I am not Bo Cogbill. We had a last minute switch up. So if you came to hear Bo, now's your opportunity. I won't be offended. I'd be a little offended. What does your brotherly love say about you? And more importantly, if you look closely at your life, and many are looking at your life, Is there solely a gospel explanation for your love? That's the issue before us in our text this morning. I want to invite all of you to stand and read with me. We're gonna be in the, again, in the epistle of 1 John, chapter four. We're going to start reading in verse seven through verse 12. Hear the word of the Lord. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this, the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him, In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. I'm paraphrasing St. Augustine here. I just want to draw your attention to the fact that this is one of the nine places in 1 John where there is an actual command or exhortation, a command to love and also love being the test of eternal life. If you have eternal life, then you will love. But why does he command us to love if it's something that we will our born-again natures naturally do. Well, I want to remind you that the scripture is filled with this mysterious relationship of God's supernatural work in our lives, bringing us to life and making us to be loving people, and at the same time appointing the means by which he does that. He appointed to come through our obedience to commandments, our response to his word. And so St. Augustine said, Lord, command what you will, but give to us what you command. Make us loving people so that we can obey your commands. We're going to walk through this text. It opens up fairly simply. There are some striking statements in this text which we will pause and consider carefully, but to begin with, I want to just simply walk through the text and see how the apostle is reasoning here and what he's arguing for, and then finish with some applications of several lessons that we can draw from this. There's much in this passage. teach us. First of all, I want you to notice this exhortation that the Apostle begins with. He says in beginning in verse 7, Beloved, let us love one another. As I mentioned before, there are nine commandments or exhortations in 1 John. This is the eighth of the nine. The very last one is the very last verse of John. where he says, little children, keep yourselves from idols. I want you to notice, I'm gonna read these quickly, they're short little verses. I want you to see the pattern of what he's doing here, because they all have some similarities. Chapter two, he said, do not love the world. Chapter two again, verse 24, let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. And then in verse 28, and now little children abide in him. In chapter three, verse seven, little children, let no one deceive you. And then same chapter, verse 13, do not be surprised, brothers, that the world hates you. A few verses later in verse 18, little children, let us not love in word or talk, but in deed and in truth. Chapter four, verse one, beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits. Then our text, beloved, let us love one another. And then again, as I said, little children, keep yourselves from idols. I want you to notice that in most of these passages, and even the very first one, although it doesn't say little children, it actually is in the verse just before, he gives a term of affection. either little children or beloved in most of these passages. Now that's something that he's actually done frequently throughout his epistle, but every time he steps forward and says, you must do this thing, you must do this thing, he adds a word of affection. He adds a word of endearment. And I'm not going to make, draw many conclusions from the fact of those nine commandments. I don't think, I don't think there's some kind of other pattern in there, but I do note that when the apostle steps forward to lay a burden upon people and to give them a sense of obligation, he does so in terms of endearment. He always adds command with words of affection to affirm them, to comfort them. And don't we do the same thing? If I'm about to say something very important and pressing to my daughter, Very often I'll say, oh, sweetheart, listen carefully. I'm about to say something. I want you to not take the wrong way. I don't want you to see this as coming from a heart that wants to burden you, but I'm saying these things because I care for you, because I care for you. And I am certain that John said these things because he did have a confidence in their love. He's already said as much. But all the more, pressing forward, grabbing them, Little children, or here, beloved, let us love one another. This is important. Listen carefully to what I'm saying. I want you to also notice that the imperatives and exhortations, in a sense, form the substance of where the will of the hearers needs to respond. You can infer obligations from other parts of the letters. When John says something in an indicative form, says this is the way things are for believers, all the believers in the room will hear that and say, and infer obligations, and infer, and rightly. But when he says it in the form of a command or exhortation, we recognize that there's something that we need to do here to respond. And if there is one way in which Christians ought to respond to 1 John, it is this, beloved, let us love one another. Let us love one another. So the exhortation here is to love one another. Now I find it very interesting, don't you, that just before, in chapter three, John has already said, let us love in deed and in truth. And now he says, let us love one another. And we would have expected the more general exhortation to have come before. And here, but that was a more specific exhortation. It was an exhortation to love in a very specific way, in deed and in truth. As if to say, I see love amongst yourself. Let's make sure that it is of a certain kind and a certain quality. And then he steps back and says the more general statement, let us love one another. Now that might seem difficult to understand why he's doing that, but in fact, what he's getting at here are the reasons he attaches to love. He is going to give four reasons why we ought to