We're going to look at 1 John chapter 4, and I'm going to begin with verse 7. 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 manifest to us, 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 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 beheld 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 in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. And we have beheld and bear witness 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. And 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, that we may have confidence in the day of judgment. because 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 love his brother also. May God bless his word to us. Let's ask our Lord's blessing again as we come to his word. this morning. Father, we thank you. Jesus, we thank you. Holy Spirit, we thank you that you have worked so together to make us alive in you, that you have given us such life, such joy, such peace because of the forgiveness that we have through the sacrifice of Christ. We thank you that we can come now and openly, publicly open your Word and look at it, and receive Your blessing from it. That Your Spirit is in us, declaring these things to us. Your Spirit is in us, showing us the face of Jesus. And in the face of Jesus, we see You. Father, we give You praise for the life that we have, the life that is from this Book, this Word, this living, active Word, that by it You feed us, You nourish us, You make us strong, You equip us. You mature us. You make us fit for worship in this world. Father, bless us now. Bless the words of my mouth and the meditations of our heart. May they be pleasing and a pleasing aroma to you this morning. We ask this in Christ's name. Amen. Amen. Well, this morning I want to wrap up our brief series on the Trinity by picking up on something I said last week. In in the message on the spirit as Christians. It is extremely important that we know believe and are able to confess The trying nature of our God we are not strict monotheists We often get clumped with the great monotheistic religions of of Islam and and Judaism But we if we are being accurate we are not strict monotheists We believe in one God, yes, one being, yes, one essence, one substance, but three equal persons, Father, Son, and Spirit. We are not modalists, where there is one divine person who wears different clothes at different times for different reasons. Fatherhood and Sonship are not masks that the one God takes on and puts off, depending on the situation. But at the same time, we are not polytheists, like the ancient pagans, with three different gods, living like eternal roommates. Rather, he is Triune, and we are Trinitarians. Again, this is far beyond our ability to fully understand. We have brains the size of a cauliflower. And so, with that size of an intellect, we can only go so far before we have to submit to scripture, to submit to the mystery of it. But even if we don't fully understand how that works, it does make sense. It can make sense. It's not like God is asking us to believe 2 and 2 make 5 somehow. So as we submit to Scripture and see throughout how He has revealed Himself, we see that He has revealed Himself as Triune, as Father, Son, and Spirit. And if He has revealed something to us, it is because it is sufficient to a degree for us, and it is to a degree graspable for us. But more than simply an interesting point of theology, understanding the Trinity to the degree that we can is, like I was saying last week, foundational to everything that we believe. You take away the nature of our triune God, you take away the Trinity, and you take everything else away too. Everything else goes with it. And the reason why is found in these three little words at the end of verse 8 in our Theos agapin estin. God is love. And so before we get into the rest of our passage, I want to spend some significant time right here just talking about these three words. More than simply a quaint Christianese tagline, something you see printed on a calendar in front of a rainbow or a basket of kittens, the fact that God is love is precisely what sets him apart from every other deity every other idol, every other false religious principle. God is love, is foundational to creation, to our justification, our sanctification, and every other aspect of our redemption and our life in Christ. Philosophers for millennia have asked, why are we here? What are we doing here? What is it that we are here for and why do we even exist? The first answer, the answer that needs to spring up in our minds first, is these three little words. We exist because God is love. Now, for this to make any sense, we need to remember that love in scripture is not primarily a feeling, like affection or friendship, but it is an action. To love someone scripturally is not simply to feel warm fuzzies about that person. It is not even mere appreciation or kind, loving thoughts about someone. but rather proactive, self-sacrificing service. That is love. Love is dying to self for the sake of another. It is considering another's needs as more important than your own. It is considering that other person as more significant than yourself. It is patient, kind, humble. