because Paul is said to be the apostle to the Gentiles. And thereafter, they're brought in after the beginning with Israel. Well, then Paul is the latest and greatest and the advance on what the early 11 had. So you can read Matthew, sure, but that's not like reading Paul. That's hyper-dispensationalism. We reject the Jewish flavored books of the New Testament. If you will reject the gospel of Matthew, written to whom? Who was Matthew written for? It was Jewish Christian readership that was Matthew was written to. OK, and so we don't need Luke. That's the one that Paul supervised. So that's the gospel that has the priority, you see. And hey, people I respect, their writings I respect have been this. John Nelson Darby talks this way in some of his writing, and he's a very helpful Bible reader. And you can see when his theology is getting in the way of his exegesis sometimes. See, my understanding of the Bible isn't as important as the Bible itself, and that's where theology versus the actual reading out of the text. So the hyper-dispensational study, he's got good company in Darby in some cases. And Darby knows better now. He died in 1882. Not just Darby, Bullinger, E.W. Bullinger, synonyms of the New Testament. Very helpful scholar. Not so much with the Gospels and the stars stuff, but the very involved scholar from the 19th century was an ultra-dispensationalist. Well, the ultras and the hypers are wrong. Why? What piece of data can I say disproves this whole idea. Well, one is John probably is writing after Paul's death. You want to talk about the progress of Revelation, that also happens within the progress of time. First to the Jew and then to the Greek. Well, that's a time sequence. John writes this later than Paul. Now John's the pinnacle, isn't he? And I promise you the book of Revelation was written after Paul's execution. Who got to close down the Bible? Not Paul. That very Jewish-sounding writer, John. This is an overthink that has had some problems. What are some problems? My third point on this ultra-hyper-Marcion thing, Pauline priority dispensationalism. Do you know what you get if you reject the Matthew testimony as Matthew is presented in its literary structure? If you reject Matthew 28, Jesus' last words to the disciples as he's setting them up to start the church, written during the church age, somewhere probably between the 40s and the... I've gotten earlier, maybe 45, maybe 48 A.D. Jesus being crucified, we believe in 33 A.D. If Matthew is written During the church by a church age apostle and we're going to disregard it when it's the last words of Jesus Christ to the apostles who are now the writing apostles and we listen to them because First John 4 6 the one who knows God listens to us. I mean this this is a problem, right? But I've seen it done Matthew 28 19 and 20 says that you go to all the nations and you make disciples by baptizing them into the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit by teaching them to observe, to obey, to keep all that I've commanded you, lo, I'm with you to the end of the age. If you're a hyper-dispensationalist, you don't have to listen to Matthew 28, 19, and 20. And that's a big thing, it's a big fight in the circles I'm from, is do we actually have a great commission for the church, or is it for the first generation of the church, the apostolic period of the church, and then the apostles fade it out. I've seen baptism commanded by the Lord Jesus Christ as his final instruction as Matthew presents it. As Matthew presents it, this is what the Spirit wanted Matthew to do in his final instructions. I've seen someone say that since Paul says in First Corinthians three, I didn't come to baptize and I'm glad I didn't baptize any of you idiot Corinthians. That's not nice. Those are those are our brothers and sisters in Christ. Right. Those Corinthian who've fallen asleep in the Lord, you foolish Corinthians who are pagan in your thinking and your practice, who are going to brothels and saying, well, you know, it's not in my spirit, it's in my body. And that kind of practice, since Paul tells the Corinthians, his longest epistle in the New Testament, that he didn't baptize or come to baptize, he wasn't sent to baptize, but to preach the gospel, that this somehow negates what Jesus commands at the conclusion of Matthew. I'd say I've got Jesus and I've got Paul. I'm going with Jesus, since Paul, the only reason I listen to him is he's an apostle of Jesus Christ. Why I'm talking about this is because 1 John 4, 6, this passage on discernment, on listening to the apostles, this is why you've bound your New Testament books together. This is why the church is responsible for the popularization of a newfangled concept in the first century AD, a codex. A codex. Do you know what a codex is? This is what happens when you get academic. You start calling things by new words that you've known all your life. Codex. It's a new contraption in the first century. You know why? Because for the longest time it was scrolls. It was it was long sheets of papyrus rolled together on two sticks, scrolls. And as Jesus reads from Isaiah, the Isaiah scroll, when he is in Nazareth reading in the synagogue, he's got to ask the guy to bring the scroll, the right one. They go find the right one. It's got Apparently, no chapter and verse breaks, but he's got