-Transcript-
00:37 Amen. Glory to God. Welcome to the program.
00:44 Hope you’re doing great. What is this month about? What is this season about? It’s about love. Amen.
00:45 It’s about love. There’s a lot of discussion of love around this season of time here. People getting cards and gifts.
00:55 I know how, you know, special time it is. Amen. To show love to the one that you love.
01:05 And I think the question we should ask as Christians, honestly and sincerely, is how do we show God that we love Him? You know, we always say as Christians in church, God’s been good to us and we praise God, we worship Him. But do we love Him here today? Not just in a word, but in action, in deed, in truth, and how we live, do we love God? You know, the Bible gives us some steps that we can follow to show that we love God. And the first one we’re gonna get to in a minute.
01:34 Our text verse here is 1 John 4:19 – 5: 3. Usually, for whatever reason, I always stay within the chapters. Usually it’s 1 John 4 19- 20 or whatever. But this time I actually went inter-chapter, went multiple chapters.
01:53 1 John 4:19 -1 John 5: 3. And it’s interesting, as many messages as I’ve preached on the radio and as many messages as I’ve preached to the church, I hardly ever do that. I don’t know why, because as I understand it, the chapters were just put in later as kind of ways to break up the text. They weren’t in the original epistles or letters.
02:15 But we see here in 1 John, that was just a bonus little fact there, we love Him because He first loved us. Alright, so we see a very simple fact here. And this is a very important fact.
02:26 God loved us first. You know, there’s some songs out there and poetry and so forth that says, I found God. And that’s incorrect.
02:35 God found us before we were even born. He knew us and He found us and He revealed Himself to us. He chose us.
02:41 Amen. When we look what God’s called us to do in the ministry or in life, we should thank Him because He chose us to do it. We didn’t do anything.
02:48 It’s not anything that we can do. It’s all of God. So we love Him because He first loved us.
02:54 Loved us. A very important point. Verse 20 of 1 John 4. If a man say, I love Godand hateth his brother, he is a liar.
03:03 For he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? And here in this letter here in 1 John 4:20, we see a very powerful truth that really deals with faith. Right? If a man say, I love God and hateth his brother, he’s a liar. For he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen.
03:25 Right? How can he love God whom he hath not seen? The idea is, if you don’t even love people that you can see, Amen, that you can see and touch, that you come to know and that you, you know, you interface with or talk with and and conversate with on a regular basis, if you can’t love them, Amen, and the brother here I think means beyond a relative, I think it means a brother or sister in Christ, okay?
03:50 So if you can’t love the brethren, if you go to church and you got a problem with sister so and so, or brother so and so, or you want to have the preacher for lunch, as some preachers have said, Amen, or if you don’t like the deacon, or you don’t like the this or that, goodness gracious, God’s saying, look, through the through 1 John 4, look, if you don’t love them, okay, how on earth can you love me?
04:13 You’ve never even seen me, and it’d take great faith to love a God you’ve never seen. In fact, Jesus always comes to my mind when I read scripture like this, Jesus confronting Thomas, you know, doubting Thomas, you know, saying Thomas had doubted that Jesus had been resurrected, and he said, I won’t believe until I can stick my hand in that piercing in his side and touch his nail-scarred hands, and Jesus appears and lets him know a couple weeks later, hey, I’m here, go ahead and do it, but blessed are those that have not seen and believed. Very similar, and of course,
04:46 I’m paraphrasing that scripture, but you know what I mean if you’ve read it before, and the point is, we have to have faith to love God, but we have to put that faith into practice by loving our brothers and sisters in Christ.
04:57 So we’re gonna talk about loving our brothers and sisters in Christ today, but I’m gonna go ahead and finish the rest of this multi chapter passage of scripture. In this commandment have we from him that he who loveth God love his brother also, whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone that loveth him that begot loveth him also that is begotten of him. So everyone that loveth Father God loveth Jesus Christ, and his brothers and sisters.
05:27 By this we know that we love the children of God when we love God and keep his commandments, for this is the love of God that we keep his commandments, and his commandments are not grievous. So here we’re focusing today on loving your brother and sister in Christ.
05:47 You know, and oftentimes in the New Testament when you see something referenced, it says here in verse 21, and this commandment we have we from him, him being God, that he who loveth God love his brother also. Whenever it’s referenced, it’s oftentimes throughout the Bible, and sure enough throughout the whole Bible, we’re commanded to love our brother, our neighbor, our sister, love people, Amen, show great love.
06:10 And I’ve got sections here mentioning loving your brother in Scripture, a couple from Paul, be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love, in honor preferring one another, Amen. So Paul says you need to be affectionate and loving to each other, in honor preferring one another, maybe even putting them above yourselves or loving them like yourselves. Hebrews 13:1, let brotherly love continue, Amen, let brotherly love continue.
06:46 I love that because oftentimes there’s a season where love exists, and it kind of then just like a marriage, you know, oftentimes you got your honeymoon phase. My wife likes to joke around and say that we’re still in our honeymoon phase, and then God has really blessed our marriage and so forth, and you have that honeymoon phase, but oftentimes in marriages that wears off, and then you have that, what’s that called, the real-life phase, right?
07:03 The real-life phase, dealing with all kinds of real-life issues, and all of a sudden realizing that there has to be more to a relationship than just physical attraction or personalities that work together. It has to be foundational on the principles of God, and so the same way that that love must continue in God to your spouse, that love must continue in God to brothers and sisters in Christ.