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love lays down its life for a friend. Scriptural love is concerned with self last, after it has concerned itself with everyone else first. It is concerned with our own desires last, our own needs last, our own reputation last. Scriptural love does not consider the birthright of heavenly glory and majesty as something that weighs heavier in the scales than the human beings stuck in their sinful condition. Love is outward service, outward sacrifice, outward ministry. It is crawling up on a cross and dying for you. That is love. And so, for love to be love, there must be more than one party involved, right? If love is an outward action, if love starts from point A, for it to be love as we are defining it, there must be a point B. There must be an object. It is impossible to die to self for the sake of self, for the sake of our own needs, to say no to self's needs in order to meet self's needs first. There must be a second party. There must be someone to receive the love that we are giving away. And if this is what it is to love, what do we mean by saying that God is love? John is telling us that at the core of who God is, at the foundation of what it in fact means to be God, is this word, love. What does that mean? We get a glimpse when we consider Jesus and the cross, but that is a love directed at us still. What does it mean for God in himself, before the creation of the world, before anyone was here on this planet? What does it mean for he in himself to be love, before there was anyone to die for? Consider pure monotheism first, for a second. Can Allah, in himself, be love? Think about it. Can the one being, one person, truly monotheistic, loner god of Islam, be in himself, in his own nature, love? How can he? In order to love, Allah, as a single person, needs an object outside of himself, and so becomes dependent on creation to have something to love. which means he cannot be love in himself. In himself, he can only be power and dominance, which, incidentally, is why Islam is not a loving religion. It is a religion of power and brute force because it bears the image of its god. A loner god can only be authoritarian and tyrannical. A god like Allah cannot function in any other way. And while we're on the subject, A loner God like Allah, who cannot love, who cannot give of himself to anyone or anything, would never create the world in the first place. Why would he? Why would a non-loving, self-focused, self-centered God like Allah ever even think of creating anything outside of himself, let alone the world of beauty and abundance and delight that we see all around us? Food for thought. But our God, the true God, the revealed God of the Bible, the God who made the heavens and the earth. In Himself, He is love. In His very nature, He is love. Why? How? Because He is triune. Before the worlds were made, the Father loved the Son, served the Son, glorified the Son, delighted in the Son. Before the worlds were made, the Son loved the Father, served the Father, glorified the Father, delighted in the Father. There is room inside the Trinity to move outward. to give of oneself, to glorify another, to delight in another. There is room to truly love another person in the Godhead. God was love before the worlds were made because God was loving before the worlds were made. He loved before the worlds were made. He did not simply love self. He was not one person with his love turned inward. That's not true love. Three individual persons, one in substance, one in their love for one another. Within the Trinity, there is no selfishness, no self-centeredness, no demanding of personal rights, no entitlement, nothing like that. Only true, proactive, outward-flowing love, an outward giving of self, a true delight in pursuing and glorifying the other. And so, to say that God is love is to say, fundamentally, in Himself, He is a God who gives. He is a God who shares. Perhaps we are tempted sometimes to think of a God as a God who takes. Takes our pleasures, takes our desires, takes our lives. But that is Allah. That is the loner God of sheer power and dominance. That is not the triune God of Scripture. Our God gives. Our God shares. Our God includes. From eternity past, He is a Father giving love to the Son. A Son giving love to the Father. And the pathway of that love, the means by which that love is shared, is the Spirit Himself. The person of the Father loves the person of the Son through the person of the Spirit. In other words, God's love is not ingrown or self-focused. It is outpouring. It delights to include, not exclude. This is why we are here. This is why creation exists at all. God didn't make us because he was lonely, or required an object to love, or wanted something to do. He was not some bored cosmic two-year-old simply looking for a toy to play with. By nature, he is a God who gives, who shares, who wants to bring others into his joy. He created the heavens and the earth as a platform to share his love with us, to give us from his abundance all the life that he has, to include us in his own divine joy. God does not need us to exist, to be love, to be giving, sharing. Every idol, every other false god requires us for its existence, for without us there is no one to make it complete. Every other idol or false god is entirely self-centered, and so would never give life to anything outside of itself to begin with. You cannot have creation with such idols or false gods. For without a true and deep desire to selflessly share, to give, to look outward, creation is nothing more than just a hassle or a nuisance. But since the Triune God is complete in himself, he creates us not out of a need or out of loneliness or to have subjects to rule, but rather in order to share himself with us. to bring us into the delight and joy and love that had already existed between the Father, Son and Spirit from eternity past. We are entirely and gloriously unnecessary. We are superfluous. We are not the main show. This world is not about us. And it is truly a good thing that we are unnecessary. If your feathers are ruffled a little bit by that, It is a truly good thing that we are unnecessary, for only by being completely unnecessary can we trust that