love one another, which are actually basically saying the same reason. And so really what he's saying here is, beloved, let us love one another for this reason, for this reason. In other words, when you love one another, this is what ought to be entering into your mind. It ought to be coming from this place. Our love has an origin. Our love has a shape. It has a source. It has a look to it, a feel to it, a divine look and feel to it. And so we turn now to see, well, what are these reasons? What is this shape and this look that is supposed to mark our love? Where does this come from? And as I said here, he gives four reasons, but they're actually one reason. He says, beloved, let us love one another for love is from God. Whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love. God is love. You can see here that they all have one thing in common. All of these four reasons. We could tease them out. We should love God because love is from God. We should love one another because whoever loves has been born of God. We should love one another because whoever loves knows God. And then in the negative, we should love one another because whoever does not love does not know God. But really, what is he getting at here? What do they all have in common? Of course, it's God. It's God. Do we have God? Are we right with God? I can be right about 99 other things, but if I'm not right with God, I am not right. God is the square by which all other right things, including our love, are measured. If I have God, if I'm right with God, I have hope in a future I can endure difficulty, I can suffer loss, can labor with purpose, live with dignity. If I have God, if I am right with God, if I'm a friend of God and know God, I have all things. That is the place from which our love will spring. Friends, when we love one another, we are doing something distinctly God-like. When we love one another, We are showing a family resemblance with God. We are showing an intimate acquaintance with God. We are reflecting his handiwork, his life. I want to ask a question. Are we of God in this place? You can know by our love where you ought to look according to the text. You want to see the work of God? You want to see his family resemblance in the air? Look at how we treat one another. And we'll see whether we are God-like or not. When you come into our circle, is there something distinctly God-like? And that is a very powerful reality. I want people to look at my life and say, he knows God, clearly. Look at how he treats other people. Look at how he treats other people. And what I know of God, that is certainly what God is like. I see a resemblance. I see that they have had intimate dealings. They are friends. They know one another. Now, I wanna step away from the text for a moment and imagine a world that has other ordering principles. Other sources, other reasons why you might show kindness or do something upright or something in your mind that you believe is upright. For instance, you can square your behavior and actions with psychological norms. And by this, I simply mean if you look out across the sea of humanity and you say, what does a normal, healthy, functioning adult look like in our world? And if I measure somehow up to that, if I go to the psychologist, if I go to the therapist, and they say, you're basically a healthy, functioning adult, and I feel pretty good about myself, I've kind of squared myself with that standard. And you might not think, well, that's not, that doesn't sound very powerful, but in our day, it's very powerful. It moves legislation. It persuades government policy and educational policy and therapeutic policy. This norm has governed and guided ethical thinking in our world for almost a century. If you can show that someone is a normal, high-functioning person, basically that they're living without much excess stress or they have functioning relationships, they get their work done and are not engaged in what are deemed antisocial, harmful behaviors, then they're good. They're good. They're in a good place. Practicing homosexuals meet these psychological norms these days, which is one of the reasons why we see a great shift in our cultures, because we have adopted, as a society, that as our standard. If they can function normally in society with normal human relationships, stability over time, being at peace with themselves on some measure, and having a limited amount of stress, or at least the normal amount of stress that marks all these other people, and we put our stamp of approval on it. There are many other standards we could go on, but there's the majority, the standard of the majority, the mob. This is the impulse to repeatedly survey, survey. What do most people think? What do most people say? 80% of the US population approve of this ideology. 70% of the people approve of this ideology. 75% approve of gay marriage. 80% approve of Black Lives Matter. Why do you hold that position? Only 25% of people hold that. And so you see this is another way, a related way, but of course it's more informal based on just surveys and journalistic polls. you can square yourself against the majority, then somehow that means you're doing all right, you're okay. We could go on traditions, science. Listen, no, forget it. Forget about it. Give me God. Give me God. As the Apostle Paul says, let God be true and every man a liar. If I am right with God, if I reflect God, I don't care if every other human being on this planet looks different from myself, behaves differently from myself. That's what I want. That's what I'll take. Square myself with God. And that is also true of our love. We ought to look nowhere else for the standards of our ethical behavior and our love for one another than God himself. Now he goes on from here. verses 9 through 11, and gives further explanation of what he means when he says God is the source of love, or even more specifically and more pointedly, God is love. The apostle expands on this idea, supposing perhaps that some will object, but in my thinking, I don't remember thinking that thought, that God is love, before I started to love people, or I think I loved God first before I sensed his love for me. No, he is clear. He is clear here. The father loved first. The father loved first. The father loved