Sermon Transcript
1 John 4:7-21. Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: he sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.
This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. This is how we know that we live in him and he in us. He has given us of his Spirit, and we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world.
If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. And so we know and rely on the love that God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God and God in them. This is how love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment.
In this world we are like Jesus. There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. We love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar, for whoever does not love their brother and sister whom they have seen cannot love God whom they have not seen.
And he has given us this command: anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.
Thanks. Last week we began a series on the fruit of God’s Spirit. We’re asking, uh, when God is at work in our lives, what is it that is produced? Or when Christ’s work on our behalf becomes more and more real to us, How does it change us? We’re told from a little passage in Galatians at the end of Paul’s letter to them that the fruit of God’s Spirit, what he produces in us, is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
That’s what God is up to in our lives always. God wants more of that fruit in us, and that’s what we want too, isn’t it? I mean, more love, joy, peace, self-control— absolutely, we would all have more of that. So we’re studying this passage from Galatians for a total of 7 weeks, including last week. Each week we’ll look at a different part of the fruit that the Spirit grows in us, and today will be love, next week joy, then peace and so forth.
Though some of the weeks, uh, just to give you a preview, will double up because things like patience and self-control can naturally go together. If you think about it, many of our self-control issues are because we don’t want to wait, we’re impatient, right? And then we lose self-control. So some of them go together. Some of them we will study individually, and for those of you who prefer an expositional sermon series where we go verse by verse, line by line through every little detail of what is going on in the text, I think that you will enjoy this series because we’re spending a total of 7 weeks on 9 words, basically.
We can’t get much more thorough than that. On the other hand, for those of you who prefer a more topical series where we choose one subject and then teach broadly on what the Bible says on that one subject, I think you’ll enjoy this series too because each week we will need to look at other Scripture outside of Galatians to define what Paul means in Galatians when he says love, joy, peace, etc., right? Because in Galatians it’s only individual words, so we have to look elsewhere, but that’s okay, that’s valid because Scripture is always consistent. With itself. What it says over here about love will match what it says over there about love.
And as an aside, we should always use Scripture to interpret Scripture. What Matthew says needs to be informed by the Psalms, needs to be informed by Revelation. It will all fit together because the same Spirit is behind each of the authors. So today since we are studying what the Bible says about love we are looking at a passage from 1 John that defines it quite well and as we do we will see the love we all need, what if we don’t have it? But what if we do?
Where we find such a love and then what that love would do for our relationships if we ever did find it. The love we need, what if we don’t have it? But what if we do? Where we find such a love and then once we find it what it does for our relationships. So first, the love we all need: bottomless, endless, unconditional.
We all need that kind of love in our lives. Even if we don’t realize it, we need it. We all need to be completely known where nothing is hidden, everything is revealed, and yet at the exact same time be completely accepted, received, cherished, celebrated, praised. We all want that. We want to be seen to the bottom and loved to the sky, where there is no pretense, where we don’t need to wear any masks, right, where we can be full throttle us.
And then to have someone see us and say, yes, you delight me.
That is one of the deepest desires of our heart. Verse 16 says that we rely on a love like this, which is true. If you find that, it’ll feel like the source of life itself.
But, and you don’t have to raise your hand, How many of us would say that we regularly experience that kind of unconditional acceptance?
For many of us, I dare say it’s rare to be received so fully. Maybe it’s even unheard of to have someone run toward us like with arms open wide at all times, even if, for example, we’ve just hurt them?
Do we have someone running toward us then?
Do we have someone who we know for sure, for sure, no matter what, will stay with us no matter what we’ve done, who still enjoys us Even when our faults are exposed, all of our faults, when everything in the closet is revealed, when even the really off-putting stuff which we all have, even then do we have a person who is unhindered for us, never flinching, never blinking, still delighting in us?
That’s the love described in this passage. A love that does not run from our sin but runs toward our sin. A love that is so complete and thorough that we will never have any fear of judgment, verse 18.
Do we have that? Do you regularly experience that kind of love?
I contend again Being loved like that is one of the deepest desires of our heart. Now what if we don’t have it? To the extent we don’t have it, we will have fears, anxieties, insecurities. If we don’t have it, it says here we will have fear, verse 18. When we wonder, for instance, where we stand with the people who are most important to us, when we don’t really know if we’re accepted or not, we lose stability, we become worried, anxious, we fret, and sometimes that’s all we can think about, right?
