We thank you for the opportunity, Lord, this morning to hear from your word. We pray that you would speak through me this morning. We pray that your Holy Spirit would attend unto the teaching, Lord. Speak through your word, we pray, in Jesus' name, amen. So as I was assigned this topic, I accepted it with a bit of trepidation or fear because there's no way that I could possibly explain or teach this topic the way that it ought to be and the topic today is on the love of God. And as I began to study for today's lesson, it became more and more apparent that I'm just going to be able to scratch, maybe not even scratch the surface of the love of God. So let's dig into it and maybe we can learn something and grow a little fonder of our Lord today because of the teaching on this attribute of God's love. In order to properly define love, we will look to Scripture in a couple of places to try to get a handle on what love is and what it isn't, and then we'll look at several theologians' definitions of God's love. we'll kind of summarize that. I'll start with one of the most beloved verses in the Bible, John 3.16. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life. In this verse, we see that God loved the world and that love was expressed in giving what was most needed. Fallen man was perishing and God in his love stepped in and provided a savior for men, God's only begotten son. Now if we analyze this a little more, we'll see that the love that God had logically comes before the action of love in giving. So that the love of God was the source or the beginning of the act of love or the giving. So we see in this case that the love in the act is preceded by God's deep, heartfelt affection for the object of his love. In this case, the object of love is the world. Now look at 1 Corinthians 13, 1 through 8 and see the Apostle Paul's teaching on love. He writes, though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. Charity suffereth long and is kind. Charity envieth not. Charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth, et cetera. In this passage, we see love being defined in such a manner so that what may appear as an act of love, if it is done without the right heart, is not actually love at all. We see this in verse three, where good done to the poor does not qualify as love unless it proceeds from a loving heart. It says, and though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, And though I give my body to be burned and have not charity, it profit me nothing. Even dying a martyr's death is meaningless unless it proceeds from a heart of love for God. This heart affection, this feeling of love is essential to true love. Charles Hodge, the theologian, tells us that the schoolmen are a sect of medieval theologians, and often the philosophical theologians tell us that there is no feeling in God. This, they say, would imply passivity or susceptibility of impression from without, which it is assumed is incompatible with the nature of God. Now, after expanding on this, Hodge concludes, here again, we have to choose between a mere philosophical understanding or a mere philosophical speculation and the clear testimony of the Bible and of our own moral and religious nature. He says, love of necessity involves feeling. And if there be no feeling in God, there can be no love. Let's explore a few verses which demonstrates this aspect of love that is in the heart. When Joseph's older brothers brought his younger brother Benjamin to see him in Egypt, look at Joseph's emotional response to seeing his brother. It says, and he lifted up his eyes and saw his brother Benjamin, his mother's son, and said, is this your younger brother of whom he's spake unto me? And he said, God be gracious unto thee, my son. And Joseph made haste, for his bowels did yearn upon his brother, and he sought where to weep, and he entered into his chamber and wept there. The word bowels signifies the place of tender love and compassion. Joseph broke down emotionally because he saw his brother, and his heart was inflamed with intense emotion. Joseph loved his younger brother. The Lord also, though, has bowels of love and compassion for his people. Jeremiah 31 20 says, Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he a pleasant child? For since I spake against him, I do earnestly remember him still. Therefore, my bowels are troubled for him. I will surely have mercy upon him, saith the Lord. Jeremiah 31 20. We see how God describes his love for Israel in terms of internal compassion, out of which flows the resolve to do them good. So we have this heart element to love. It's not merely an external thing. It says in Zephaniah 3, 17, the Lord thy God in the midst of thee is mighty. He will save. He will rejoice over thee with joy. He will rest in his love. He will joy over thee with singing." Here again, we see God characterizing his love for his people with an internal joy, which overflows outwardly with singing. And finally, the Apostle John encourages believers to let their love terminate in action, so it's not merely heart affection or bowels of compassion. But it also terminates it moves towards doing good. It says hereby perceive we the love of God because he laid down his life for us. How do we know that God loved us? He laid down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. This is how