to find a spot. And then he's got to scroll. The scroll, that's why I call it scrolling. He's got to scroll to the place where it is the quote that he is looking for, that he wants to read to them, that has been fulfilled in their hearing. Okay, that's the old way. This is all brand new, newfangled. A codex is individual sheets that are sewn together on one end. Have you ever seen that video? It's a funny thing out there. You could YouTube it on your own time. Please don't do it now while you're here in church. But it's the tech support for books. It's like the medieval period, and they didn't know how to work books. And the guy keeps having to say, no, don't open it over here. Turn it this way. And the guy flips it up. He's like, no, you have to open it this way. And then the guy tries to open it this way, and no, it's on this end. And it's funny because computer people, that's what we seem like to the computer tech people. because we're always dumb with how we handle computers. But anyway, this is a new thing, this codex. The reason we bound it together is because 1 John 4, 6. The apostles are speaking from the Lord Jesus Christ's authority. And if we know God, we listen to them. And that's the difference in the two boxes. And so be careful. I think we should be really careful to prick up our ears when someone says, oh, that's just Paul. Back to my friend in the 21st century. That's just Paul, you know. Hey, this man doesn't listen to the apostles. And so what I know for sure from 1 John 4, 6, he's not from God. He doesn't know God. He knows the world and he speaks from the world because he's from the world, and so the world listens to him in verse five. From this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of deception or error, planis. From this we know, from what? From whether it came from the apostles or not. That's the standard. Remember, what I'm trying to say, and this has been very challenging for me all my life, is 1 John 4.1. Test the spirits. Now we've got something. Now we've got something mystical to hang on to, and I'm just going to get my emotional, spiritual sensor out there to test, like I'm the tester, like I am the standard by which the test will be made, if I feel good or bad about it. It doesn't say that. Your emotions and your conscience and all these complex things that make up your inner you, these are all part of God's equipment that He's given you, but none of those is the standard. The standard of assessment Whether you know truth or error is the apostles, which drives us. It drives us to their writings. It drives us to fearfully before the Lord say, help me know you through what they've written, because this is your protocol. This is your specifically designed and designated and created way of doing what you want us to do. There are all kinds of ways this could have been done, but God's way was this way through what the apostles wrote in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. You know why we listen to Moses? Because Moses tells us very painstakingly with great detail in Hebrew, writing right to left with no word processor, Under the inspiration of the Spirit of God, he tells us how he came by his instructions, face-to-face with God. To say something is on par with Moses is a pretty hefty claim for a Jew to make, and that's exactly what Peter, the apostle to Israel, the apostle to the Jews, says. In 2 Peter 3.16, the writings of Paul, he says, are on par with the rest of the scriptures, what Moses wrote. See, the New Testament is a bigger deal than we think, and everywhere I go, and what John has written, I'm reminded of that. Remember the Upper Room Discourse? Maybe you remember. In the Upper Room Discourse, that's John chapters 13 through 17. Why don't we all remember that real quick? The Upper Room Discourse is the Gospel of John chapters 13 through 17. Here's a real quick question. Can you tell me, if we broke that into two pieces, what chapter 17 would be called? What is John... what's that? The High Priestly Prayer. It's called the Upper Room Discourse, meaning where Jesus gave most of it, although they're walking in part of it. Another probably more helpful name for it has been the Farewell Discourse. This is Jesus, again, the way John does it, his last instructions to the apostles before he is crucified, his last evening of ministry. And what a fantastic body of truth we find there. But one incredible part of it is Jesus' encouragement that the Spirit is going to come for them. He's going to come and empower them. And he's going to bring to their, the apostles' memory, everything that they've forgotten from his teaching. Believers, that's not for you to say, I must not be my Holy Spirit connection must not be grounded right or something, because I'm forgetting stuff that I used to know. That's not even talking to you. Oh, no, he brings to my memory that passage about the bringing to the memory, I've spent four or five lessons on it. But when Jesus said the Spirit is going to bring to you the apostles memory, the things that I've taught you that you've forgotten. This tells us to read every word of john. Because John has exactly what Jesus wants us to have from his teaching. Read every word of Matthew. Read every word of Luke under Paul. Read every word of Mark under Peter. Because again, we're apostolic here. These men, you