God is both all-powerful and all-good. If we were necessary, if God was dependent upon us for His existence, He would not be all-powerful. And if He simply made us in order to dominate over us, He would not be all-good. But we are unnecessary, and so we can share in the glory that He shares with us. But if we are that unnecessary, what is the point? Why? What's the reason? Colossians 1, that we are here. Colossians 1, 16. All things were created through Jesus and for Jesus. This world was created in the first instance as a platform for the Father to glorify the Son. This world is for Jesus, Paul says. Creation was given to us, but not simply so that we can go do whatever we want, whatever floats into our head to go participate in. It was given to us with a clear purpose, a very singular intention, so that we might participate in the divine joy and love of our Triune God through the fellowship of the Spirit with the Son before the Father. Every tree, every flower, every bird, every cloud, star, every other creature in the ocean and on the land is here so that we might know Jesus, love Jesus, glorify Jesus, and delight in who Jesus is. For in Jesus, through the Spirit, we see the face and the love and the joy of the Father. This world is not about career advancement. It's not about hobbies. It's not about movies. It's not about trips to exotic destinations. It is not even in the first instance about our kids or grandkids. All those things are fine and good, but as soon as we think of them as our primary reason for existence, they become an idol. I am here. Every person born into this world is here fundamentally for one reason and one reason only. to know and love Jesus. It doesn't matter if you believe in Him, you're here to know and love Jesus. It doesn't matter if you like Him, you're here to know and love Jesus. So that in Jesus, through the Spirit, I, in my finite smallness, might rejoice in the love and joy and delight of the Father. That is why I am here. That is why I was created. That is why He put my first father, Adam, in the garden, to know Him. to have fellowship with Him, to walk with Him in the cool of the day. Careers and hobbies and movies and trips are totally fine. And, of course, our kids and our grandkids are uber-important. They are just not the center of our world. Jesus is. All things were created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything He might be preeminent. The created world is the triune expression of love, of gift, of delight, of joy, and of sheer abundance, because it reflects the nature of its creator, who has father, son, and spirit, three persons, one God. He is himself love, gift, delight, and joy in abundance. That is our God. That is who he is. We were formed from the clay simply to receive and to rejoice, to honor God as God and to give Him thanks. Were it not for the fall, creation would have been a perpetual Christmas morning with no end of gifts and no end of gratitude in return for them. But we did fall, didn't we? Adam rejected the gift. Adam wanted to strike out on his own, apart from the fellowship of the Spirit, apart from the love of the Son, apart from the delight and joy of the Father. Adam and we in him said, my way is better, God. I don't need to submit to the Father. All he is is rules, rules, rules. All he does is take, take, take. I want freedom. I want freedom to do what I want to do, which is exactly what he pursued when he ate the fruit. And because he was made with a particular intention, breaking free of the Father's intentions meant death and despair. In Adam, we looked at the world and told God that we wanted to do things our own way. We wanted to fit the world to our own desires, to conform it to our own image, to our own inclinations, to our own desires and tastes. We received the gift of creation and immediately wanted to refashion it in our own image, to make it do what we want, to submit it to our will for our own glory, for our own personal delight. That's like taking a hammer and trying to use it as a screwdriver. It's like jumping off a skyscraper, expecting your arms to act like wings. It doesn't work. It's not what we were made for. So, too, Adam's attempt at self-government didn't work, because that's not what he was made for, and it wasn't what creation was made for, either. All sin is brokenness because it is attempting to use creation, our minds, our wills, our bodies included in that. It is attempting to use what God has made, apart from what God intended it for. This world, including every man, woman, and child born into this world, was created for the sake of knowing and loving Jesus. Not because he needed a fan club, but because his beauty was too delightful to keep to himself. He wanted to share it with us. Because through it, and through the fellowship of the Spirit, we would know the joy and the love of the Father. But we, blind in our sin, blind in our selfishness, wanted to do things our way. And doing things our own way, for our own glory, inevitably leads to brokenness, because we are taking the hammer and trying to use it as a screwdriver. We're jumping off the skyscraper, flapping our arms like mad. And that is the basic problem of our current existence. That is the reason for the brokenness that we see all around us and within our own hearts and minds. Every sin is simply our attempt to use what God made for something that he did not intend it to be used for. But did God simply give up? Did he kick back and go, well, they blew that one big time. I guess I'll just have to send everyone to hell now. No. His purpose in creation was not thwarted at all. His intention for us is the same, to know and to love Jesus, so that in Jesus, through the fellowship of the Spirit, I might, in my small finiteness, rejoice in the love and joy and delight of the Father. That purpose remains. That intention remains, even now. But how can this now be accomplished with all the brokenness that has gone in the way? OK, now to our text, 1 John 4, 7, and 8. 