And you can turn first of all to 2 Peter chapter 1. As we continue on meditating on our text here, on supplying with our brotherly affection, love. Love now as the crown of sanctification. And truly the prayer we just prayed in that hymn is what we pray as we enter into this text today. We're now in the 12th sermon in our series on sanctification. And we're coming to the climax of the qualities that we are to supply with our faith. So we need to quickly review, pardon me, where we've come from, pardon me, and why we are here. Remember, we're asking the question, how? How do I live this new creation life in Christ? How are we actually conformed to the image of Christ? How do we become imitators of God as dear children? What do we do to grow in grace and the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ? So we laid the foundation for that, for answering that question by learning that God alone is holy. but that he gives us a gift of holiness. He brings us to share in his holiness. It's a gift given to us by our union with Christ. So in Christ, we are sanctified. We are set apart to God. We are holy. But that relation to Christ is an active relation in which his spirit is remaking us so that we can also truly say we are being sanctified in Christ. So how does that active relationship of being sanctified in Christ take place? Well, here we turn to 2 Peter 1, verses 3-11. where we see both the gift in verses 3-4, God's divine power granting to us, giving to us all that pertains to life and godliness. And for this very reason, we see the growth then in verses 5 and following. For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For these qualities are yours and are increasing. They keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. Pardon me. And, of course, this section ends with showing the eternal fruit that comes from this growth, this abundant entrance into the kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. We want to be partakers of the divine nature. So we've been learning to make every effort to supply with our faith these qualities that Peter lists. And this list of qualities in 2 Peter 1, of course, is a bird's eye view of what goes into being a partaker of the divine nature. It's not intended to be an exhaustive kind of list of every single aspect of it, but it does intentionally start with faith and work toward love. as its climax, everything we do has to spring from faith in Christ, resting and receiving on Christ, because apart from Christ, we can do nothing. But then faith reaches out for and comes to fruition in love. And so today we're going to come to consider love as the crown of sanctification, in a sense, summing up within itself everything that has come before. So we're going to talk about love again as a congregation As I pondered the text and what to say about love, it seemed to me the Lord has been bringing this back to our attention repeatedly as a congregation. Back in 2014 and 2015, we took a good long look at love from 1 John chapters 4 and 5. We meditated long and hard on what love means and and how we work that out in our lives then again about a year ago Just last year. We dealt again with love from Galatians chapter 5 the importance of faith working through love the fruit of the Spirit being love and And so over and over again, we keep coming back to love. I think it was even while we were in Galatians 5 that we went back to 1 Corinthians 13 and talked a little bit about how love acts, what it looks like, what love is like. And so over and over again, we keep coming back to love. But in fact, that's a very biblical thing to do because you can't study the scriptures long without Coming to this whole issue of love, Jesus said all the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. And the second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus approached the time of his death, he gave a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this, all men will know you are my disciples. And here, if he's gonna single anything out that manifests that we are his disciples, it's that you love one another. When Paul applied the gospel to our lives in Romans chapters 12 and 13, he stressed love. Oh, no one anything, for example, in 13, eight, except to love each other for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. When the apostle Paul prays for us in Ephesians chapter three, he asks that the father, the father would grant to us that Christ would dwell in our hearts by faith. so that being rooted and grounded in love, we would have the strength to know the love of God. Being rooted and grounded in love, coming to know God's love, which even surpasses our knowledge. And so on and on it goes. You cannot study the scriptures without coming time and time again to the supremacy of love. So we ought to study love regularly. It's good for us. But then we ask, so what should we say about love that we haven't said before, even within recent memory? I felt like I should just pull one of my sermons out of the file and just preach it over again, right? Well, I'm sure we would learn from that. Or should I simply give another exhortation to love, right? Love, okay, everybody, it says to love, love each other and spend an hour or so here telling you stories and then say love each other and make sure you leave here knowing you're supposed to love each other. and love the Lord, of course. Well, no doubt there could be even some benefit in that. But today what I'd like to do, as God brings us once again to consider love here and tells us to make every effort to supply with our faith love, What can we do? Well, I think we can be transformed by the renewing of our minds. And so what I want to do is today just gently lead us into making every effort to love by learning more of love. And I suggest that we can learn more of love. I'd say this, learning more of love will help us to practice love well. in part by countering worldly, idolatrous even, or inadequate ideas about love that