we demonstrate our love. But whoso hath this world's good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth. And so this internal feeling or bowels of compassion manifest itself into deeds of love. Now let's look at some concise definitions of God's love from several theologians. We'll start with Wayne Grudem. He defines God's love as his eternal giving of himself to others. This definitely touches on part of the definition of love, God's eternal giving of himself to others. Louis Burkoff defines God's love as that perfection of God by which he is eternally moved to self-communication, to God revealing himself to us. That definitely is part of it. Charles Hodge says, love includes complacency. We don't use that word in the sense that he meant it anymore. What he means is it includes pleasure, satisfaction, or gratification. So love includes complacency, that is pleasure, satisfaction, gratification, desire, and delight, and has rational creatures for its objects. So he touches there on both aspects of love, the internal and the external. Greg Nichols, his definition is not concise. I looked for a concise definition, but he doesn't provide one, but it's worth looking at. There's some value in his definition. He says that God has seven primary affections, love, hate, joy, grief, pleasure, anger, and peace. He then distinguishes these in terms of absolute affections and relative affections. Love being an absolute affection because love exists in God apart from the creation of the world. There is not hate in God when evil doesn't exist. So that would be a relative affection. This is why scripture says that God is love, but it could never be said that God is hate. Hate could even be called a byproduct of love because God loves righteousness and is absolutely holy. And because of that, he of necessity hates everything that contradicts his good nature. Because he loves himself, he hates that which is opposed to him. Nichols goes on to describe love. He says, love often denotes a sensation of delight felt for someone or something that the soul regards as beautiful, pleasant, or attractive. In this emotive sense, it describes Isaac's delight in savory meat or Amnon's delight in tamar. Sometimes love depicts voluntary attachment and loyalty as opposed to rejection. Thus Leah, hoping Jacob would dwell with her, said, now will my husband love me? Thus the Lord calls voluntary cleaving to a master love. No man can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will hold to the one and despise the other. Sometimes love has a moral connotation. It refers to the virtue of goodwill and unselfishness in contrast to malice, selfishness, and evildoing. In this sense, Scripture commands us to love our Lord, our neighbor, and even our enemies. Our duty to love our enemies discloses that having goodwill does not always coalesce with a feeling of delight. Nor is feeling delight necessarily joined to having goodwill, as Amnon's mistreatment of Tamar confirms. In some relations, love is emotional, volitional, and moral. In godly conjugal love, a husband and wife feel delight in each other. They voluntarily cleave to each other and display goodwill for each other. Similarly, God delights in his people, cleaves to them, and has goodwill to them. Therefore, God's love illustrates an inherent weakness in Nichols' arrangement of God's attributes. He says, in one respect, God's love for his saints is a feeling, and in another sense, it is a virtue. And then go back to Hodge's definition. He includes those things. Love includes complacency, desire, and delight, and has rational creatures for its objects. Now my point in pushing down a little on into the definition of God's love is to show that love isn't merely a moral virtue, nor is it simply internal feelings. It is deep and complex. Just as human love has degrees depending on the object of love, so does God's love. Christ can love the rich young ruler and let him walk away without salvation. while he can also efficaciously love the tax collector into fellowship with him. So seeing the broad scope of the word love, let's turn our attention now to God the Father's greatest expression of love to us in his giving of his son. John 3.16, which I cited earlier, says that because of God's love, He gave His only begotten Son. There's a lot packed into that phrase, He gave His only begotten Son. What was it to give the Son? The father gave the son to be a savior by the son humbling himself and taking to himself a human body and soul in the womb of the virgin Mary. Now, this is the highest one, the son of God, stooping down to the lowest place and subjecting himself to all of the miseries of this life and even to death itself. This is a great act of humility and condescension on God's part. The Father gave the Son then to fulfill two main purposes to accomplish our salvation. The first, to live a morally perfect and upright life. Christ came to live under the law. He came to be obedient, to live a morally perfect and upright life as a man. And secondly, to become the atonement that we needed through his death, to be a substitutionary atonement. Those are the two main and great purposes of his first coming. It was only in this way that he could become our righteousness and our sin bearer. He had to be our substitute for both righteousness and atonement. In