know that their teaching is from the Lord Jesus. And this again gets to the whole point of the authority of the Scriptures. Why do you even read the Bible? People like us that teach the Bible and teach the Bible and teach the Bible will be called Bibliolators. I love talking about special vocabulary. Bibliolators. Are you ready to shoot that one down? Can you can you disconnect the power source from that little ditty? Bibliolatry. Bib. I like it so far. Well, we're going to we're going to show it. Thank you. Bibliolatry. So I like the biblio part, but the atri part, I don't like that part. What do they mean? What does someone mean when they call you a bibliolater? Because you like to read the Bible and you like to go to church that teaches the scriptures. Why are you a bibliolater? Well, because this is the word for worship. Like the worship of idols. And the Bible is being called the object of worship, Bible worship. Have you ever been called a bibliolater? Has it been true? Let's establish whether or not it's true. Here's the thing. We don't worship the Bible here. The Bible is the Word of God, but we don't worship the Word of God, except as you mean Jesus Christ, the Word who became flesh, God the Son. We don't worship the text, we worship the speaker of the text. And the way we worship the speaker of the text, we pay attention to what he said. It's silly to say you're submitting your entire life to the message of the King, when what you really mean is you're submitting your entire life to the King. But how do you do that? Oh, I just go up on a mountaintop and have Rocky Mountain thoughts and just make sure I stay hydrated or I get altitude sickness, but I still just think about the Lord up there. Well, that's a great thing to do. We love to take kids up to Colorado. Rocky Mountains are beautiful. God did that. Probably with the flood of Noah. But, see, we worship God according to His truth, as Jesus teaches the Samaritan woman in John 4. The Spirit and truth. We know what God wants us to know because He told us. It's so amazing that we've got a Bible and the reason everyone ducks it and shirks it is it's hard. That's the secret. It's hard. The King James only people. If you're a King James only, don't cover your ears. And I love you and I do. I'm not going after you. But the mentality of a King James only. I love Mormons and I love Jehovah's Witnesses and I love all kinds of manners of people that I think it might have been misled and misguided. But the King James only movement is just hiding from the difficulty of how God revealed himself. It's hard. I was teaching a room full of Ukrainians a couple years ago in Hebrew poetry and I pulled out The poetic structure of Proverbs 3, 5, and 6, trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean not on your own understandings. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will direct your paths. So straightforward, so obvious, so clear. When you look at what's being rhymed in Proverbs 3, 5, and 6, what's the connection? What's the focus of his words? And you see that it's a little chiastic structure and there's more to it than just the straightforward translation. It's how it's also arranged. One of the Ukrainians said, if it's like this, then we need to learn Hebrew. And the next class, guess what they had? The next class, after I was done, I got to go have my cup of coffee, guess what they did? They went to Hebrew class. That's right, you need to go learn Hebrew, and you need to study the Hebrew, and you need to teach your people what you get from the Hebrew. And they don't have to learn Hebrew, but you who are going to teach the word in a vocational way probably should. So we teach Hebrew here. And and so my point is that the Bible is hard and it's very challenging. And and so it's so much easier to to. Let's have a party. Let's celebrate, let's do anything but feast on some steak. And I'll have some steak. Well, it's aged, in fact. It's well-aged steak because John wrote these things 2,000 years ago. But this is the transition where he moves from the false teachers who don't have this message to the central message that John has for the body of Christ. The central message is going to be chapter 4, verses 6 through 21. Now, it's a challenging message, and it's one of those places where the Bible summarizes the Christian life. Let me summarize it to make it a little bit more accessible. You ever play Google Earth? You ever mess with a little program Google Earth? If you haven't, I recommend you check it out. It's a fantastic geography lesson. But it's also a neat way to illustrate summary versus detail. Google Earth, I'm not going to put it on the screen. You can go do that on your computer or get your grandkids or whatever. But Google Earth is a satellite map of the world. Satellite images have been taken and uploaded to a database and then they're presented in a graphical format. And so you see the Earth. And you can go anywhere on earth, but you see the earth. And that picture is what I'm about to say from 1 John 4. The summary Christian responsibility, the summary of the Christian life is L-O-V-E. It is love. And that's looking at the earth. When you first bring Google Earth up, you see the earth. It's the summary. I haven't dealt with any details. I haven't talked about all the intricacies that are involved. It's