we hold and that we practice that actually keep us, inhibit us from loving well, inhibit, if you will, the love of the Spirit from flowing through us well. So that's what we're going to do. We won't be saying a lot of new things, but hopefully we'll be working them into our lives even more deeply so as to open us up to the love of God and enable us to love one another more. So in order to do this, I want to set before our eyes just two profound passages of Scripture with regard to love. I'm going to start with one from the Gospel of John, Jesus' time on earth, and then we're going to go to one in the first epistle of John. pardon me, both of us, both of which drive us to consider love in its depths. In fact, put before us mysteries that are hard for the human mind to plumb and yet invite us in to a real goodness here and truth that is beautiful if we will learn it and make it a part of our lives. So first of all, let me just set this up by looking at John chapter 17, verse 23, Jesus is praying. This is what we sometimes call his high priestly prayer, his time alone with the Father just before he goes to the cross to give that ultimate demonstration of love to mankind. And he prays this regarding himself and his disciples. I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. And he went on to say in verse 26, I made known to them your name and I will continue to make it known that the love with which you have loved me may be in them and I in them. Here we have just a little glimpse. into the inter-Trinitarian workings of God himself. Of a love that extends back before creation ever existed. Of a father and a son in eternal communion with one another. The perfect expression of love going on. And yet now, that love being made manifests in and through the incarnation, the death and resurrection of the Son, Jesus, so that, amazingly, others would come to participate in this love. That it wouldn't be, in a sense, just the eternal trinity enjoying love forever, but they would actually overflow to include a multitude of others. This is a profound love. And let's turn our attention to 1 John chapter 4 and verses 7 through 12. 1 John, which is close if you want to just turn over there in your Bibles to where our text is in 2 Peter, 1 John chapter 4, beginning at verse 7. The scripture says, 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. And I like the way he even uses that term of love as he's talking to us here. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also 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. In fact, he will go on to say in the last part of verse 16 in this same passage, God is love. Once again, God is love. And whoever abides in love abides in God and God abides in him. And then he will say in 1 John 4, 19, we love because he first loved us. What I want to do today is simply draw out some implications from the word of God as we press into enjoying the depths of this communion that is being revealed to us, this cognitive love that is being revealed to us in the life of Jesus Christ. First of all, we need to just get this point and get it well, that God is love. God is love. That in and of itself provides the foundation for all of our knowledge of love. So God, this self-existent I am, the one who is, who was, who is to come, who needs nothing else but himself, who is the I am, is infinitely, perfectly, eternally love. That's who he is, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And it's been one of the great fruits and delights of Christians throughout the centuries to reflect on the reality of that love, God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There was a man actually even in the Middle Ages named Richard, about the 12th century, who began reflecting on God is love and the Trinity. And he came to the realization, and he wrote about this, that God could not be love if he was not triune. He could not eternally be love if he was not Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Because love presupposes some other to love. There is no such thing as self-contained love. It's a different kind of a creature. It's not love at that point. It's something else. that God must be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit if He is love, and that He always has been love, and that He needs no one outside of Himself to love, so that when the Bible says, God is love, it's not just using a figure of speech, so to speak. It's not just sort of telling us something that is sort of like this. It's saying, this is really who God is. He is love. But if that's true, the God we worship, love if that's the way he is and that means that ultimate reality the really what is really real God himself is united in love constantly generously giving and receiving that means that personal relationships are at the heart of existence that nothing exists apart from this that love somehow is just worked right into the very foundations of being. You can't be without this reality. God is this way in himself, and that is why, then, he created everything outside of himself. He's not a needy God. He's not a God who said, oh, I just wish there was something to love. So let's see, I'll have to make a world and make that world something that I can give myself to in love, that I can enrich and bless and be good to. No, he wasn't that kind of a God. He was, in a sense, the polar opposite of that. He was so overflowing in love within himself that he could even, if you will, make room for a multitude of other creatures to share his love. Without ever diminishing himself in the least, he could overflow in eternal love to other creatures who could know that love and could actually respond to it and participate in it. This is an amazing thing. That's why he created all things. The preacher Richard Sibbes said, if God had not had a communicative spreading goodness, he would never have created the world. God simply was true to himself. He's so good that he creates. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I'm quoting Sibbes again here, were happy in themselves and enjoyed one another before the world was. Apart from the fact that God delights to communicate and spread his goodness, there had never been a creation or redemption. There wouldn't be any reason for it. except that God delights to communicate and spread his goodness. And that tells us something very important. Think with me here this morning. That means that all of creation works that way. Everything that exists works that way. As we know, in him we live and move and have our being, the apostle Paul said. In fact, Well, side note, I was just thinking of this this morning in our scripture reading. In Hebrews chapter six, as the scriptures are illustrating the point there for us, it uses the illustration of the land drinking in the rain. And it says that the land receives blessing from God. What is going on there? What is blessing? That is God communicating his life to his creation. He is life. He's the source of life. Where does life come from but from God? And God gives it freely all the time. That's how creation works. It doesn't work apart from the love of God being freely communicated to creation. So all of creation is structured by, ordered by, and united together by love. There is this basic goodness, this basic generosity to everything that's created, to all created existence. And that's in fact why we can use created analogies to help us learn about God. If it's true that heavens declare the glory of God, they are showing us who he is. As Romans chapter one says, that even the invisible things of God are made manifest by creation. How often, for example, through the years have Christians used the sun as an analogy by which to learn of God's love and goodness and truth. God is like the sun, which by its very nature pours out and shines forth light and heat, right? Giving, enabling the plants on the earth to live and to grow. The created world is a gift. Every, down to its last molecule, everything about it is a gift. The created world means love. To me, just a very small but a profound example of this is a mother and her newborn child. As that new baby comes into the world, so to speak, begins experiencing life out here in this world, what does a mother do? She takes that child and holds it. She feeds it. And maybe even as those eyes begin to open and try to see something about what's going on, the senses begin to operate, try to figure out what's going on in this brand new world I'm in, The mother looks at that baby and smiles. And you know what she's doing? She's communicating reality to that baby, apart from which that baby won't come to know it. You know what happens to human babies that are not given that? They die. They can't come to know and experience and interact with the world that's given to them. But their mother is that first experience that says, this is good. It's good that you exist, that we're in this relationship. I love you. And I give you life in that human sense. This is a beautiful picture, really, folks, of the way God made the world to work. Everything is made to communicate God's goodness. As the sun is shining today, as the trees that you can see through the windows are stretching out their branches, they really are rejoicing in the Lord. That's not just a metaphor. That's what they're doing. This is creation responding to the call of God to say, life is good. and I'm giving it in abundance. Come forth, grow, multiply, enjoy my world. This is God communicating himself to his world, and it's a beautiful thing. Now, the problem is, of course, that, well, twofold. Our innate sinfulness does not like to receive that, And then our sinful world system does not want to have to think of the world that way. Modern science, for example, says that the whole question of love is really irrelevant to understanding creation. You don't need to love in order to understand something. That's maybe a sentimental thing if you want it, or if it feels good for you, but that's not part of our really knowing and understanding creation. So man's relationship to creation is essentially one of power, not of love. Nature is simply stuff. It has no meaning until we can impose our will on it. which of course ultimately means that nothing matters except my unfettered will. There is no inherent truth in creation to which I have to respond in receiving it. There's no revelation going on in creation. There's no inherent goodness in creation. There's no inherent beauty in creation. pardon me, it's just stuff. And that fits very well with our sinful propensity to see ourselves as the center of the universe. We are curved in on ourselves. We crown ourselves as God. And in such a society, we have to be very intentional about seeing God's love in all the work of his hands. And a crucial starting point for this is submitting to, maybe we could even say, in fact, enjoying, submitting to a reality that is given to and is outside of us. If we're going to know love, we're going to have to submit to a reality that is there outside of me. One 20th century writer, not a Christian, said that love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Now, that's the way a philosopher might say it. But she was grasping that love has to respond to reality. There can be no such thing as love if there is not something else that's real out there, outside of me. And if it's real, that means it's not me and under my control per se. It also exerts a reality here that I have to respond to. Ooh, now we're starting to threaten my autonomy. I'm not sure that I like that. I'd rather define it as not really real and thus be subject to my will. No, there has to be something real giving itself to you in order for you to love. And if that wasn't clear enough from creation, then God makes it explicitly and undeniably clear in redemption. In this, our text in 1 John 4 said, in this, the love of God was made manifest among us. God is making this undeniably clear. This is reality, the love of God. 