Peace, mercy, and peace be unto you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. For those of you this morning that are perhaps less in tune with church history and the church calendar, today is when many churches celebrate Reformation Day. In 1571, excuse me, 1517, Martin Luther presumably in October, nailed his 95 theses to the castle church door in Wittenberg, Germany. And that first hymn this morning reminded me of Luther's great contribution to the church. See, Luther, prior to his conversion to the gospel and his understanding of justification by faith, said, love God, I hate God. He saw God as a vindictive judge that he could never live up to the standard to which God gave in his law. But as the gospel was open to him and his eyes were open to the truth that we are justified not by works of the law, but by faith alone in Christ Jesus. a reformation began in his heart that spread to others all around Europe and the world. And so I just want to call your attention to that this morning, to both remember that great moment, but also to see how God has blessed the work of his church since the Reformation. So today, we're going to continue in our series through 1 John. We'll be in the fourth chapter again, this time beginning at verse seven. along with Paul's great love chapter in 1 Corinthians 13, I would suggest that today's passage is arguably the most extraordinary exposition of the love of God in the New Testament. We'll scratch the surface of these verses today, mostly focusing in on the first few, but I hope that we can return to it again in a few more weeks and consider these words more than once. So let us go to the text, 1 John 4, beginning in verse 7. 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 manifest among us, that God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him, And this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God. 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 seen and testified that the father has sent his 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. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected within 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. 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. Let us pray. Lord, we thank you this morning for your word. Your word which is so simple that declares that you are love. And yet as we unpack that, that means so much. There is such a fullness there. There is so much to plumb the depths of our mind around that statement. You are love. Be with us this morning. transform us and conform us to the image of your son this morning through your word. For it's in Christ Jesus' name we pray, amen. We live in a world filled with stories, films, and art that define or attempt to define what love is. Rarely do we see in those things what God defines love to be. Our culture, in fact, often seems to have an obsession with the perversion of love. Love is a feeling or an emotion in our culture that can be akin to a high. One can be lost in a temporary moment of transcendence. You fall in and out of love. Love fades. In our cultural moment, real love is frequently seen and experienced in a distorted view of sexuality and eroticism. As I have lamented before from this pulpit, we have a wildly distorted view of what love is in our culture. Sadly, in our day today, many see love as impatient. We're always in a hurry. Why wait until marriage to consummate a union? For the sake of love, we can be unkind, we can be boastful, arrogant. I'm to love myself, after all. I don't like that person. Why should I reach out to them? Why should I love them? Love can be rude, self-centered, irritable, and resentful in our culture. It's a child, not a choice. Do what's right for you and yourself. A child might ruin what you have planned for your life. Love in our culture frequently rejoices in wrongdoing and lies. Love is love, the slogan goes. Love yourself no matter the consequences, except if it's not hurting anybody else, that's the one consequence. YOLO, you only live once. If it feels good, do it. All of these are the opposite of love. This is a kind of hedonism, not love, that our culture is obsessed with. This is the world we live in, a world that is under the influence of sin and Satan. It has taken this incredible word, this incredible gift from God, and has defined it and turned it upside down. Consider the lyrics of this song, appropriately titled, The Sodom and Gomorrah Show. You've got to love, to learn to live where angels fear to tread, sun, sex, sin, divine intervention, death and destruction, The Sodom and Gomorrah Show. The only thing these lyrics get right is the death and destruction part. Some of you may say, OK, Pastor Chad, that's one example from our culture. I don't know that song. Aren't you overreacting a bit? The group that sang those lyrics has sold over 100 million records. And that's only one example from our culture, our culture that has a distorted and even perverted view of love. the sexual perversion of Sodom and Gomorrah being celebrated, death and destruction, opposed to God's design, loving in a way where angels would fear to tread. We must be careful as Christians that we get our definitions of love from the word and not woodstock this morning. Let us consider this for a moment in light of ourselves. Let us not pat ourselves on the back in this cultural moment and say, look at all the bad people outside the church who don't know what real love is. People who live like that song suggests, people who produce that kind of perverted view of love. They're following the God of this age. And sadly, we often need to point our fingers back to ourselves and consider how we misunderstand God's view and definition of love. A mixed up view of love does not usually come directly as an assault in the church. It comes in subtly. It sneaks in in little ways. And we have to be on the lookout for that. As John previously said in this fourth chapter we have to test the spirits. We have to know the difference between that which is godly and that which is not. Paul in speaking. of love in that great chapter of 1 Corinthians 13 said, if I speak in the tongues of men and angels but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and have all faith so as to remove mountains