the summary. And we better know what the summary is. When I tell you, imagine what the Earth looks like from space, most of us think, most humans think of North America, Central America, South America, blue, green, and brown, and white clouds swirling around. That's what we think of because of what the astronauts have shown us from space. When I ask you what is the summary Christian life from John, we better say it's love. Now, loving God, loving what God commands, loving as God commands, there we can get detailed and zoom in. I've invented a game, accidentally sort of, with Samuel, my son, using Google Earth. It's called, let's find the coffee shop in whatever town, Lisbon. not here, the other one. We'll go to... let's go find a nice little place on the coast, on the Mediterranean coast in Italy, see if we can find a coffee shop. How can I do that using this map of the earth? Well, because Google Earth has a way for you to look at actual photographs that people have taken from the particular spot that you're standing on and the direction you're looking at. eye level photograph of that direction. And you can turn around and see a 360 degree of a lot of places, most places on earth. There are places governments have said you can't publish these findings. I found my forward operating base in Iraq and found helicopters in the pictures. And there I was saying hi. No, I didn't see myself, but I saw that it's easy to see the outline of helicopters very distinct Maybe we should do something about that being available so easily on our bases and stuff but But but you know, you can go look anywhere on earth and find What what it looks like on that road I went to now it doesn't look like what you're used to because they're trying to do a a three dimensional thing in two dimensions and it just doesn't work. But we like to play go find a coffee shop. Let's go have a cup of coffee in Kiev or let's go find a cup of coffee somewhere. And Samuel loves to get on the computer and he wants to play games and we're fighting that battle and we're winning and he's losing and ultimately he'll win. I mean by getting my way. I have two rules for finding a coffee shop on Google Earth. First rule is Daddy gets to try to find it as long as he wants until he's done and gives Samuel a turn. And the second rule is that when Daddy's done with Samuel having a turn, Daddy gets control again and then goes to find a coffee shop. And Samuel doesn't like those rules, but he does play along. The point is, that you go from a summary to all the intricate details. Let me ask you this, how is your conscience supposed to interface with the problem of your sinfulness when it comes to your relationship with Jesus Christ? What is a biblical view of the Christian's conscience given that I'm to love Christ, that I'm to consider what He had to do for me. What is the normal or the normative expectation of my conscience and my relationship to guilt with respect to my sinfulness, with respect to Christ's sacrifice, His indescribable gift? How should those things resolve? I think the Bible gives us an answer. I think that by God's grace we have a clear conscience because Jesus cleanses us with his blood and we're to be thankful and grateful. But see, that's one of those little details that you work out. That's not the summary. That's one of the details. That's just one that comes to mind that we could we could point out many details. We just went got a cup of coffee on the street in the north end of Boston. And boy, I've got a place, too. That's the Italian district, and they know how to make cannolis there. And I serve up some good espresso. And I would love to go do that with you sometime. Go have some coffee and pastries in the North End. But those are the details. The picture from space looks like, oh, that's the familiar Earth picture with the plant. And the summary I'm saying from that Earth picture is love. We love. That's our calling card. And there's one aspect that really jumps out in terms of who God is that we probably don't think about when we talk about love, but it's everywhere in the Bible. I want to finish tonight talking to you about what we know about God from the love that He's displayed to us, what His love is like. We think of it as big, as unconditional, and we're right to. We think of it as defining of who He is. We think of it as a father for His children. And I mean the ultimate father, not just a good father, but the infinitely good father. But do we identify God's love as self-giving? Do we identify God's love as His, everywhere you look at it, giving of Himself, giving His Son for us? Do we see His self-sacrificial giving as definitive of the love of God? Let's read it in verse 7. He says, Beloved, let us love one another. One of those good leadership commands called a hortatory subjunctive, let us love one another. The main verb to love is given in a way that says it's a command, but I'm giving it to myself as well. And so let's all love one another. Why? He gives the explanation because love is from God. Now, this see this piggybacks on thoughts that John has already communicated, because he said before, they're from the world. We are from God. He who knows God listens to us. Now, we, therefore, ought to love one another. Let us, and I see beloved let us again. When I said that we, in verse six, is talking