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. The Triune God is love, always has been, always will be. It's not that the God of the Old Testament was mean and angry and the God of the New Testament is bright and cheery and the Spirit is just some amorphous thing we don't really understand. God is love. Father love, Spirit love, Son love for us. Always has been, always will be. The Fall did not change God's fundamental nature of love at all. It drastically changed us The Fall means that we cannot and will not love because we refuse to love God. But God as love remains the same. And so, in the Fall, we simply gave God the opportunity to manifest that love to us in an even more dramatic way. Verse 9. 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. This created world is itself the tangible, visible love of God. In creation we see His beauty, His playfulness, His joy, His abundance, His life, His delight, His creativity, His power, and His love. But in Jesus, who lovingly and willingly submitted Himself to the will of the Father so that we might live in Him, in Jesus we see that love magnified to an infinite degree. Verse 10, in this is love, not that we have loved God, but that He, the Father, loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. So how does the Father sending the Son fix our brokenness? How does Jesus' coming actually restore the fellowship that was lost in the garden? Again, only a triune God could accomplish this. Only a triune God could enact such salvation, and it is why confessing a triune God is so important. When we sin before anything else, it is a sin against God. God made creation to function in a certain way, and when we cut across the grain, we are doing something that was not intended by God. which is why it leads to brokenness. Had we simply obeyed and trusted that God knew what He was doing and said no to the fruit, we would still be in fellowship with Him. But we broke that fellowship in sinning against our Creator. He is the judge and we stand guilty before Him. Now, in order for our guilt to be taken away, one of two things needs to happen. The first option is that we die in our sin and so pay the wages of that sin. That is what we call perfect justice. I broke the window, I pay for a new one. I committed the sin, I receive my wage. Death and hell and condemnation are not mean-spirited. They are the outworking of perfect justice. And we need to confess, by the way, that perfect justice is both glorious and beautiful. Because otherwise, if God winked at sin in an ultimate sense, If God let sin slide on the last day, if God simply sweeps sin under the rug without dealing with it, he would be a wicked tyrant and no God at all, and there would be no gospel. That is not good news. But perfect justice is beautiful, and that is what he does in judgment. And it is one option for taking away our guilt. The downside is that because our guilt is infinite, having sinned against an infinite God, we would never in all eternity be able to finish paying for it. And so we would never again regain the fellowship that we lost. If I broke a window that cost $100, it wouldn't take very long to pay off that debt. But in sinning against an infinite God, we broke a window of infinite value. And so our debt is of infinite size. And our payment of that debt is of infinite duration. Not that we would even want to regain that fellowship, because sin in its essence means hatred of the God that we sin against. But the second option for our guilt to be taken away is what we call grace. Grace happens when someone else outside stands in our place before the judge and takes the punishment that we deserve as a substitute. and pays the debt that we owe. I broke the window, the substitute pays for the window. But because of the infinite nature of the debt, it's not as easy as the window, it's not as easy as it seems. It's not as simple as you giving me $100 that I don't have to cover the cost of the window that I broke. For grace to be effective, several conditions have to be met. First, the substitute paying my debt has to be a human being. That is because it is a debt incurred by a human being. A human transgression has to be paid for with a human death. The death of bulls and goats does not get to the root of the matter. It was not a bull or a goat that sinned against God in the garden. And so the substitute has to be human. Second condition. The substitute cannot himself be a sinner. The substitute has to be perfect, spotless, blameless, righteous, never a lustful or angry thought. Never a bitter attitude or deceptive word. Fully perfect. Fully righteous. Fully good. Perfectly holy in every way. Otherwise, this person would need to pay for his own sins first, and because of the nature of perfect justice, would never be able to pay for my own. Third condition. Because God wants more than just me in heaven, because he wants the world in heaven, because he wants creation itself restored, because he wants all tribes, all nations, all peoples, and all languages to know him and rejoice in his goodness, the substitute must not only be a perfect human being, he must also be infinite. He must have human shoulders, but shoulders broad enough to carry the sins of the world. Therefore, this perfect human substitute also has to be the infinite God. Only a man can pay for man's sins. but only God can pay for the sins of the world. Fourth condition. It is not justice to