Why don’t they like me? Fear is a great word, and when we fear, we often do all kind of desperate things, right? If you’re on the dating scene and your date didn’t contact you after the date, you thought it went pretty well, but now, you know, it’s been weeks and you haven’t heard anything. You’re like, why isn’t he calling? Or texting these days probably, sorry it’s been a while since I’ve been out there.
Why isn’t she texting? You know, do I need to text? How many texts can I send before he replies? Has she found someone else? Is it because of that thing that I said?
You’re laughing because you did it, right? We go crazy if we feel unaccepted. It’s not just dating, whenever we feel rejected we can really struggle.
I saw a book review recently. I have not read the book so I can’t officially recommend it but I’m putting it on my list because it sounds super fascinating. It’s a biography of Richard Nixon from the perspective of his search for acceptance. If you’re not familiar, Nixon, 37th President of the United States, most well known for what became Watergate which In the course of that investigation, it was found that he was secretly recording all of his meetings. He recorded others, he recorded himself, and most incriminating, he accidentally recorded himself plotting and ordering all kinds of illegal activity.
So he was impeached. He would have gone to trial, but the next president pardoned him. And if you only know one thing about Nixon, that’s the thing you know. But the book apparently tracks his whole life showing that he never felt like God loved him. He believed God’s love was something that must be earned.
He did not believe God’s love for him was by grace alone, and he thought he hadn’t earned it.
Even though he became good friends with Billy Graham, he never got there. He always felt, felt he fell short of earning God’s love. So the obvious question is, why? Why did he feel like it needed to be earned? And the book’s answer apparently is starting even as a young child with his parents.
Nixon said he never heard once from his parents, I love you, like zero times. And he doesn’t even blame them for that. He thinks that’s a valid way to raise a kid. But there you go, never told I love you. And simultaneously his parents were very demanding.
Mom required him to recite Shakespeare perfectly, play piano without error, get good grades, take care of his brother. So he had high demands for perfection but never any assurance of love just for being their kid. His dad, no better than mom, owned like a grocery store, gas station grocery store where all the family worked, mom, dad, everyone. And apparently dad always thought his sons weren’t working hard enough. His dad had some kind of office up on a balcony that overlooked the grocery store, and from this high-perched office he would degrade everyone for how lazy they were being down there.
And as an extra wrinkle in the story, the gas station grocery store was a converted church building. So the picture is a father figure on high in a church booming disapproval for a son who desperately wants acceptance and to be told that he’s good enough. That’s Nixon’s early life, which has got to mess with you. But then Nixon grows up and he gets into politics and he hopes to find acceptance from party leaders. He wants the people who have the power to make or break him in the party to make him, which they do initially, even to the point he becomes vice presidential candidate.
But then he gets some bad press and the party leaders don’t back him then. They say, you’re on your own. Nixon has to bail himself out. He gives a speech, smooths everything over. But what he learned from that experience is he’s like, okay, I shouldn’t trust party leaders for acceptance.
I should seek acceptance from the crowds, from the electorate. All it takes is a good speech and I can always write a good speech, so I’m set. But of course that doesn’t work, right? The crowds don’t always accept him. Sometimes he wins an election, sometimes he doesn’t.
And so now he’s in a position where he knows, okay, I can’t trust crowds, I can’t trust party leaders, I can’t trust parents. Where do I turn for acceptance? His final quest to be loved is from history. He thinks when it’s all said and done and everything is evaluated that historians will honor him as one of the great world leaders, which is why he starts recording every meeting he has. He wants proof of all the great stuff he’s come up with, but then he inadvertently records himself committing crimes, which is his final legacy.
And ironically, it’s his search for acceptance that led to his complete rejection. Right? It’s a Shakespearean tragedy, which is even more ironic because his mom made him memorize all of them. He’s an extreme example of the lengths we might go to find acceptance. He’s terrified of being judged, of being rejected, so he scrambles around manipulating situations, manipulating people, never really giving anyone the full story, only telling them the version of the truth that he is pretty sure will make them accept him.
And that’s what happens if we wonder if we’re loved. Fear.