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. We are not the origin here, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation, the satisfaction of his wrath against our sins. God communicates himself. God is love. God gives of himself. That's why the world exists. That's what the world means. That's the way it's built. That's woven into its very structure. And you have to submit to that fact if you're going to love truly. God gives himself. He is so generous that he freely says to you, it is good that you exist. It is good that you exist. What kind of a God is that? They would freely say, call us into existence, and say that's good. It's good that you exist. You see, He loves us not with a needy, selfish, quote-unquote love, but with an overflow of goodness. And that leads us right into this next consideration. If God is love, and that is what is really real, more foundational than anything else we know, then love is bigger than us, and that's good. Love is bigger than us, and that is good. Pardon me. It's not something we can reduce to our puny little human control. our puny little human, pardon me, selves. Now, one of the ways that we do this in our current age that I think Christians often recognize as a wrong way to think of love is to identify love as a feeling. You know, love is just a, That loving feeling I get when certain situations are the way I like them to be, or I get something I like. Pardon me. That one's not too hard to see through, even though a lot of people live that way. And I think a lot of Christians rightly say, wait a second, love, you can't reduce love to just a feeling. You get, you know, a transitory, you know, it might even be something you ate that makes you feel really good. If that's all love is, there's not much to it. And we certainly want something more than that when it comes to love. Even when we've been talking about love in the Bible, certainly that's not what we're talking about. But I think sometimes there's another error that we fall into that inhibits love. And really, it's another man-centered view of love. And this view says that love is basically the product of man's will. Love is a choice. We'll say things like that, right? Love is not a feeling, love is a choice. Full stop, stop there. And I would actually submit to you today that that's not sufficient biblically to say, well, love is a choice. I can decide when to love somebody, or I can decide not to love. If I'm called upon to love, then I simply just decide to love. If I'm called upon not to love, then I simply decide not to love. And that's basically what love is. It's a function of my will. But what does 1 John 4 say? Love is from God. It does not originate in us. It's bigger than that. It's something we're going to have to submit to. Pardon me. First John 4 says, we love because He first loved us. Our will is not the originator of love. Now it is certainly true to say. And here's where we're responding to one error on love, that it's just a feeling or something like that. And so we respond by saying, no, love is a choice. What we're trying to do when we say things like that is that We bear responsibility to love. God tells us to love and we have that responsibility. And that's certainly true. It's not just something we just hope zaps us like a bolt of lightning. Well, I hope I get it. Pardon me. We recognize that's not adequate. At the same time, we cannot respond by simply saying, love is a product of my will. Love does include our will. Love includes our intellect. Love includes our affections. Love includes every aspect of us. But it's always bigger than us. It's before us and it's after us. It's above us and it's below us. We're living in it, so to speak. We are not the originators of it. Love is something that is called forth by something outside of us. not simply something we originate from our own power. How do we sing that even last Lord's day in the, or maybe it wasn't last Lord's day. Maybe I was just thinking about this hymn and it wasn't when we sang it last. And I go to say, I should have written this down in my notes, just popped into my head. Where the hymn writer says, drawing out my heart to thee, Here is love vast as the ocean. That's the that's the him I'm thinking of right here is love vast as the ocean That last stanza talks about God's good work and it ends with that statement drawing out my love to thee We love because he first loved right our love as a responsive thing and Our eyes have to be open to perceive the beauty of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Eyes that are clouded by sin. The beauty is there, but we don't receive it. And God has to graciously open us up to it, to call us forth to it, to see His glory, to respond to it, to be drawn out of ourselves to love. Because in a sense, love really is bigger than just ourselves. One of our consistent modern errors is to identify love as simply a subjective thing. It's something kind of tucked away inside of me. That's where love is. And what we're saying here today is that's not enough. Love is out there too. In fact, it's surrounding us. As we'll get to, not today, I won't be able to get this far. Love is a real union with another. And in some ways we can even say it exists between the one who loves and the one who is beloved. It's out there in reality. It is an objective reality, not just a subjective thing, whether feeling or choice. This is a very important conception of love. I think the scriptures are calling us to to help us understand. what love means. Again, what does this mean? In order to truly love, you're going to have to submit yourself to a reality that is bigger than you. By the way, that is why throughout history even, and not just in the modern era, human beings will use this language of something like falling in love. Why do we talk about falling in love? Well, we could be simply perverse and say, well, that's not true at all. There's nothing about falling in love. Love is a choice. But