fully. He loved first in that he initiated love toward his enemies. He made a truce with us in his son. with us who were his sworn mortal enemies. We did not reach out to him. The peace party did not come from the direction of our camp. It came from his camp. And some might say, well, wait, wait a second. Okay, so what you're talking about here is, as the apostle said, is Jesus was sent into the world as an expression of divine love. But didn't people love one another Before that, wasn't there love on earth before that? Well, sure. The facts of God's love speaks for themselves. He sent his beloved son at great cost. He sent his beloved son to save enemies, but there was love before that. There were people that did things at cost before that. There were people who showed kindness and mercy to enemies. but nothing matches this love. You see, whatever it was that was there before, whatever kind of affection or whatever kind of mercy and kindness towards one's enemies, it pales in comparison to the love that was shown to humanity in the sending of Jesus. You see, this is true love. It is the standard of love. It is love that greater love cannot even be fathomed or imagined. Sent his beloved son to pay completely for their sins. It's not mere nice thoughts. We talked about this months ago in the gospel of John when we were looking at the new commandment and the word Agape and I want to remind you I looked it up again in the best Greek lexicon. This is this is the definition of The word that we translate love. It's agape And in Greek it means something like this This is this is what it means from from the again the best Greek lexicon that we have today the quality of warm regard and interest for another quality of warm regard and interest for another And I want you to just think about that for me, with me for a second. When this lexicographer sat down and looked through all of the Greek literature and found every use of this word, agape, agape, agape, thousands and thousands and thousands, and began to draw conclusions from it, began to form a definition from it, what he didn't right as the definition was sacrificial, merciful, overwhelming, kindness, charitable, love. Instead he said, he actually used the word warm feelings, warm regards. Because that's what the word means in its original usage. The word agape means warm regards. So you might pick up a piece of of ancient Greek literature, Plato, or maybe just a papyrus, you know, and like a letter from someone to another, and they just use the word agape, and really what they mean by that would say is not, I will give my life for you, I will lay down everything for you, but regards, warm regards, thinking of you, care about you. But the word was transformed after the cross, so that today, even people who don't know a lick about Greek, when they hear the word agape, the things that come to their mind are things like unconditional, sacrificial, lay down my life for others, do everything I can to help, pour myself out. We did not know love, truly. until Jesus was sent into the world. We did not know it. We did not know it. The apostle goes on. In verse 11, he gives what I call an exhortation redux. He returns to his exhortation. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. So he's returning now, having looked at the source of where the love comes from. where our love comes from, and he returns to the exhortation, and he's going to attach another reason to it. And so he goes on. No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God abides in us. His love is perfected in us. And this is a fascinating statement about invisibility. Isn't it interesting what he's saying here? And what he's saying is if you have this kind of love within you, it is perfected, the love of God is perfected in you because God is invisible. What does he mean by that? Well, this is something he's going to develop more in chapter five, but the invisibility of God to introduce that here, that seems like a strange move. Why would he do that? You can't see God. This is what he means. If we have seen God, if no one, I'm sorry, if we have not seen God, and no one has seen God, and you love God, and are touched by his love, and are demonstrated, I'm sorry, and that his love is demonstrated in you by your love for God, his giving of his son to you, there is a love relationship there. But you can't see God. What can you see? What is around you? What you can see is a seven-year-old who lives in your house. And the seven-year-old is noisy. And he's demanding. And he gets sick. And he gets hungry. And he asks questions, so many questions. And they just keep coming. So many questions. Now, we can't see God, but we see this. This is the matrix in which even that divine love, okay, even that love which is real, this is where it gets worked out. It gets worked out when you say calmly, okay, let's go over this again. All right. You again, wake up in the middle of the night and take care of someone who is sick, and you show love to the person who is directly in front of you, whom you can see, who's not as nice as God, who's a harder person to love. God we can't see, but this is what we can see. And I call this the matrix in which divine love gets worked out. It would be something, wouldn't it? What if we all lived in silos? We all showed up here and we all expressed our love to God. and there would be no reason to doubt that anybody loves God, but we're all in silos, and we don't interact with each other, or say, hypothetically, that we're all worshiping at home, and we're looking at screens, and we're singing, and praising, and loving God, but we're all by ourselves, and there's no test of that love. It's just this free expression of love and adoration of God, and receiving from Him, and worshiping Him, but that's not the way God made the world. And then he puts visible people all around you by which that love becomes expressed. You have opportunity to show that love in action. It's the seven-year-old from your life. I'm sorry for picking on that. If it's not true there, then there's no reason to suppose it's true at all is the implication. And that's the reason why it's with the visible people with the visible people. Listen, that love is perfected. Love is perfected. It begins with this. Wait, he loves