Now positively, what if we are assured that we are embraced, celebrated always? What if we had the confidence that someone would tell us, I see you, I love you, you’re wanted, I’m for you, I have your back when you fall.
What if we had that? We’d act confident, we’d be transparent, we’d be free from fear. See that in verses 17 and 18, and we have confidence when we’re judged because perfect love has driven out any fear. Stability, peace of mind, rest.
You just wonder how much history would be different, how much the world would be different if Nixon had known down to his bones that he was loved. That he was loved all the way to the bottom with his failings, mishaps, sin, maybe even laziness and all, right? If he knew he didn’t need to work for acceptance, if he knew that Jesus had earned it for him. If he knew that, he would have been free. All this energy he put into asking, am I accepted?
He could have put that energy into actually being a good leader. How about you?
Do you know all the way down to your bones that you are loved?
The way we can tell The litmus test if we really believe that we are accepted is by looking at how much confidence we have versus how much fear we have regarding being judged.
How do we feel when our shortcomings are exposed or could potentially be exposed? How do we respond to failures?
Do we hide them? Cover up? Make excuses for them? Blame others?
If we do, it shows that we still have fear, not confidence. We’re afraid of rejection because we’re afraid we don’t measure up, and we’re afraid if we don’t measure up, it means we have not been perfected in love. If we’re blaming, making excuses, hiding, it shows something within us still thinks that our acceptance conditional. We think love and acceptance is merit-based and we’re worried if we have enough merit.
But if we really believe that we are loved, accepted, celebrated no matter what, without conditions. If we knew we could never lose acceptance, that we would always be celebrated no matter how big our failure is. If we really believed that, we wouldn’t cover, we wouldn’t hide, we wouldn’t blame. We would be confidently transparent because there would be no fear of judgment. In fact, we could even proactively talk about our weaknesses.
You may remember that is exactly what Paul did, 2 Corinthians 12. He says he boasts about his weaknesses. He makes sure everyone knows what he’s bad at. In his first letter to the Corinthians, he actually did it. He admitted how scared he was when he first preached for them.
He says, I wasn’t eloquent, I was trembling. What I said may not have even made any sense.
And he tells that to people who he is supposedly leading. Have you ever seen anything like that? Yeah, maybe an executive in your company comes out to all the employees and says, you know, I didn’t know the whole board of directors was going to be in that meeting, and when they walked in, I was so nervous I just froze up. I know I was stuttering. I even cried a little.
Can you imagine someone being that confident speaking about their weaknesses? No fear of judgment. None.
Are we anywhere near that? Are you that totally transparent with with anyone, right? You can forget about your employer or the general public. I’m sure you could come up with some justification for why you should not be totally transparent with your work team. Okay, fine, don’t be transparent at work.
I won’t even argue the point with you. What about just the people that we’re closest with?
What about your best friends?
What about your spouse?
How openly do we talk about our insecurities with them?
Or do we fear judgment even from those people?
If we’ve had a day where we are embarrassed at work, if we had a day where someone challenged us and we crumbled like a coward, is there anyone We share and say how small it made us feel?
Or do we not even feel safe doing that with those closest to us? Are we afraid of even them? Do we feel like we need to project strength even with our best friends?
The question is, how convinced are you that you are really loved and accepted all the way to the bottom? Do you really believe that you are celebrated to the sky always?
The way you can tell is what you do with your insecurities. Do you reveal them or do you conceal them?
Do they make you afraid or do they give you confidence?
If they don’t give you confidence, Where do we get that? How can we be assured of such unconditional acceptance? Where do we find a love like this? This love that always runs toward us, never away.
It’s really only with Jesus. I’ll try to prove it. The way we can know for sure, for sure, for sure that we are cherished no matter what really only comes from Jesus. We really won’t find it anywhere else. Our parents probably tried, probably, but they fell short sometimes, didn’t they?
Just like we fall short with our kids. Hopefully we don’t fall as short as Nixon’s parents did, but we probably don’t do it perfectly, right? I’ll tell you, I need to apologize to my kids often. I won’t tell you how often because I’m worried of your judgment, but I need to tell them, I’m sorry, I lost my temper, that’s on me. Now I also tell them, I needed to give you a consequence, right, for whatever I was mad about.
It was right for me to take screen time away or treats away, that’s the age of our kids. Correct, right? I needed to give you a consequence, but I should have done it in a way that made you even more confident in my love, not less. I should not have yelled at you like I did, right? I’m sorry.
I need to tell them that often. So for me at least, you’re probably a better parent than me, but for me, at best what they see is someone trying to love them unconditionally. Trying but not quite getting there. So none of us find this love that we need from our parents. Neither do we really find it with a spouse even though again most spouses probably try.
We probably try. Right? I’m sure everyone here if we’re married we intend to be the biggest cheerleader for our spouses. Right? We aim for that.
But we fall short and they fall short. We can feel judged in a marriage. We can feel rejected in a marriage. A spouse isn’t always a safe place to share failures. Not always.
Now, if it’s a good marriage, you know, husband and wife work toward loving each other like that and they apologize when they don’t, but there is no husband and wife who at all times without fail sees each other to the bottom and loves each other to the sky. We all fall short of it some because we’re all flawed and broken and we’re in relationships with people who are also flawed and broken. We do not always deal with each other’s sin the way God deals with our Sin. When we sin against each other, and we all do, when there’s a rift in the relationship, when intimacy is to some degree damaged or broken because of what someone has done, there’s more than this, but there’s about 3 ways to respond. Only one of those ways is seeing them to the bottom, loving them to the sky, which is what God always does.
That’s option number 3, and we’ll talk about how he does that in just a second. But we sometimes choose the other 2 options, and therefore we don’t love each other perfectly. We might, for instance, option number 1 of how to respond when someone offends us— someone offends us, option 1, we can make them pay for what they did to us. We can extract little amounts of revenge here and there until we believe that we’re even. You know, we’ll make little snide comments, Or maybe we have the opportunity to do something nice for them and we don’t do it, right?
Or we have the chance to inconvenience them somehow and we take it, right? We make them pay, and once they’ve completed time served, then we’ll move toward them again, right? Embrace them again, celebrate them again. But of course, that’s not the love that we need from each other. That’s That’s not seeing each other to the bottom and loving them to the sky.
It’s really only seeing them to the bottom. Because, I mean, we see their flaws. We know those are there. We acknowledge how wrong the other person is. We’ve seen them for who they are.
But we’re not loving them to the sky. We’re making them earn love back from us. Then likely every bit of debt that we try to make them pay for, every bit of little revenge that we take, now makes them mad at us. So now they aren’t going to treat us with unconditional acceptance, right? It’s because we made them pay, now they’re going to make us pay, and it’s this vicious cycle, and then neither of us have the love that we need.
Okay, but that’s one option for how to respond when someone offends you— revenge. Option 2, when someone hurts us, we could act like what they did wasn’t that big a deal. We could tell ourselves, I’m not really that hurt, let’s just move on. And that might seem like a good option, but it isn’t, because that’s not really the intimacy that we’re looking for either. If we pretend a problem doesn’t exist when there really is a problem, that’s a type of acceptance, But we’re not actually accepting the real person that we’re in a relationship with.
We’re loving some version of the person who never offended us, and that person doesn’t exist. Right? We’re loving a pretend person who doesn’t have any stick skeletons in their closet, and that person isn’t there. So we might be loving them to the sky, but we’re not seeing them to the bottom, and that’s not intimacy. Because we haven’t acknowledged the real person who we’re in a relationship with.
Intimacy is when you are known and loved. Known, flaws and all. Flaws acknowledged, not ignored, not glossed over. Flaws really admitted and still, I love you, celebrate you to the sky.
But pretending is an option.
You could deal with offenses that way, or we could do option number 3, what God always chooses with us, seeing us and loving us anyway, which requires— the only way to see someone and still love them if you’ve really seen them, the only way to do that is with forgiveness.
Forgiveness is saying to someone who hurt you, it is not okay what you did, Forgiveness is never glossing over how terrible an offense was. Forgiveness always admits the offense was real and wrong, but it is also saying, I’m not going to make you, the offender, pay for it. It’s saying, I release you from your debt. You don’t owe me anything. I’m not taking any revenge to get paid back.
But just like any debt, if someone owes you but you’re not going to make them pay for it, it means in some sense you need to pay for it. In any debt, if someone caused a deficit and now they are not going to restore it, someone’s on the hook for it. And that’s easy to understand in financial terms, but it’s even true relationally. Anytime someone offends us and we forgive, there is a sense in which we, the offended, need to compensate for the deficit the other person created in the relationship. That wound they caused is absorbed by us somehow if we forgive.