simply kill some innocent bystander for my crime. It is not enough to simply pick someone at random to be our substitute, even if he is the perfect God-man. He must also be an official representative Just as Adam represented me in the garden, so too this substitute must stand in my place as a representative, which means a willing identification both with me and with the whole world. He must be willing to be considered as one of us and stand as our representative with our sins on his shoulders. Last condition. This perfect, representing God-man substitute cannot himself be the judge. The substitute needs to stand before the judge to present the payment, to present the blood spilled in propitiation for our sins. Propitiation, important word, elosmos in the Greek. It is a noun that means atoning sacrifice. The act of paying the debt, the act of making it right, the act of taking something broken and making it whole again, That is an act of propitiation. And in order to be a propitiation, there has to be at least two people, the one making propitiation and the one to whom the propitiation is made. So you see where this is leading? Only a God who is both Father and Son, both judge and propitiator. both God and God-man, both Yahweh and substitute, both divine presence and human representative, while remaining one God. Only a God like that can be both just in punishing sin with perfect justice, and the justifier who takes our sins away, removing them as far as the East is from the West. Only the triune God of Scripture can enact this kind of grace, this true, effective, and redemptive grace. This is why the Father sent the Son. This is why the Son willingly took on flesh and dwelt among us, taking upon Himself the role of our representative. This is the whole purpose of the Incarnation, that Jesus might be fully human, fully one of us, fully a brother, the head of a new redeemed race. This is why He was born of a virgin, that He might remain fully perfect, fully righteous, untainted by Adam's sinful nature. This is why He is the Son, so that He could stand before the Judge, stand before the Father, and offer His own blood as payment for our transgressions, which the Father received and declared sufficient, fulfilling the demands of perfect justice. And because Jesus was human, because He was perfect, because He was also God, and because He was also the Son of God, the Father delighted in proving that sacrifice sufficient by giving the Son the keys of death and Hades. the Son, through his willing sacrifice, through his willing and joyful submission to the Father's will, which was to crush the Son for our salvation, Isaiah 53. He conquered, through that willing submission, he conquered the power of death. And having conquered death, how in the world could he stay in the grave? Death had no power over him. The resurrection was simply a logical necessity, given the way that Jesus met each of the five conditions of grace. There is no way that he could have stayed in the grave. That is the Gospel. That's our hope. That's God is love for us. But we have yet to discover why this is good news for us as individuals. It's good news for the world. It's good news for mankind in general. The way to Eden is restored in Christ. The Father has reconciled the world to himself. But we're still speaking in generalities. What about our sins? How is all of this good news for us as individuals? We know from elsewhere in the New Testament that it is only through faith, it is only through believing in Jesus that we are saved. Believing that He is the Son of God, that He was raised from the dead on the third day. Believing that His sacrifice actually paid for my sins, that His blood actually accomplishes what could not be accomplished any other way, namely the reconciliation to the Father and my adoption as a son. But how did I come to believe? It is through faith that I receive all those blessings. But how did I get faith? How did I receive faith? That seems to be a critical point in the equation. I once was lost, but now I'm found. Was blind, but now I see. And if you look at the music, there's a comma between lost and found, blind and see. What is that comma? How is it that I believed? How do I come to faith? I certainly wasn't looking for it. I was dead in my trespasses and sins, Ephesians 2. I was an enemy of God. I was at enmity with God. I was hating God and hating others. I was a slave to my former passions. I was locked in the prison of my own darkness. How did I escape? I didn't even want to escape. I was comfortable there. I was happy in my sin. I was actively and unrighteously suppressing the truth of my sin, Romans 1. There was no hint of remorse in me, there was no contrite spirit, no humility, no love for God. How was I made free now that I am free? How is it that I now abide in God and so abide in freedom? 1 John 4, verse 13, By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. Do you see the beauty of the triune God at work here? Again, this is why we confess a Trinity. The Father is the Judge, and because of His great holiness, He must punish sin. But because of His great love for us, His great love for His creation, He did not simply want to throw us all into hell. Because of His great love for us, He sent His only Son to be the propitiation for our sins, to be the atoning sacrifice, having perfectly met all the conditions of grace. But if I don't cast myself on His mercy, if I don't want to know Jesus, if I don't ask for forgiveness, I am still lost. It doesn't matter that the Father and the Son did all these amazing things. If I am still unwilling at the name of Jesus to bend the knee, I am still damned. But behold our triune God. The Father loves us. The Son loves