me? God loves me? God sent his son to pay the price for my sins? To forgive me completely? What's the catch? What do I have to do? Just receive it? Just trust him? He's free? That is amazing, to be loved by that and to feel that love growing up, but then it is, how is it perfected? In this way, when you turn, you see someone that you need to show mercy to. You go back to this and you realize, okay, God showed mercy to me. I didn't deserve it. I know what to do here. I know what the right thing to do here is. It's perfected on the horizontal level. It's how we know that we love, that we are born again. I have several applications of this. Let me count them, I didn't number them, I lettered them, which is not helpful. The three applications, that should've, I should've known that, okay. These are important, okay, these are not, I really consider this to be right at the heart of what we're saying today. These are very important ways in which I want to press this home into your life. The first one is simply this, it is worship. The importance of worship, adoration, admiration, being enthralled with God, being impressed by Him is so important. And this is the source from which our love springs. This is the God-appointed means by which we come to manifest love in our lives. You must be worshipers. You must be committed worshipers. You must be worshipers who do not take your gaze off of God and Christ. Let us look carefully and repeatedly and admiringly upon the work of redemption. because it begets love. The more you look upon the cross and admire it, admire the work, admire the heart of Jesus for his people, the more you will love. This is the reason why Jesus says about his love, as he was going to the cross, he says, abide in my love. Stay there. Abide in my love. Look upon it always. Never take your gaze off of it. One of the most important reasons why we keep the feast every single week is to keep our gaze on the work of Jesus Christ. The work of God's love on our behalf. You see the same dynamic in the letter to the second Corinthians, where the apostle Paul says this, now this is kind of a complicated sentence, but I want you to picture, with unveiled face, he's been talking about veils covering our face, Moses, there are people who worship with a veil, he says, with unveiled face, okay, we stand face to face with God, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image. We're being transformed into the same image from one degree to another, meaning step by step. The more we behold God in his glory, the more we come to resemble him. If you look ever admiringly on LeBron James, you probably will not dunk like he does, but you will begin to say the types of things that he says and value the types of things that he values. you look on some Instagram celebrity, you're going to begin to resemble them, maybe not in exactly how they look, but certainly in their values, what they care about, what they admire. Listen, whatever you worship, whatever you apply worth to, what you will inevitably direct your energies and resources into resembling, what should we look on more than any other thing? We should look to God. We should look on the Lord Jesus, the work of redemption. If we do that, we can be confident that we will be loving people. That's our first point of application. Worship the Lord for his love. Look upon him always. The second word of application is a warning. I'm speaking specifically to reformed people here. one reformed person to another, as a person who has lived most of my life as a caged Calvinist. Is that the right term? You know, just the type of person that looks around for battle after battle, thing to defend, thing, point to make. The reformed are traditionally those who know a lot about God, and that is good. And what I'm going to say is not going to minimize our precious reformed heritage, it's one marker that you've landed in a good place if you're here. When people are educated in theology and study and are careful about their thoughts and their teaching and what they understand the word of God to say, we want to be a people who are careful. It would be slanderous to say that reformed people, for another thing, are just less loving outright. I mean, that is a common misconception. It's a common misconception in our world that speaking with precision and speaking hard truths to people and being demanding is necessarily unloving. And I do believe that many reformed people are slandered for this, that if you speak truth to people, then it's seen as unloving. But there is, in our circles, Very frequently, spirit of precision and theology and interest in the deep things of God that is, unfortunately, also uncharitable. We've had that conversation, I have too. Conversation with a guy that is so knowledgeable. He's just not a very nice person. I've been that person. talking to the less informed brother or sister and saying something very unkind and uncharitable, but trying to push them into some point of theology. I imagine that most of those types of conversations are utterly useless to them. Christianity dressed up in much precision and little charity is a very hideous thing, unfortunately. One would expect someone deeply knowledgeable of the truth to have a heart that matches. I listened to a lecture a few days ago of the late and great Greg Bonson, brilliant, reformed theologian, teacher. It was titled The History of Reconstruction because I need to know a lot more about this too. Many of the conversations I'm having, I'm trying to learn as much about it as I can and be a better representative of the church. Much of the lecture was fascinating retelling of the history of this movement, truly the work of God to open the eyes of people to better understand some of the harder things of scripture. The end of the lecture was also optimistic. So the beginning was this kind of rehearsing the great works of God that he's done in the last 100 years, and then the end was optimistic because as a post-millennialist, he was optimistic. And he believes that the work of God will continue. God will bring reconstruction to his church, reform, development, and growth. He will do the work. But in the middle of the lecture was a lament. A lament. Because, and this was probably 25 years ago when he gave this