about the apostles, look what he does. He uses evocative address, calls us out, calls his audience beloved, and then includes himself when he uses the first person plural, when he says we, and now he's brought us back into us. We is not all Christians in verse 6. We is the apostles. Now it's back to let us love one another. I'm bringing you back to the discussion. That's too complicated. It's not that complicated. It's how language is, how communication works. Friends, one of the greatest miracles that you don't even know that you use is the ability to communicate thought with speech. to use words, to use language, spoken or written, to communicate ideas which are somehow immaterial yet absolutely real. This is a miracle. Where's God? Where do you get the idea that language is not a miracle? It is a complicated thing and we're at the basis of all communication. But verse 7, Beloved, let us love one another because love is from God and everyone who loves has been begotten from God. He just branded the love that he means. He doesn't mean the love of the world. He's talking about something technical and specific that is not. That is not what the latest rom-com is about. It's not what's going on, used to go on apparently on daytime television. I don't know what's on daytime television now, but used to it was all about love and soap, and now it's not. Everyone who loves has been begotten from God. Now see, the universalist will say this means that if you just have love, then God shows up. No. Loving wickedness is something we find in the scriptures. They love the darkness and not the light. You can love the wrong thing. He's talking about love that God expresses through us. This is the person that's been begotten of God. Everyone who loves in the sense that he's discussing. And he knows God. Language that John has used throughout this context, especially in chapter 3, to describe the believer who is walking with the Lord, the believer who is obedient, the believer who is performing what is expected, the believer who, as John would summarize, is abiding in Christ. He is begotten from God and he knows God. I think that love has come under attack. from various quarters. Love has come under attack. One thing that happens is we don't let John define it, we let the world define it, and then we try to read that back into John. Know what I mean? What is love? Not just the 90s techno song. What is love is an important question. What does it mean? Oh, everybody knows it. You don't have to define that. Better let the Bible sort it out, because if we let the world define it, we will not actually be talking about the same thing anymore. If you don't have self-sacrifice in the definition for what Jesus is talking about, then you don't, or at least a giving, a sense of self-giving, then you do not have the love the Bible is talking about. A sense of affection, or a compulsion to be with you, or those kinds of things, that's not what the Bible is discussing. One thing that we've done culturally is we've made it a sense of emotional connectedness. This is what I mean by falling in love and Elvis was right. It's great. I can't help falling in love with you. It's a wonderful thing to have emotional connectedness. It happens from close proximity, from shared experiences, from especially shared positive experiences. We start to like to walk in step with one another and that feels good and I am falling for so and so. Okay? We've defined that as love. And it's not quite. Love how it feels. Hand in hand with that, as everybody who's older than 15 knows, there becomes a dependency, well, older than 18, there becomes a dependency that goes with that emotional connectedness. A dependency. I found a drug and I have to get some more. I've got to get more of that thing that I've enjoyed, because it's awesome. It's the best. I love the feeling, so I've got to get more of it. And you get this dependency, and that's love. But it's not what John's talking about. It is romantic affection. I contend that these things are wonderful and a blessing from God, even the dependency part. It's a blessing from God. It's part of his design for man and woman, for husband and wife. Most husbands and wives through world history have not been probably the selections of the two people. It's been their families. And this thing happens. This thing develops. It does. Not to stars. Not happenstance. I just happen to run into just the perfect person. But we're made to connect. We're made to be relational. And part of the problem with this is If I start to really get intimate with someone in terms of knowing them very well, I start to see their flaws and their humanity, their fallenness. And I mean the sense of humanity that's undesirable and unattractive. The emotion side, the fog, kind of covers that up, doesn't it? Oh, I'm not going to look at that. Don't show me that stuff. I don't want to see the whole deck of cards, just show me the ones I want to look at. And eventually we look at the other things too, and I think real love involves the choice to stick with it once you start to have to look at those things. When the emotional side of things gets grounded in some reality, hopefully there's some principles, some integrity, some reality to the thing, and it's not just that emotional connectedness. But this is what the world does with