us. The Spirit loves us, too. The Spirit came down 2,000 years ago at Pentecost and has not yet returned to heaven. God still dwells among us. The third person of the Trinity has come to break the chains of our darkness. He has taken the cold, dead stone of our hearts and has replaced it with a heart alive and soft towards the Father. He has renewed my diseased mind and given me thoughts of the Father. He has taken up residence in my soul and given me the ability to grow, to change, to pursue virtue and holiness, to love others as I have been loved, because he has shown me the face of Jesus. In short, because of the Spirit, I am now born again. He is the Lord and giver of life, we confess in the Nicene Creed. The Father is the judge, the Son is the propitiator, the Spirit is the minister of that love. The Father has accepted the sacrifice of the Son and takes that freedom purchased by the Son and applies it to us through His Holy Spirit. By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us because He has given us of His Spirit. Now we know what the Father has done for us. Now we know what the Son has done for us. And we know this now because of what the Spirit has done for us. Again, see the beauty and the joy and the delight of the Trinity. Our Triune God's intention for us from the beginning of time has been to know and to love Jesus, so that in Jesus, through the fellowship of the Spirit, we might, in our finite smallness, rejoice in the love and the joy and the delight of the Father. Not even the fall could interrupt that purpose. Just as the Triune God made the world, so now the Triune God is remaking the world, one human soul at a time. Paul puts it this way in 2 Corinthians 4. He says, For what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake. For God, who said, Let light shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. Hear that again. In paraphrase this time, highlighting the different roles of the Trinity. For the Father, who through the Son and for the Son at the creation of the world said, let light shine out of darkness, which light came into being through the ministry of the Spirit. He, the Father, has now, through that same ministering Spirit, shone in our hearts in order to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of the Father seen in the face of the Son, Jesus Christ." That is glorious good news. First John 4 14 and we have seen and testify that the father has sent his son to be the Savior of the world How have we seen how have we testified that the father sent his son to be the Savior of the world only through the Spirit? Only because the Spirit has testified first to our spirits that we are indeed the children of God, Romans 8, 16. Only because the Spirit has made us alive first, together with Christ, even when we were dead in our trespasses and sins, Ephesians 2, 4. Only because we were saved by mercy first, through the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, Titus 3, 5. The Father, through the Spirit, has shined the light of Christ into our hearts, bringing us life. It is because of the Spirit that we confess that Jesus is the Son of God, that the Father abides in Him and He in the Father. 1 John 4, verse 15. And it is because of the Spirit that we have come to know and believe that the love God has for us. For God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. Verse 16. That is the love of the Triune God. That is the love of the Father, Son, and Spirit. That is the love of the Trinity, who, through the divine joy of sharing Himself with you, has now made you able to receive that love by drawing you up into Himself, through the Spirit, into Jesus, before the Father of all lights, the giver of every good and perfect gift. Now, we could just End there, right? And bask in that glory for eternity. And in fact, that is precisely what we are going to be doing in eternity, is basking in that. But because we still live at war with the flesh, John does not simply want us to stop here. He leaves us with two things that necessarily flow from this beautiful truth. Two things that follow from the glory of the triune love for you. two things that this truth must convince us of, two things that result from a life transformed by the recreative work of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He leaves us with an encouragement and with an exhortation. And we'll just briefly touch on them now in this afternoon and in this coming week. I would exhort you to and encourage you to meditate on these and why John leaves us with these two applications specifically. First, the encouragement is this. Verses 17 and 18. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. Consider the length to which the triune God has gone to save you, sinner, and then ask yourself, what now is there to fear? If fear has to do with punishment, as John says, if fear has to do with what you will say on that final day when you stand before the judge, then what now is there to fear? The Son has stood before the Father, offering his own blood to pay for your sins. The Father has accepted that sacrifice and declared you clean. The Spirit has made you alive in Jesus and is busy transforming you into the image of Christ from one degree of glory to another. And now, as He is, free from the power of death, so also are you in this world. What now is there to fear? Was the Spirit mistaken when He gave you life? When you get to heaven and you stand before them, is the spirit going to say, whoops, never mind, didn't mean to regenerate your heart? Is the son going to say, whoops, never mind, didn't mean to pay for your sins? Is the father going to say, whoops, never mind, didn't mean to foreknow, predestine, call, justify, and