but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have and I deliver my body to be burned but have not love, I gain nothing. The importance of love is stressed by Paul, and then he defines God's view of love, what love actually is. He says in the fourth verse, love is patient. Love is kind. Love does not envy or boast. It is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. That's the Bible's definition of what love looks like. Love is the opposite of the hedonism and the general definitions of love that we find in our culture. Love is not a noun. To love is a verb. It is acted out. Feelings and emotions are wrapped up in love, to be sure. And that is good and right. But we are called to love actively. The Bible calls the people of God to exhibit the love of Christ to others in the church and to the world. Today we will consider three principles regarding this. First, we will consider the nature of God himself. Second, we will consider the nature of God revealed in Christ. And thirdly, the nature of God revealed in his people. First, God's very nature is love. John tells us in the text that love is from God and that God is love. Love can and does come from God because he is love. This is the first consideration for why we must exhibit the love of Christ to others. Throughout the first epistle of John, the great apostle is constantly admonishing us to love one another because God's very nature is love and love itself comes from him. He defines the term for us. If we are in Christ, we will love as he loves. This is not some abstract concept of love, but love characterizes God and everything he does. We sometimes like to compartmentalize God, to bring him down on a level that we can understand. We have categories like God is omnipotent, he is holy, he is just, he is love, and so on. God is all of those things. But God is all of those things at one time and simultaneously. God is not just holy some of the time. He is holy when He loves. He is holy when He doles out and administers justice. It's an intrinsic part of His nature. In fact, we cannot even know what actual holiness is apart from how God has revealed Himself to us. In the same way, God is love. God is always love all the time. God was love when He called the universe into being. God was love when He brought judgment on the peoples of the world. God was loving when he corrected his nation, Israel, his chosen people, and brought about judgment on them. God was love when he sent his son Christ into the world to die for us. God. is love, not just some of the time, but always. That is who God is and that defines his character and everything that he does. John says love is from God because God is love. Let me draw your attention to the Trinitarian nature of God's love this morning. Notice in verse 13 that it says that he has given us his spirit And in verse 14, And 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. It is the Spirit who opens our eyes to see the loveliness of Christ and to confess Him to the glory of the Father. In this very passage about love, we are reminded first that our God is Triune, and secondly, that our entire salvation is accomplished in and through the work of the Trinity. God is triune, this is who he is, this is his very essence. Within the one God, we see the most beautiful expression of love. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth suggested that to be genuine, love requires an object, a beloved, an other. God's love expresses itself in his mutual love through the persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. As one commentator said, God lives in eternal communion of perfect love, joy, and peace. The father loving the son through the spirit, the son returning love to the father in that same spirit because he is eternally and essentially love. He can love us with an eternal love. This is God's nature. God can love us because of who he is and the depths of his character. He is love. We may not be able to plumb the depths of knowledge of what it means for God to reveal himself as triune, but God is no actor this morning. What he reveals about himself, we must receive with awe and devotion. Our God is a loving father. He is our loving savior and bridegroom, and he shows himself to be the lover of our souls through the work of the spirit this morning. When God shows himself, his identity, In the revelation of his kingdom, he shows himself as loving, as love itself. God can love us because he has eternally expressed love within the Godhead. One Bible scholar said, God the Father loves us, his created creatures, his children, because he has eternally loved the Son in the Spirit. The Son loves us as brothers because he has eternally loved his Father in the Spirit. The Spirit loves us because he has an eternal bond of love between the Father and the Son. Loving another was not a new experience when God created the world. It's an extension of the love that the Father and the Son and the Spirit have always had for one another. What are we to do with this? Is this a dry doctrine only for our head? This should send us to our knees in awe and wonder and worship at our great God. who has condescended to reveal himself in his very nature to us. The Cappadocian church father Gregory of Nazianzus shows us how we might worship the triune God in his orations on the Trinity. He said this, no sooner do I conceive of the one am I illumined by the splendor of the three. No sooner do I distinguish them than I am carried back to the one. When I think of any one of the three, I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me. I cannot grasp the greatness of that one so as to attribute a greater greatness to the rest. The father is in the son as he is in the spirit, and the spirit is in the son as he is in the father, and so on. We must marvel at God's revelation to us this morning. Our triune God has loved us in perfect harmony within the Godhead from all eternity. And he has set his love upon us, a part of his creation that he created in his own image. Praise be to God. There is no other God out there with this kind of nature of love. And we are his offspring made in his image. Let that sink in for a moment. We are the image bearers and we are called to exhibit God's love to the world because of who God is. God manifests his love in many, many ways. However, the most incredible John highlights in the passage we read The great unveiling or manifestation of God's love is through his son, Jesus Christ. John writes in verse nine, in this the love of God was made manifest, revealed. 