07:27 And again, once the honeymoon wears off, and you know, you think of people that might have a long-term appointment in the ministry together. I would think of mission workers or people within a ministry organization, right?
07:43 And they’re working together, working together, working together, and guess what? Over the years they kind of get tired of each other, get irritated with each other, and here in Hebrews 13:1, Paul exhorts, let brotherly love continue.
07:52 So it’s that kind of persevering love, that enduring love, that long-lasting love, amen, that charitable sacrificial love, that is the type of love we are to love our brother with.
08:05 You know, in fact, Jesus mentions this in the New Testament, John 13:34, a new commandment I give unto you. And so the old commandment was, love thy Lord with all thy heart, thy soul, thy mind, thy spirit, thy body. You got to love God with everything you got, and that still applies.
08:23 But Jesus is saying in addition to that, a new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. And so in John
13:34, Jesus is addressing the format of this love, saying, you love everyone as I’ve loved you. So you see how I love you? And how does Jesus love people in his earthly ministry? Sacrificially, right? Sacrificially.
08:47 He was obedient to the Father. He was humble beyond humble. He was meek.
08:53 He was an example. He had all the power in the world. He was God in the flesh.
09:01 I hear this great song sometimes when I’m working on, and I have a little playlist on my phone that plays gospel songs, and I can’t think of the name of the writer or the singer, but it was, He made the hill that he was crucified on, the cross he was crucified on, the man that put the nails in His hands.
09:19 He made them all, Amen? And it’s unbelievable to think about that idea that God allowed his own creation to crucify Him so that His creation could have everlasting life when they accept his free gift of salvation, and God the Father raises God the Son from the dead to prove that new life is now in Christ, Amen?
09:40 It’s incredible to think about that, that Jesus had, the Bible word here or the commentary word would be condescended Himself, brought Himself low, Amen? Can you imagine being someone very rich, very powerful?
09:58 Think of a big-time CEO or celebrity or something, and they go off into a slum, and they live there for a year, and they tell nobody who they are, and they remove their ego, and they remove their pride, and they live on a bowl of rice once a day, and they deal in the muck and the mire, and they don’t have any wages, and they’re mocked and ridiculed, and they’re taken advantage of, and they’re abused, and they’re mistreated, they’re treated horribly.
10:24 That’s really not even, that example does not measure up to what Christ did, but I’m trying to give that idea of that kind of love where it’s a sacrificial love.
10:32 Here is the king of the universe, here is Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior, here is the one that was from the beginning, you know the book of John says Jesus was from the beginning, and without Him nothing was made, and we have that Jesus here involved in all of creation with all power and all glory bringing Himself down.
10:52 People doubt him, people try to catch him in a trick or a snare, the devil’s tempting him, he is living a life not of ease but of poverty and of pain and suffering, and yet he showed great love. What did he do? Oh I don’t know, he just did so much it couldn’t be contained in all the books of the world as the Bible says.
11:16 He healed so many people, he taught so many great lessons, he walked the walk, Amen, and so we see our example for brotherly love from Jesus Christ Himself, and so what does that mean for us today?
11:29 That means that we can get a lot, you know, if you look at the Bible and the New Testament specifically, and you look at, you’ve got the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and then you have Paul’s epistles, right, 1st Corinthians, 2nd Corinthians, Thessalonians, Philippians, Colossians,Hebrews, and we look at what Paul’s written, that’s the doctrine for the Gentiles, that’s what we are to understand on how to live and what it means to be saved, Amen, and the idea of we’re saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.
12:05 So we have the Pauline epistles, as people call them, as our foundational, you know, what we ascribe to, how to be saved, Amen, and the revelation that Jesus gave to Paul, and then we have the Gospels full of grace and truth and God in the flesh, because remember, Jesus was preaching to the Jews.
12:26 He was trying to basically show the Jews who he was, and the Jews are God’s chosen people, and so you see that play out in the Gospel, you know, with the climax being the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, and only after Christ leaves the earth, right, in bodily form, does Paul then get called on the road to Damascus, well Saul then turns into Paul and so forth, and but what we can learn from these Gospels is that Jesus showed great love, and we, you know, when I preach, oftentimes if I’m preaching from one of those texts, it’s dealing with Jesus as our example for love.
13:03 I think sometimes preachers that understand or can rightly divide the scriptures will get so caught up in saying, well we need to look at what Paul’s saying here, here, and here, that sometimes we can have a blind spot for how Jesus lived, Amen, and what in fact he did in part when it came to love, the example that he showed, and oh how we need to show that love today, oh how we need to show that love today.
13:27 John 13:35,the very next verse, by this shall all men know that ye are my disciples if ye have love one to another. How will everyone know that we serve the God, the true God, if we love each other, Amen, and what does the church do? Tear each other down all the time.
13:43 That’s not good. Jesus gave us the great example. We must be about our Father’s business.
13:50 If we want to show God we love Him, we must love each other. That is the great lesson for today. Love each other with that sacrificial, genuine love that Jesus Christ showed in his earthly ministry, and that we see throughout the Word of God.
14:04 God loves us so much, so we need to love him with all our heart, mind, and soul, and live that out by the example Jesus gave us.
14:13 Thank you for joining me. Take care, God bless, and Amen. to God.