love. They definitely do not think that love is a choice. Do they? If you go out and survey the man on the street, this would be a fun thing to do, go do on a college campus or something. Is love a choice? Ask him that. I wonder what kind of answers you'd get back. I don't think it would all be no, but I think there'd be a huge percentage of people who'd say no, it happens to you. Somebody chose it, maybe fate, but it's not my choice. But the Bible is constantly commanding love. Old Testament saints, without the Spirit, were commanded to love God with all their heart, with all their soul, with all their strength. New Testament saints, with the Spirit, are commanded to love one another as Christ loved the church. To love God and to love one another to a higher standard than even the Old Testament standard of your neighbor as yourself. Now, the Bible commands it. Therefore, it has to be connected to your choices. Father, I know you commanded this, but I can't do it. I don't feel it, I'm not stuck with it, so it must not be binding on me in this case. And then that's where we get into, I can't. That's really not our responsibility, is it? You know what I'll say about I can't. God says what you can do and can't do, and better stick with letting Him decide what you can, can't. He's told you what to do, so you better do what He said. A lot of times we think that love is dependent upon a preference or an alignment with someone. This is the side of that word agape, as it's used sometimes in the New Testament, that means approval. If you love and obey, if you obey my commands, then we will make our bow with you and my Father will love you. The Pharisees love to be given high honors. This word, this sense of the word, doesn't mean self-sacrifice or self-giving. That's not what he means by it. He means approval. I approve of what I see. I love that thought. I love that person who is expressing those valuable truths, whatever. approve of. And this is again where the darkness is something that the wicked approves of. The man committed to the world loves the things of the world. And so 1 John 2.15, don't love the world. He's talking about approval, preference. But when you read that into what John's talking about here in 1 John 4, approval, alignment, preference, he's not talking about that. He's talking about self-giving, acting like your father in heaven. That's just mean, that language right there, paganized Christian lack of discernment. What do I mean by that? You ready? If somebody wants it, and I love them, then I say they should have it. Otherwise, I'm not being loving to that person. You hear me? So-and-so says he wants it, He says even that it's best for him, and you don't understand, this is what I need, this is what it is to be who I am. I am self-defining and self-communicating what are my preferences, my needs, who I am. So, either you love that, what I decide I need, or you're unloving. Either you approve of what I say is best for me, or you are unloving. I've seen this a lot. In the postmodern world that is trying to assert its dominance today, in the emerging church, love is opposed to righteousness. And if you don't approve of unrighteousness and wickedness and sinfulness because someone so needs it and it's who they are, then you're unloving. See, the claim that so-and-so is intolerant. Have you ever heard intolerance? What do we mean by intolerance? That's a really sticky question. See, the person that can't discern truth from error or righteousness from wickedness can't really understand love. And this all goes back to what does God say, not what do I feel or what does Kinsey say about my sexuality or some other false teacher. What's the truth that God has told me? And that inability to think clearly, this is the person that wants to argue for wickedness as normative, as righteous, will always throw love at you and say you're unloving. It's like saying, Those who oppose central government paying people not to work in our civilization, that we reject that idea. The central government taking tax money and paying people not to work, paying women not to marry the fathers of their children, paying people to make wrong choices. That when we say we don't like that, that we're uncharitable, ungiving, unloving. That's paganized lack of discernment. And Christians were called to think, to actually think. We're called to be compassionate, to be loving, to be charitable, to be giving. That's what the discussion is. If you give an addict the drug that he's going to kill himself with, you haven't loved him. And the only way you know whether it's going to be the right thing or the wrong thing for him is you ask God. Don't ask the addict. Don't ask Brer Rabbit where he should go. He'll tell you the briar patch. Actually, he'll tell you not to throw him in the briar patch because he's smarter than you. Love is feelings of affection, isn't it? Some aspects of love are. I think philos is this. I think the affection you have for those you grew up with That sense of home, that's philos. That's not what we're talking about in 1 John 4. It's related, but it's not the same thing. We've talked about the approval of sin. How about this? Let's not talk about it in terms of sin so much as wisdom and folly. Remember working through Proverbs? You would expect the Bible, that's the book of God, you would