we've already said that's not adequate either, right? The reason we use that kind of language to describe what is happening to us when we love is we're recognizing something is happening to me. It's not just what I'm doing. There's something out there that is impacting me. I am being affected by it, right? Now, I need to respond to that in right ways. All of our intellect, all of our will, all of our affections, things we talk about, that is very true. But there's something a whole, that's, why does that language persist about things like falling in love? Because, although perhaps not always seen rightly, it's experiencing something that's real. There's something that is, happening to me that's bigger than this in my control. And that's true. You're gonna have to submit to a reality that you cannot control if you're going to know love. You know, we don't like that. That threatens our autonomy. That threatens our security in ourself. I'm gonna be in control of my life. I'm gonna know what's going on. I'm gonna, you know, this, this, this. And in fact, sometimes we identify that with being holy, right? I wouldn't let something like this happen to me. Now we can talk a lot more. I'm gonna put a pause here on this explanation. We'll pick this up next week with more about what love is. But we've learned so far Just trying to open our hearts and minds to understand this amazing truth that God is opening to us. First, that God is love. And thus, real reality is love. Creation means love. And love is bigger than us. And that's good. That's really good. We'll learn more next week how to deal with that, how we respond to that more so that we begin to participate in that love, share that love, exchange that love like God does. But let me just close with a thought for your day to stimulate your thinking and challenge you on to pursue love, like the scripture says. I wanna just use the illustration of life in the church. I think one of the inhibitors of love in our day. is our understanding of the world outside of us is not being something that is being given as a gift to us in love, to which we respond in love, but it's simply there. And then our wills are what make it what it is. We've taken that same kind of a thinking and applied it to the church. And today we often live life in the church, which is designed to be God's school of love in that way. Right? I am a part of the church if I will to be, and if I will not to be, I am not. There's nothing bigger than me that I have to answer to. It ultimately devolves down to me and what I choose. And that's why often today when we think of the church as a voluntary society, I think we have to push back a little bit in our day. There's some truth to that statement. The church is a voluntary society in the sense that nobody does or should hold a gun to your head and say, go join the church, right? No questions asked or you'll be slaughtered. That's a very unloving way to try to build up the love of Christ in the church. And so we can say, in a sense, the church is a voluntary society in that sense. But in our day, we tend to think that means, when you say the church is a voluntary society, that it is actually our choice that forms and makes the church. It's my choice to join together. Let's say we as a congregation right here, why are we a manifestation of the body of Christ? Because we decided to be one. Really, at the end of the day, that's why we are. If we hadn't decided to be one, then we wouldn't be. But since we have decided, we are. And we forget there's a whole antecedent, there's a whole surrounding work of the Spirit of God that is the reality into which we must be born again, be baptized, in order to be the church. It's a gift of God's love. God is communicating himself to his creatures in bringing about the thing, this thing called the church. And he's inviting us to participate in his love through this. And we have the privilege then of learning what that love means and looks like and practicing and participating in it through being a part of this that God is giving. This is God actively communicating himself to us. And that means it's not our will. It's not even, say, our church constitution. And I'm doing really well here today at remembering what I want to say. What's that thing we read at the Lord's Covenant? There we go. Thank you. Sorry about that. It's not even our covenanting together that makes us the church, for that would have no power apart from God's action beforehand. Right? God is the one bringing this about, and we get to enjoy it. Love is bigger than us, and that's good. So when we're in the church, we've welcomed in that sense God's gift of love by covenanting together similarly to the way a man and a woman welcome God's love and uniting by covenanting together and so God making them one in marriage. So we've done that in the church and then the church has struggles and the church has problems and we don't feel very in love. We can simply say Well, I'm going to grit my teeth and I'm going to decide to love. There's a partial truth there, but there's still an impediment in the way of love. And that is, what I have to do is submit to God's reality. I'm not the one who can make this be what it has to be. I have to submit. It's bigger than me here. But God is calling me to participate in His love. I trust Him. Faith. And I work that out through love. And then I'll come to know, more than I ever have before, the reality of this love that God is calling us to. Some food for thought as we put a pause on this thinking about love. We will pick it up, Lord willing, next week. Let's respond by confessing our faith. In fact, let's do this together today. Instead of our usual confession that Jesus is Lord, let's confess together this simple truth that we saw stated twice in our text. God is love. God is love. Do you believe that today? Do you submit to that today? Let's do it all together as a congregation. God is love. God is love. Amen. Let's look to Him in prayer.