And in practical terms, it probably works like this. Somebody offends you and you feel bitter. Every time you feel that way again because of what they did, you remind yourselves, I’m not gonna make them pay for that. We say, I release them from that debt they caused when they hurt me, right? So I’m not gonna make the snide comment right now, even though I could, everyone would laugh.
I’m not gonna ignore them when I see them, right? I’m not making them pay, I’m releasing them from the debt. That’s forgiveness.
For us, forgiveness is often a process instead of a one-time event, and at times we of course struggle to do it, especially if we’ve been hurt badly, right? We don’t always choose option number 3, and hey, if we heard your story of why you can’t forgive someone, I’m sure we would say, wow, I wouldn’t forgive that person either. I’m sure that’s what we would say. Jesus would tell you something different. Let him do that.
But the point is, whenever we struggle to forgive, It means at that moment we are not cheering for the other person. We are not celebrating the other person to the depths of who they are. And it’s why no relationship on earth can really provide us the acceptance that we need. We don’t always and immediately deal with each other’s sin the way God deals with ours. We’re not always known and accepted with each other.
Sometimes we’re known, sometimes we’re accepted, but we’re not always full throttle in both directions. The only relationship that sees us to the bottom, loves us to the sky, cheers for us, celebrates us always, at all times, even in our failures, is Jesus. Where we struggle to forgive, he never does, because he has already done the work to forgive us.
This is what happened on the cross. On the cross, all that relational burden that we created that is now in between him and us, all the rejection that would be coming our way was carried by him. The debt we owe was paid by him there. That’s verse 10 of our text that explains Jesus was the atoning sacrifice for our sins. It means Jesus absorbed the cost.
He absorbed the pain that we caused in our relationship with him so that we could be together with him in perfect relational harmony with zero bitterness between us, where he enjoys us with abandon. He celebrates us unconditionally. One of my favorite explanations of what Jesus’ atonement accomplished is to break down the word atonement into 3 words.
At-one-ment. Atonement made us at one with him again. So never does he hold our sins against us and never does he act like our sins aren’t that big a deal. He never brushes them off. He never glosses over our offenses.
He never says, ah, it didn’t really bother me. It’s okay. He tells us it was a big deal. The cross shows us how big a deal it was, how much He had to pay because of our sins, but He paid it.
He always takes the third option with us, forgiveness. With Him and only with Him are we truly, fully known and fully accepted, always, without hesitation.
So if you recognize that you have a desire to be fully seen, flaws and all, all the mess, fully seen and also fully received unconditionally, if you know you have that need, and we all do, there’s only one place, only one relationship where it can be filled. Without fail, and that’s with Jesus.
Now finally and very quickly, what does finding a love like that do for our relationships? It makes us love more and love better. John makes the point here, verse 19, we love because he first loved us. So you can imagine if we are totally confident of our acceptance, if we have no doubt that that we are loved and somebody enjoys us even when we failed terribly, if we have that kind of assurance then we will be more loving to those around us. I mean if we have the deepest longing of our hearts filled to overflow and we go out into a world with a— and we have a totally full heart, what are we going to do out in the world?
We’re going to be loving to those around us. You know, when you meet somebody who just like recently fell in love and they seem to kind of bounce everywhere, you know, they’re kind, they’re patient, they’re probably more huggy, very generous, handle all the ups and downs of life with ease, right? Because their heart is full, that’s why they’re acting that way. Christians, we should have the fullest hearts. If we grasp even a little of how wide and deep is the love of God for us, we even begin to understand how fully we are known and accepted.
Then we’ll move out in compassion and forgiveness and generosity to all those around us because our hearts are full. Let’s pray. Father, thank you for Jesus, where we can find an unimaginable love and acceptance all the way to the bottom, all the way to the bottom of the mess that we are and we hide from others, Lord. He sees all of it and yet He still runs toward us and enjoys us, celebrates us, brings us close, delights in us, Lord. I pray that we feel His delight in us and pray it enables us to be transparent with others, to walk out in the world in confidence and assurance, love and generosity, Lord.
Transform us by what He did We pray those things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