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 propitiate our sins. There are things we need to marvel at here for a moment. First, the fact is that the internal son became incarnate and was born. This in and of itself is extraordinary. God did not hold back. He did not send an angelic being or even a prophet like of old. God sent the best He could offer. He sent His dearly beloved Son. And Jesus' entire life showed forth the love of the Father. As the Apostle Paul expresses in 2 Corinthians 9.15, thanks be to God for this inexpressible gift. The second way God manifests His great love in sending Christ to us is that He sent Christ to die. John says that God sent his son to propitiate our sins. The word propitiate is a great word, and we've already seen it once before in this epistle. John reminds us again. Jesus propitiated our sins if we are in Christ. This means that he, through his substitutionary death on the cross in our place, satisfied completely the wrath of God for his people's sins. He has removed sin from us if we are in Christ as far as the East is from the West. And our sins will never be counted against us if we are in Christ. The prophet Isaiah foretold this in chapter 53 of his book where he said, but he was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. For God so loved the world, us. that he foreordained the death of his beloved son, that his son would be crushed for us, and that our sins would be propitiated, that they would be forgiven and never held against us. The third way God manifests his great love for us is that God not only sent Jesus and sent him to die, But God sent Jesus to die for sinners, which we all are. If you are in Christ, God the Father loves you enough to send his son to die for you, a sinner. The son coming and dying for his people's sins expresses the deep love of the Father for you. Look at what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5.18. All this is from God, God the Father. All this is from God who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. God the Father sent Jesus to reconcile us to himself. Christ has restored the loving relationship with God that Adam had lost in the garden. We are the offspring of Adam. We have no natural claim to God's love or kindness this morning apart from Christ. We forfeit the right to God's love when we show a life of sin. But we sin because at our core we are sinners and Christ came to redeem sinners so that our sins would not be held against us. Until we are born again to this living hope, our very nature is turned away from God. It is curved in on itself, as Luther would say. It is towards sin and self-centeredness. Christ came to forgive our sins, resurrect our dead souls, and give us peace. Not in some general sense, but peace with God. Some of us may not have the best earthly fathers. But if you are in Christ, you have a perfect and loving Heavenly Father who spared no expense to rescue you and me. We who are sinners by nature and by action, God sent His Son to die for sinners. Jesus' death makes it possible for us to be in a loving relationship with the Father, and by extension, the Son and the Holy Spirit. God desired to restore that relationship with you because of His great love for you. Jesus was the perfect God-man. Jesus satisfied the wrath of God for his children in our place. He experienced the pain and the torture and the full measure of pain as a human being through all of the suffering, but he sustained the anathema and damning gaze of his Father for your sin and my sin. Jesus became a curse for us. so that he might propitiate the just wrath of God for sin and rebellion and to bring us into relationship with God. He took our stripes because he knew there was no way we could endure, even for a moment, the full, unmitigated wrath of God. Jesus knew this. The Father and the Spirit knew this and that is why Jesus freely stood in our place. He loved you first with arms outstretched on a cross so that you could be forgiven and adopted by your loving Father and given peace. Don't miss this either. Jesus loves you, but he also fulfilled the Father's will to die for you because of the love of the Father and the love that Christ had for his Father. Remember this first big point, that the triune God's nature is love, and that love is continually expressed through the relationship and the work of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. What is more remarkable and humbling is that John tells us that we did not even initiate this relationship. John says not that we have loved God, but that he has loved us. Verse 19 reiterates this by saying we love because he first loved us. Christ died for the ungodly. He came to rescue those who were his enemies, those who would even kill him. The Bible is clear, we do not seek after God in our fallen state. We run from him and rebel against him. God's perfection and holiness are too much for us to behold. Look at Adam and Eve in the garden. The response to God's presence after they sinned was to run and to hide. Our holy and righteous God could have ended the human race at that very moment. He would have been just in doing so, but our God chose to redeem his people. God the Father reached down and loved by sending the Son. The Son died for us and the Father and the Son sent the Holy Spirit to apply that great salvation to us and to reveal God's love to us, his creatures who are his adopted children. What could possibly be more amazing than this? The great Baptist preacher Charles Spurgeon said it this way. This is the personal point, he said. He loves me, an insignificant nobody full of sin who deserved to be in hell, who loves him so little in return. God loves me. Does this not melt you? Does this not fire your soul? I know it does if it is really believed. It must. And how did he love me? He loved me so that he gave up his only begotten son for me and to be nailed to a tree and made to bleed and die. And what will come of it? Because he loved me and forgave me, I am on the way to heaven. Within a few months, perhaps