my mind, the love of God comes in the sharpest focus when Jesus struggled in prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane and the following events, the crucifixion. The weight of sin that he bore for us became unbearable for the Holy Christ. His just nature abhorred sin, and he was soon to be treated just as sin deserved. He prayed to the Father that if it were possible that this cup might pass from him. Now this was no apathetic prayer. The book of Hebrews tells us that he made his request with strong crying and tears. He was so earnest that he was dripping with sweat, though it was cold that night. Remember, Peter warming himself by the fire later on. His sweat mingled with blood, as Luke says, and fell to the ground as great drops. Nevertheless, there was no other possible way to secure the salvation promised without Christ submitting to this humiliation and to this death. On the cross, you can feel the weight of his suffering as he cried out, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, which is to say, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Is there anything more pitiable than an innocent one crying out? John 3.16 tells us that it was the love of the Father that put him there for us. Christ was willing to suffer in our place, but look at what cost. Let that sink in. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? As God forsook Israel for a small moment, As it says in Isaiah 54 7, So God forsook his son, but for a short time as he unleashed his anger upon Christ's body and soul for our sakes. Isaiah tells us, Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him. He hath put him to grief. When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. Even so, as Psalm 22, 24 says of the father concerning his son, for he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, neither hath he hid his face from him, but when he cried unto him, he heard. God heard those cries, those strong cryings and tears, and his answer was, there's no other way. This is the way, and Christ submitted to it. So we see that the Father's love for us is most clearly seen in this amazing act of giving the Son, for God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. Now the wonder of the love of God the Father in giving His Son is further expressed in seeing this love manifested in the incarnate Son, in Christ as a man. I want to now highlight Christ's love in the last moments of his life as he was being offered up for us. During this short period of time, he distinctly demonstrated his love on his disciples, on the people of Jerusalem, on his crucifiers, on his mother, and on the thief that was crucified next to him. starting with the disciples. Christ loved them even when the pressure of his trials was the greatest. John says, now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour was come, that he should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end. We can see this. as he continued to teach them and be an example of love leading right up to his death. He ate the Passover with them with great anticipation as he instituted the Lord's Supper. He washed their feet. He brought them with him into the Garden of Gethsemane to watch and pray with him. He spared them when he was arrested by telling the officers, let these go their way. After Peter denied him, the innocent Jesus looked upon him, which ultimately led to Peter's repentance and reconciliation. But Jesus didn't just love his disciples. He loved the people of Jerusalem. As he was making his triumphal entry on the back of the colt, he wept and lamented over the city. He said of them, if thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace, but now they are hid from thine eyes. For the day shall come upon thee that thine enemy shall cast a trench about thee and come past thee round and keep thee on every side. and shall lay thee even with the ground, and thy children within thee. And they shall not leave in thee one stone upon another, because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation." Jesus didn't say this with joy. He said it with weeping. He loved Jerusalem. After he cleansed the temple, he daily taught the people, even in the face of great opposition. He had a great concern for their welfare. Even as he was being led to Calvary, he loved the daughters of Jerusalem who were weeping for him, warning them of the impending destruction of their city. He loved Jerusalem. If we think it strange that Christ had concern and love for the fickle people of Jerusalem who said, crucify him, It is even more astonishing that he loved the very ones who crucified him and were mocking him. This is seen as he prayed for them, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. This is so opposite of what we would naturally do in this circumstance. If you or I were innocent of a particular crime and yet we're being tortured and executed unjustly, how would we respond to our abusers? Peter tells us to follow Christ's example in this. His example of suffering patiently without bitterness, as he says, for what glory is it if when you're buffeted for your faults, you shall take it patiently? But if, when you do well and suffer for it, you take it patiently, this is acceptable with God. This is what Christ did. because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example that you should follow his steps. Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth, who when he was reviled, reviled not again. When he suffered, he threatened not, but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously." When Christ was squeezed hard, all that came out was love. There's no doubt that God will repay unforgiven evil, unforgiven men, with everlasting punishment. But Christ wasn't comforting himself with this fact. As our example and as a man, he entrusted himself, he entrusted vengeance to God. While he was empty of all bitterness toward his enemies, he even asked God the judge to forgive the persecutors. What an example. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. Is that how we respond to unjust persecution? It is in times of testing that our character is revealed. How often have we been pressed a little too hard, and our hatred, bitterness, and ugliness comes out? Jesus was pressed harder than any other man, and yet all that came out was love. He was void of all evil. His time of trial revealed His divine character, and the love of God was in full, glorious display. Look now at his compassion for his mother. There he is in agony from his many wounds, with his life draining away with every drop of blood which is falling to the ground. He's struggling to breathe on the cross when he spots his mother and his disciple John standing by. When Jesus therefore saw his mother and the disciple standing by whom he loved, he saith unto his mother, woman, behold thy son. Then saith he to the disciple, Behold thy mother. And from that hour, that disciple took her into his own home. Mary's eldest son. Or as Mary's eldest son and Joseph apparently being dead, Jesus cared for his own mother's welfare, even while he was suffering and dying on the cross. He entrusted John to take care of her like a son should, which John did. He fulfilled this calling. Now, as if this kind of love in all his interactions wasn't enough, right before his death, He transacted the greatest act of clemency when he, by divine fiat, forgave one of the thieves crucified with him. Let's quickly review the scene. Remember, Jesus was crucified just outside the city of Jerusalem in a public place with people coming and going. Matthew says, and they that passed by reviled him, wagging their heads and saying, thou that destroyest the temple and buildest it in three days, save thyself. If thou be the son of God, come down from the cross. Likewise also the chief priests mocking him with the scribes and elders said, he saved others, himself he cannot save. If he be the king of Israel, let him now come down from the cross and we will believe him. He trusted in God, let him deliver him now. if he will have him, for he said, I am the Son of God. The thieves also which were crucified with him cast the same in his teeth." Think about the scene. Everybody was mocking Christ, even the thieves who were crucified with him. In Luke's record, we see that after this, one of the thieves had a change of heart. One moment he is deriding Jesus with all the rest, and the next he is rebuking his fellow thief. And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on him, saying, If thou be the Christ, save thyself and us. But the other answering rebuked him, saying, Dost thou not fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds. But this man hath done nothing amiss. And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, Today, thou shalt be with me in paradise. At some point, he realized that Jesus was indeed the Christ, and he then addressed him as Lord. The few words he spoke to Jesus indicated that he believed the scripture regarding Christ and his kingdom and humbly asked Jesus to remember him. when he came into his kingdom. Without hesitation, Jesus promised him that he would be with him in paradise that very day. Look at how freely Christ gave. He didn't demand a waiting period of penance or good works before granting the request. Here's a desperate man who now fears God, asking the one mediator to make a way for him into the eternal kingdom. Christ's love was so free, so abundant, so overflowing, that every turn it was just pouring out. Now for a quick word of application. What does this mean for us? Literally everything. Scripture tells us that we love God, because he first loved us. God's love is efficacious. It moves us to love him and to love our neighbor. Has our love waxed cold? Are we bitter and hard-hearted? Do we find ourselves in conflict with each other? Do we tend to be angry, harsh, and censorious? Are our devotions dry? Has scripture reading become difficult? What about prayer? What we need is a fresh view of God's love for us. We need to read and meditate upon the love of God. When we begin to awaken to the fact of the overwhelming love of God, our love will be inflamed. He loves people and we will love people too. Love is like that. It's so fundamental to the Christian life that nothing good can be done without it. And for those who don't yet know the love of God, please understand that His love is free and abundant. All you must do is desire it by faith and you will have it. John invites us. He says, and the spirit and the bride say come and let him that heareth come and let him that is a thirst come and whosoever will let him take the water of life freely. God loves us. Amen.