expect his discussion for training of children in Proverbs to be about righteousness and unrighteousness. And that theme is there in Proverbs, but it's more about what is skillful at living and unskilled at living, wisdom and folly. That's the Proverbs dichotomy, the two options that Solomon presents in Proverbs. And so, when you have to define love as agreement, approval, acceptance of folly, of foolishness, of unskillfulness, Because that's what he wants, or that's what she prefers, and so you have to love. To love is to approve of foolishness. Remember, folly is the person that digs a trap for another person, and then he falls in the trap himself, in his own folly. Loving someone is not approving of their self-destruction. It's disapproving of self-destruction because we want what's best for them. I'd be remiss if I didn't present a definition, a definition from the Apostle John of love. In verses 9 and 10, we'll skip ahead, we'll back this up again, but look at verse 9. In this the love of God is revealed in us, that God sent the only begotten Son of God, it says that, into the world. so that we might live through Him. I'm sorry, His only begotten Son. It doesn't say the only begotten Son of God. It says that God sent His, the sequence of the sentence threw me off. I'm sorry about that. His only begotten Son. That God sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. Okay. He just told you how he means love. In this we know love, draw a box around it, that God sent his only begotten son into the world so that we might live through him. Two pieces of that, the sending and the self-giving, and the other is the benefit to those for whom he was sent. There is the thing that is needed for those who need it. And you couldn't get what you needed from God, eternal life, unless he gave of himself to do it. He gave his only begotten son. The self giving. And then verse 10 narrows it down even further. And this is love. Not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent his son as a propitiation on behalf of in place of our sins. This doesn't mean I have this compulsion that I can't help. This means that I do something that benefits you in what you need. That's the essence. That's boiling this thing down to its real essential oils. This is love. It is the self-giving of what God says the other person needs. And this is how we define it. This is what I mean by a definition of love. A definition of biblical love. We have to own this and we have to figure out a way to communicate this very straightforwardly, very clearly, where everybody can understand. Christian love is not approval of somebody's bad choices. Christian love is not sparing people's feelings for the sake of just sparing their feelings. Unless that's what God says the person needs. You see, I'm a big sparer of feelings. I hate to say no. I hate to say no. I have to practice saying no all the time. I get a lot of practice saying no. Love is not a bunch of actions that measure up to like I prove of something. Love is when I give what the other needs as God defines it. As John is describing, this is how we know it. I think we really should meditate on this a little bit because when you talk about the love of God, if you don't have self-giving as a central feature of what this means, I don't think we really understand. And then when you line up all that he's done in self-giving, OK, go back before the cross and look at the word that he gave to the prophets that were written down for all of us. He gave us of himself that we would know him. And then Jesus is the word who became flesh. This is God's self-disclosure. I think the word of God, the Bible, is God loving us by letting us know who he is. He's self-disclosing. He's self-giving. This is how he loves. And the greatest, obviously, is the cross, the greatest demonstration. This is how we know what it is. Have we emphasized this sufficiently in the church? I don't think we have seen God as self-giving the way we should. I mean, we know everywhere in the scripture we're told to love him. We're told to thank him, to give him thanks all the time. You know, all the Thanksgiving passages, why? Because he's self-giving and these are eternal gifts. Well, some thoughts to take with you as you meditate on 1 John 4, 7 through 21. I'm sure we'll spend some time, a great deal of time in here. We'll back it back up to verse 7 again for some work into the passage next Wednesday, if we're still here. I mean, on planet Earth. And I can get here. And so we'll close now. Heavenly Father, we thank you for teaching us what love is. Thank you for showing it through all that you've done and said. We don't know how unless you teach us. We don't know what unless you show it to us, Father. And we thank you that What we know we got from you and therefore we are at your feet. We're your children and Like a good father you have done everything to establish us To bring us about and the character you want us to have To bring about the character of Christ in us I should say we thank you for that work in us and we ask that you continue to work it we know that sometimes it hurts and we thank you for that and Because we know when we're having growing pains that we're growing. Father, give us a perspective through these times of growing pains. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen.