1-3 John - 1st John 4:20-21 - God is Love - part 2

So we're going to look at 1 John 4, 20 and 21 this morning. And the classic case of love and hate. So I want to start by reading, starting with verse 19. Can I get someone to read that for us? 19 through 21. Okay, let's look at verse 19. I know Bob talked about this last week, right? I didn't catch up with that, so I hope I say the same thing here. The same thing that Bob said. So, who is the we in verse 19? Believers. He includes himself. Will someone read 1 John 4, 7?

Beloved, let us love one another. Beloved is from God and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Okay, so it's the believer, beloved, the divinely loved ones. and they are born of God. So, how do we recognize God's love for us as believers? What do we believe? Christ is the Son of God and we are His beloved brethren. Okay. The person and work of Christ, right?

1 John 4.9, can someone read that please? By this the love of God was manifested in us that God has sent his only begotten Son in the world into the world so that we might live through him. And it's nice that I can kind of stick with 1 John 4 here, stick close to the context. So God sent his only son. So this is how we recognize God's love for us.

And how do we respond, how can we respond in God's love towards us, or in love towards God? By loving the brethren. Okay. Yeah. And there's no way we can do that without the Lord in us. Correct. 1 John 4, 10-11. And this is love, not that we love God. So, like you said, we can't do it. Not that we love God. We didn't. We couldn't. 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.

So there's a demonstration of that love. It's towards other believers. So the love here, and we're going to see this consistently throughout our verses this morning. This word love comes from agapeo, root word agape. It's used of Christ as love by God and it's the same love that Christ demonstrated on the cross for the world. It's Jesus longing for the Father. It's that relationship that they have. It's God's very nature.

So let's move into verse 20 here. If someone says, I love God. So this word if, it's I forget, I think it's a third class condition of this. So it may or may not be true. There's a condition of uncertainty and possibility. So this someone, they may or may not say that they love God.

So the word love here, it's agape again, agapeo. Present, indicative, active. So present is continuous, repeated action. It's a fact and it's being accomplished by the subject of the verb. So the someone here that says I love God is doing the loving. So this person is saying that they love God with agape love. And it's continuous, it's repeated, it's habitual, it's factual. But in the same breath here, I love God.

If someone says I love God and hates his brother, this word hate, it means to pursue with hatred, to detest. It's present, subjective, active. So, it's a continuous repeated action, indefiniteness, or uncertain, and it's the same person doing the hating that says they're doing the loving.

So, this person hates his brother. So, what is the brother? It's a fellow believer. Christians who are exalted to the same heavenly place. So this is talking about, and it's connected with the someone. So the someone and the brother are related. They're in the same heavenly family. So what does it say about this believer, this brother? He is a liar. John 8, 44.

Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. So this is talking about the devil. And I wanted to underscore nature. So the devil's nature is lying. Lying comes from his source. I think we can see that a believer who is saying these things is a liar. It's connecting that action or what he does, what he says to the source. His sin nature is sourced in the devil. It's sourced in that nature. You're talking about lying. Yeah. Confessing Christ is your savior and hating your brother. You can totally cancel one another out. They're total opposites. So they come from two different sources, right? So let's move on. For the one who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.

So how do we see each other? How do we look at each other? What kind of eyes? Spiritual eyes. Physical eyes. Yes, spiritual or physical. In this case, He sees his brother with physical eyes, right? Do we see God with physical eyes? So how do we see God? Spiritually, with spiritual eyes. And how do we love God? What's the only way that we can love God? It's with spiritual understanding. And so how can we love each other? Acting out of a self nature, but acting in his nature. In his nature. So with a spiritual understanding, right? So if it's out of the self nature, or the sin nature, it would be with physical understanding, with earthly understanding. It's kind of good to know, because sometimes we can be pretty unlovable. I mean, and it's not... We're not to love each other based off of our looks or who we are or whatever.

2 Corinthians 2, 14-16 it says, or it speaks of the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him. So this is a spiritual sense that we have as believers. our nose, our spiritual nose can smell the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him. Ephesians 1, 18-19 talks about the eyes of your heart having been enlightened. So let's go on.

Verse 21, in this commandment we have from Him that the one who loves God should love his brother also. So there's a principle here, a commandment. The principle is one who truly loves God will truly love his brother also. Is that should a commandment? Should love his brother also, is that a commandment? It should let us build it also.

Right. So like a mosaic commandment. Yeah. It wouldn't be a mosaic commandment. Or a law. Is it law? I'm not sure if you're going to get it. If you can work back to what I think Bob and I both commented earlier in 1 John that Christ's commandments which were first spoken of back in John 8 in that area I give you a new commandment.

So Christ gave commandments under grace. I might share a few. And there's a differentiation between law or mosaic law and his commandments, God's commandments, Christ's commandments. Roger, you say Christ gave commandments under grace. Yes. under grace. He said I give you a new commandment that you love one another.

Actually, we've been through that quite a lot. Unfortunately, I can't. But he was still speaking to the Jews at the time. He was speaking to the disciples in the Boone discourse. So he was speaking to the Jews, that's true. But it has application, I believe, to the church. looking forward to grace.

It's almost like a dummy run because the Holy Spirit hasn't been given. And then what's neat is that 1 John, we've probably been through this in earlier chapters, he refers back to the chapter 2, he refers back to those new commandments. He says it's an old commandment, but it's a new commandment. I thought of that, I wasn't going to touch on that. Let me ask this, and this is something that will come up a little bit later if we get to it.

Can we, with our best efforts, love our brother? If it's a duty, you should love your brother as Christ loves us. Can we, with our best efforts, do that? And that's where there's the there's the old saying that the brother is in the neck or is he is not the same. The same room. OK.

Well, yeah, Craig, I think, you know, kind of a reductionist view of this whole thing is the new commandment is basically to love one another as he has loved us, correct? I mean, that's truly under grace. So it is a commandment, it's called a commandment, but it's out of our power and out of our strength, right? Loving our brother as he has loved us is an impossible task, is it not?

That's got everything to do with who we are. I think in the earlier verses in chapter 2, it comes out of this relationship that we're abiding in Him. The execution of that doesn't come out of us, it comes out of our relationship with Him and Christ. So that's the only way we can accomplish that, as Bob said. And what is the main theme of 1 John? It's to know God, to have fellowship with God. sense you can you can execute that command.

So I want to touch on Paul here. With Paul it's all about position. Ephesians 2 4 through 6, or specifically in verse 6 here, Christ has raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. So it's about position. It's about location. It's about where we're at.

With John, he talks about source. You'll see a lot of God or out of, out from God, in Him, He and us, born of God, live through Him. So is there a difference between position and source? Yes, because you're depending on a source of power to enable you to do what has been commanded. Named us maybe, it's Him. So if we're positioned, who are we positioned in? If we're positioned in Christ, then He is our source, right?

Yes, and it has to be moment by moment abiding. Not just, yeah, take it for granted and then go on as if it never happened in reality. Not that the Lord So Paul explains, he explains in detail where we're at and expects us to live according to who we are. John assumes that position. He doesn't go back and explain in detail because his audience, they know it, they understand it.

So he assumes that position and tells us what the source produces in us. And today we're talking about love. Ephesians 2, 4-7, we have a mega love sandwich. So there's wealth of mercy, or mega love is sandwiched between the wealth of mercy and the wealth of grace. I got that from Vernon, sorry. But it's... I like it. Ephesians 2, 4-7. Can someone read that please?

But God, being rich in mercy, because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ, by grace you have been saved, and raised us up with him, and seated us with him in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. So that in the ages to come, He might show the surpassing riches of His grace and kindness for us in Christ Jesus. So this is God's love for us. It's mega love.

It comes out of His mercy. His wealth of mercy and His wealth of grace. So let's go to Let's look at the word hate. So what is the source of this believer who hates his brother? We touched on it a little bit. The sin nature. The sin nature is associated with the devil. So what is the characteristic of being sourced out of the devil? Only evil continually. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar. And his word is not in us. So this is a lie, right? Someone saying they have not sinned. But all have sinned, right? But it makes God a liar because his word says that all have sinned.

So let's look at The characteristic of being sourced out of God. 1 John 4.19 We love because He first loved us. That's the first verse we looked at. So, what if we don't love this way? Are we saying that we don't, that He doesn't love us? It's basically saying it's making God a liar. So John talks a lot about knowing God in an experiential way. Are we getting to know the Lord if we don't love the Lord?

If we're hating If we're in that sin nature, how does that affect our growth and ultimately our relationship and fellowship with the Lord? It doesn't affect our relationship, right? It affects our fellowship. So what does hating look like? So are we in fellowship?

Growing in the Lord? Are we demonstrating unselfish love if we're hating? No. So what does loving look like? Are we focused on self? No. Demonstrating hate for our fellow believer? Are we lying to God if we are loving? some good questions to ponder. So is there a prescription for loving the way God loves?

Just an observation, you asked the question, what does this love look like? as sinners, he died for us. And when we love our brother, we hate the sin. We differentiate from the brother and the sin. And we love the brother, but we hate the sin that the brother might be committing. In the same way, in our own sinning process, we hate our sins, but we love to look at Jesus and we love our new nature in Him and there's a differentiation there between that's not who I really am just like that's not who you really are in Christ. That takes maturity doesn't it? To understand that this is the love of God being manifested in us, that we hate sin but we love the sinner. because he loves us, not because of anything else. Good.

Yeah, while we're yet sinners, Christ died for us. Yeah, I think it's It's difficult to see sin in others and not do anything about it. Or, likewise, it's difficult to see sin in our own lives and not try to do anything about it. I think it was the attempts in time of our sin natures to legislate morality. And without the love of God, there's great hate for the thief, the murderer, homosexual, whatever, but with the love of God, there's the love of the person, but the hate of the sin.

Quite a contrast. Right. And it's with that spiritual understanding, right, that if we understand our position, and it's difficult to to be that way unless we understand identification. If we don't understand our position, who we are in Christ, and every spiritual blessing that he has given us, then we can't move forward. It's difficult to grow.

We can't understand that the sinful world, they sin because that is who they are. or who the world is, right? The unbelievers who are in Adam, right? So that's their nature. It's natural for the unbeliever to say, you hate me, because they can't Instead they don't see that distinction. And that's why a lot of people they call Christians haters.

And likewise, if we don't understand our position, it's tough to grow past just constantly focusing on our sins and trying to give it our best effort to get out of bondage or whatever. So is it my best efforts to look at my conformity of my behavior to a set of rules? Yeah, it wasn't supposed to be a joke. It is funny, I mean, I underscored every time the word my in there. That's a selfish focusing on ourselves when this whole time we've been, John's been telling us, focus on God, no God.

So how does God's love get produced? If we don't do it with our best efforts, how does it get produced? Galatians 2 19-21 For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. And the life which I now live by the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself up for me. I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness comes through the law, then Christ died needlessly. is no longer I who do the living but Christ does the living in me.

So how does God view these two believers? There's the one who says he loves God and hates his brother and the one who loves God and loves his brother. So the one who says he loves God and hates his brother, is he positioned in heaven? Is he in Christ? Is he out of fellowship? Is he not growing? So the one who loves God and loves his brother, is he positioned in heaven? Is he in Christ? Is he in fellowship and growing?

So I think this, just to sum it up, I think we can see that It's counterproductive to be these two things, these two extremes. This extreme of love, agape love, and say that you're doing that. And this extreme of hating a fellow believer. It just takes away from fellowship with Christ.

Do we have any comments or questions? Can we ever show too much grace? It goes to the idea of love the sinner, hate the sin. Is there a chance that we can show too much grace, as Roy's example was saying? Because I think somebody maybe not understanding all the way might might say that that's too much grace because you're accepting their sin. How do we go about loving our brother who is in sin? Do you have a comment?

I can answer that with what Christ happened to say at one time to the apostles before the Holy Spirit was given, of course, but he said, I have many things to tell you but you cannot bear them now. So there may have to be a growth factor in them because they're not going to understand it all at once. They may have to learn it one little bit at a time until it finally gels in their mind and they know what the position of Christ is, what believing with that mind is, and how living with that mind is.

Certainly, yeah, I think that our actions can speak louder than words. I think when we look at scripture, and I don't remember where this is, but speaking the truth in love, it's actually truthing in love. so they go hand in hand so we we don't withhold truth just to love someone to show people that the love of God they have to know the truth you can't ignore that but you can't just give them just hardcore truth and not love them that's that's a tough question because It's case by case. It's tough to know what to do. But I think that being patient with people helps.

Our Wednesday night discussion on Romans talks about the weaker believer and the stronger believer. And I was wondering if it had anything to do with that. Whereas if there's a weaker believer, the stronger believer is to love his brother. But you're to teach your weaker brother. And that's talking about two believers, right? Right. Well, that's kind of the case that you're covering here, right? But you could just expand this idea of love. But yeah, in this context, it's between two believers. Margaret?

Well, what I was going to say, kind of on that line, that I don't think there is such a thing as too much grace. I think what the issue is, is if you don't understand identification and where the grace is coming from and how much grace has been extended to us, and those would be young believers or even believers who are not growing. I mean, we all know plenty of people in other churches who have been believers for years and don't understand an inkling of what grace really is. So when they look at you and they see you giving this mega grace to this person who is sinning.

They don't understand that because they absolutely don't understand grace. But that's what the witness is and we have that opportunity to share what that mega grace really is because we have that view. And they absolutely have never understood that. They don't see it at all. Yeah, if someone doesn't understand what's going on there, They have a hard time separating sin from the person. They really do. And that's what grace is all about. Being able to see that and understand that. Not that we have it all worked out for sure, but if you understand identification, you begin to see that separation.

And what that made me think of, what happens when we put an unbeliever under, if we expect them to live as a Christian, then we're putting them under law and that's not who they are. So then that's where the hate comes from. The grace is not represented that way. says, when Jim was talking about commandment, in the Old Testament it says, love your neighbor as yourself. The neighbor can be a non-Jew.

Whereas this seems like it's more restrictive, saying just love your brothers. You don't have to love those other guys. It just seems kind of an oddity that it almost seems narrower. Is it implying to love your brothers? Is it saying to not love? Yes, it's not included there. And maybe that's a different passage, it's a different topic. So right now John's just talking about fellowship with believers and it's really just a separate issue. better to be lived out through identification with Christ. So those commandments to the church actually are well over 613. I mean, they go on and on. And they include loving the unbeliever. which is the general will of God, and it applies to the growing up of the church as well, to love our brother in this way.

But I also wanted to touch on Ephesians 4.15, you mentioned the treating in love.

I think that's one of the hardest ways for us to grow in love with one another, is to see a person having a different doctrinal or theological conviction, or not having a conviction at all, and us having a problem with that. How do we go about doing it?

And Burns mentions even if it hurts them. The church today, and I mean church as a general term, often errs on the side of loving without truth, and don't see the combination of the two. It's actually a gracious thing to clear up unbelief, or a lack of belief, or a confusion in a person's life. That's gracious, even though it might hurt. It's still grace to show them the way that the Lord has truth in the Word to them.

I have started to really combine those two terms in my mind every time I see the word love, because it's so typical of us in this age to say, well, let's just love and let love, and let love, and let love. But it means the truth in love, and that means you only can really love somebody when you're loving him with the truth. That is really key. And that's awesome because we have a way of loving that no one else has. And that's God's type of love. It's pretty cool. And both of those points that... I forgot what the first one was. Truth and love. God's character. He is fully truth. He is fully love. He is both of those. So you can't separate them.