days, I shall see his face and sing his praises. He loved me before I was born. He loved me before a star began to shine, and he has never ceased to do so all these years. When I have sinned, he has loved me. When I have forgotten him, he has loved me. When in the days of my sin I cursed him, he still loved me. And he will love me when my knees tremble and my hair is gray with age, even in advanced age. He will bear and carry his servant. He will love me when the world is ablaze and love me forever and ever." Then Spurgeon goes on to say, chew the cut of that blessed thought. Roll it under your tongue as a dainty morsel. Sit down if you have leisure and think of nothing but this, his great love with which he loves you. This morning, the love of the Father through Christ by the Spirit is still being offered to you. None of you are too great a sinner to receive mercy. As Pastor Jeremy often reminds us from this pulpit, We may be sinners, but God's mercy and grace are greater than all of our sin. You are neither too young or too old to come to Christ. You may be a person of great learning or very little. The offer of the gospel is for all who hear and do not harden their hearts. Call on the name of the Lord and you will be saved, repenting of your sins, turning to Christ. He will not cast you out if you come to Him in humility. If you are in Christ this morning, be reminded of the nature of the Trinity. God is love. Remember the manifold gifts of God to you this morning that come through His dear Son, applied by the Spirit. And here's the crux of it. Our text this morning tells us it's all for a distinctive purpose. The ought statement that follows God's promise and demonstration of love to us is found in verse 11. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. That's it. We're going to spend more time here on the future, but I want us to note this briefly in passing today. This love for others is not something that we have to work up or try harder to do in a traditional sense. Look at the second half of verse 12. If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. John teaches us that God's abiding love is the source of our love for one another. In verse 13 we read that it is because of His Spirit. By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us because He has given us His Spirit. You don't have to try to work up love for another. If you are in Christ, the Spirit abides in you. The Spirit will produce the fruit of faith, the fruit of love. The Spirit will one day, according to this text, perfect the love of God in and through us. The word perfect or perfect, or the phrase to make perfect comes from a Greek word that means to bring to an end, to complete, to finish. God's love will be perfected and completed in you by His Spirit. This is a promise. Jesus admonished us in the Sermon on the Mount to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect. He will accomplish this in us through the work of the Spirit in our lives, through this abiding Spirit. We cannot do it on our own, but through the Spirit abiding in us, we will become more and more like Jesus. This means we will love like Christ. And try to wrap your heads around this, this amazing truth. that the spirit that is in Christ is the same spirit who lives and dwells within us. It is the same spirit that proceeds from the Father and the Son. This spirit abides in you if you are in Christ this morning. In John's words, the Holy Spirit is given so that we might be born of God. The Holy Spirit was given a Pentecost in Acts 2 to bring rebirth, to give God's chosen people a new nature, and to make his dwelling place with us. God was no longer going to dwell in temples made with hands, but he was dwelling in his people. In verse 12 of this fourth chapter of 1 John, again we read, no one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us. Notice that God's love abides in us. This is a verb that denotes a permanent state for the believer. Abide's semantic range in Greek includes to remain, to reside, to persist, or to be in a continuous state. It indicates a change in the status of a believer. If you need some assurance this morning, there it is. God's spirit remains and abides in you permanently if you are his child. You are in union with the abiding spirit of God, even if your emotions are in flux and you don't always feel like it. This is a promise to hold on to by faith. When we respond to God's love extended to us in Christ, God reveals himself to us. It is the Spirit who shows us the loveliness of Christ and makes us sincerely willing to come to him and embrace him as Savior and Lord. The Spirit reveals God to us through Christ, and Christ reveals the Father to us. As John 14, 9 says, whoever has seen me, Jesus says, has seen the Father. If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus. And it is the spirit that reveals Christ to us. And the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts as we become his adopted children in union with the triune God. So how are we doing this morning in showing forth the love of God? Do our lives exhibit love for others? Jesus said in John chapter 13, By this, all people will know that you are my disciples if you love one another. Do people see the love of God in us this morning? Do they recognize the perfecting work of the abiding spirit in our lives as Christians? The world is in darkness. Hedonism is everywhere in our world. We are responsible for bringing the light of God's love into this world. And that love is based on truth. It is not a fuzzy emotional feeling. It is not telling people that love is love. It is defining it in the terms that God has given. For God is love. He is the standard by which we measure what love actually is. His very nature is love. And that love was extended to us and now abides in us if we are in Christ. Meditate deeply on this truth. This is not a dry academic treatise on the Trinity. This gives us assurance, it gives us hope, and gives us a mission and calling as the children of God to a life of discipleship and service. So beloved, meditate on these words. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. If you know him, you will love one another. So let us get about the business this morning of showing the world Jesus by our love for one another. Amen.