glorify you? Right? No. He's not going to say that. This is the perfect love that casts out fear. Not your love for Jesus, not your love for the Father, not your love for your fellow Christians, not your love for the unbelieving world. Your love can never and will never be perfect this side of glory. It is the perfect love of the Father, the perfect love of the Son, the perfect love of the Spirit, the perfect love of God who is Himself love. It is His love in you and for you that casts out fear. His perfect love for you casts out all fear of punishment, all fear of condemnation, all fear of rejection. His love for you has done this, and it is the perfect love of the Father in the Son through the Spirit that He is now weaving into your hearts and minds even now. When it is night and there is no moon, it is very dark. But when the sun comes up, the darkness disappears. The Triune God who created the world, who said, let there be light, has said, let there be light in you. Now the darkness is gone. Open your eyes, beloved of the Lord. Behold your Triune Maker and Redeemer. What now is there to fear? The exhortation is straightforward as well. Verses 19 through 21. We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, I love God and hates his brother, he is a liar. For he 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, whoever loves God must also love his brother. Just as the day is different from the night, so too are we now different people because we have been born again. and the Son of God has risen in our hearts, and his light shines in us, destroying all the darkness. How can we, who have been loved so completely, so perfectly, so utterly, not also go now and love our brother? This is one of the most common lines of argument in the New Testament. Because something is true, I must now act in line with that truth. Because we have been loved, we must also now love. Because we have been forgiven, we must forgive. Because we have been shown kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, mercy, and grace, so too must we also now go and live accordingly toward one another. This is the holiness without which we will not see the Lord. Holiness isn't getting in touch with your inner monk or sitting staring at your navel thinking holy thoughts. It is getting up off your duff and loving your neighbor. your neighbor being whoever God has put in front of you at any given moment. Because this is how the Triune God has loved you, Christian, and why he has loved you, so that you might become more like himself, a loving, giving, sharing son or daughter who with delight and joy receives every good and perfect gift that the Father gives, who delights to share that love with others. He wants His image-bearers to reflect His outward-moving joy, His outward-moving patience, His outward-moving steadfastness, loving-kindness, peace, His delight in all things good and excellent, so that we may share in His life and in His love. This is the love of the Father, the love of the Son, and the love of the Spirit poured out for you and then through you to the world. Father, we thank you for this love. Without this love, we could not know life. We could not see You. We would not even want to know You or see You. Apart from this love, we would be stuck in our sins. We would be stuck in our condemnation. And Father, we wouldn't even care. We would want to be apart from You. We would want to be as far from You as the East is from the West. And yet, because of your love for us, you made our sins as far from us as the East is from the West. And you have brought us to yourself. You have given us life. You have given us joy. You have given us delight. Because you are life. You are joy. You are delight. And so we give you praise. We give you praise for the Spirit and His ministry of love and the giving of life to us, opening our eyes that we may see Jesus. And we give you thanks for Jesus who willingly, joyfully endured the cross, despised the shame, that we might, in His joy, become one with Him, become brothers, become co-heirs. And Father, we give you praise and give you thanks Because this was your heart. This was your desire from before the world began that we might know you, that we might know your son, and that we might love you in the spirit. So Father, now fill us with such conviction. Not to be gloomy, not to be inward focused, not to be casting our eyes down, but to simply begin again. To go and now from this point forward, go in love. As the New Testament authors say, just to put off our sin. Just to put off what has gone before. To realize that the time that has passed is sufficient for living in our former ignorance. To start now to love one another as we have been loved. For Father, how can we say that we love you and go out and not love others? that proves that the love with which you have loved us and the love for which we must love is not in us. For the Father, the one who does not love, does not abide in you. So Father, give us love. Give us that active, joyful, self-sacrificing, self-denying spirit of service toward one another. not simply so we can feel good about ourselves for doing a good day's work or our Boy Scout-ness, but that we might enjoy and live and glorify you who have been loving toward us. Father, bless us now. Bless us as we come to your table. Bless us as we feast on the love, the visible, tangible love that you have shown us. Father, give us grace, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Let's stand in response this morning and sing the love of God. And as we sing, we'll sing the first three verses, just one right after another, and then end after the third verse, we'll end with the chorus. Let's sing the love of God together.