And I'll just move on. Jessica reminded me of maybe the only instance in my life that I recall where I've been kind of criticized and that you know, can you express too much grace? My brother was married to a very nice lady and she left him at a difficult time in their lives. financially and she cheated on him and went behind his back and everything. This was the lady that had been in a Bible study for a while and really seemed to be into it and I don't know if she's saved or not but she was my sister-in-law for a good number of years and they had two children and so she's the mother of my niece and nephew and I dearly love my brother and I didn't like the way she treated him but I wasn't in on you know everything and I can't imagine my brother being so rotten but that she would do that to him but still about two years after the divorce she came to my dad's funeral and no one in the family spoke to her or went to her but I went up and I hugged her and told her it was nice to see her and we cried and later in the day my other sister-in-law says how could you do that to her after what she did to Troy And this was in a public setting of the family eating together. The sister-in-law wasn't there, but it was quite a few of us together, and I said, I mentioned God's grace to me, that He had been so gracious to me. How could I not be gracious to another person?

And I mentioned sin and all that. I don't know what I said. They all just kind of looked at me like I was weird. But, and these are church people some of them. I feel like we, and you do, we gave you an opportunity to speak the truth to her. Yeah. Because otherwise there wouldn't have been, I mean there might not have been, but at least you left the door open for her. Yeah.

I didn't want to shut her off from the rest of the family and say like I'm never going to speak to you again. She won't be my friend on Facebook. I'm just serious. You just don't know what people are going to need in the future and what kind of contact you could have later because of her children still being family and so on. I just can't treat her that way.

God wants to give everybody an opportunity So, yeah, who are we to dictate? We're just speaking to the grace and truth idea for you, I think. It reminded me of John 1, 17. The law was given by Moses. The grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. Both of those came with him. Amen. And Jesus fulfilled the law, right? The only one who ever did or could. Greg, one of the things about being here and studying together as a body is that we're learning to love. Because it's the content that we get from the Word that allows us to So we're practicing and learning to love by the truth that we take in.

And I don't know, it just brings it full circle as to what we're doing here and why we're doing it. And study is not for the purpose of going into the mind and building a single person up. It's designed to enable you to love better. I mean, I just take study to a whole new level. I'm studying so that I can love better. Actually, I'm studying so that Christ can love through me in a more good way. There's an individual aspect to growing and to fellowship, but there's also that communal, the body of Christ together growing and knowing the Lord. Our spirit agrees with God's spirit, and that's where the unity comes in. Yeah, there's a unity.

One thing, getting back to this word commandment, seems somewhat annoying. But I think one thing is, if you look at the Mosaic Law, the commands had depth as their failure. Whereas this commandment is more of an, it seems like it, to drift away from it. And it's for life, right? So it's not the same idea as Mosaic commands in law. It's the same word, commandment, but it seems like it's under a different dispensation. Bob?

Yeah, to jump ahead a little bit, we'll be dealing with this in a few weeks, but if you go on to chapter 5, it talks about the love of God in more detail. And it causes commandments, not burdens. You know, if we want to put this in context, I mean, not burdensome, is simply as stated in verse 4, chapter 5, it's our faith that overcomes the world and all the temptations. And it says in verse 5 then, who that overcomes the world but he that believes in the Son of God.

And what is our belief that John puts forth? Remember, this is black and white. I mean, John says this is what the life looks like, that you love your brother. There's just If you say who you are in Christ and you're not loving your brother, something's wrong here, right? I think those commandments aren't burdensome because they're grace-based. We respond by faith that what God says about his son and who we are in him is really truth. Jim, thanks. Truth is really everything. We can never separate truth from love ever. Perfect. Yeah.

So we're going to get, we're going to really look at this in great detail in the next month. The first five or six verses. Okay, let's close and pray. Lord, we thank you so much for your truth, and we thank you for the results that it brings in our lives, that we grow in fellowship with you, that we can know you. There is truth about you that we can know. And we just thank you for revealing that to us. In Jesus' name. Amen.