talk, but the movement at that time had come to know a great deal of divisiveness and separation and cancellation before that was even a thing. Listening to him tell the story, all I could think about was how Twitter and Facebook would have only made matters much, much worse. He listed during that section of his talk about 20 different positions within the Reform Reconstructionist camp where people had drawn a line and said, You're either with me or you're not. And this is how it has to be. And people were separated, and organizations were separated, and families were separated. Over these lines that were drawn in the sand, which outsiders, people, evangelicals and other reformed people would look at and be like, I don't see why you're drawing lines of fellowship there. What is that about? I think it's somehow ingrained in our DNA. John Frame, in another work, a similar work, but from a different perspective, this is an essay, it's called Machen's Warrior Children. He does much the same thing, but the lists are completely different. different positions, 20 different issues which reformed people have split over, formed denominations, separated fellowship, disciplined one another, or just had hard feelings over. 20 issues that reformed people who have so many things in common have decided you cannot share my pulpit, I cannot trust you when you say that. There are 20 different things, and those are only the two essays I looked at in the last couple of days. There are probably many, many more things. There's a temptation that when we begin to learn and begin to learn about precision and understanding distinctions in the scripture, we begin to possibly easily apply those things in uncharitable manners. I'm certainly not going to suggest to you that doctrine doesn't matter. or that I have the proper economic, theonomic, covenantal, governmental understanding that will usher in the fullness of the kingdom. But listen, I'm sure of one thing, absolutely sure. Reconstruction will never advance beyond Christian love. Reconstruction growth of the kingdom of God will never advance beyond Christian love. If we are to accomplish much, whether it be in politics, economics, education, or whatever, we must love much. We must love much. Love is not all that there is to that, certainly, but it is essential to that work. It is essential to that work. So it's our prayer for our Reformed brothers and sisters who God has given that spirit of discernment, slicing, precision, carefulness with words, that moreover, more than that, they would be marked by love, that we would be marked by love, pointing out of them, self-included. A third point of application. is our witness, our witness. There is in this passage a truth and a reality that is so beautiful. It's simply implied, it's simply implied in this passage that should give you such great confidence speaking the truth of God in the world. Love is not invented. Love is not a created thing. It's fascinating, isn't it? God is love. This is not something that God became. It's something that he is. Before there was a world, God was love. God was love. Before there was any other created thing, God was love. Because we know the Father loved the Son. who loved the Father. And however we formulate it, the Spirit was love between them. There's a third person, it was a trinity of love. Three persons, one God in perfect fellowship and love for all time. And so when we look into our hearts and we think about what we want more than anything else, when the idols and things, when we're not looking at those things, when we think in the purity of our hearts, our desires, to be loved, to be known, to be in fellowship, to be in communion, to be in intimacy with others, it's a deep and permanent stamp imprint desire in our natures. We know that that is because it comes directly from the creator who made us. It is who he is. It is what he is like. And yet when God went to express his love towards his creature, says he sacrificed his son, he sent his son to suffer. This is, in my thinking, and this is a crass illustration, it's like taking one of the pillars of creation. You see, not gravity. Electromagnetic dynamics are nothing compared to love. Love was there before matter and energy. This is like taking a pillar of creation and building a small bridge upon which creatures can cross over. I told you it was not a good illustration. But that's the magnitude of this movement. To take that relationship and to cause suffering in the midst of it for the sake of others is remarkable and beautiful and wonderful. The religions of the world by sheer number know very little of this. One third of the world is Muslim. One third are the others. non-Abrahamic religions or the growing movement, especially here in the Northwest, the nons, they know nothing of a God of eternal love. Now, they will say that they know something of a God of love, but by necessity, if God existed by himself as a single, unitary being for all time, he did not know love. It's something that he created when he created others. But that word others is something that has always been there has always been another. There has always been another. This is one of the reasons why we can be confident that heaven, whatever marks heaven, whatever is true of heaven, we know we can have perfect confidence that it will be a world of perfect love forever. and ever and ever because that is who God is in his very being. His very being. Love is eternal. And so dear brothers and sisters, this is how I want to conclude because you may feel like I've been beating up on you a little bit. But I want to commend you. I want to conclude with just a word of commendation. My wife and I, I know that she will heartily amen this. We have found our three plus years here to be years of love, years of fellowship, years of sacrifice directed towards us. Much love we have seen shown among the members of this church. And there is and there always will be room for growth. But I see reasons to encourage to conclude that there is much eternal life in this place. There is much of God here. And I encourage you to excel still more. Because for one thing, we will certainly be tested. Our love will be tested in the days ahead. Soli Deo Gloria, may God be glorified in the preaching of his good news.