1 John 4:7-21 - The Source and Proof of Love
Tom Shrader walks through 1 John 4:7-21, explaining that true love originates from God and serves as both the source and proof of genuine faith. He emphasizes that God's love was demonstrated through Christ's death as propitiation for sin, and that believers must respond with love for one another. This love becomes the practical test of whether someone truly knows God and has confidence about their eternal destiny.
“If you miss it, John says, you may be in trouble—everyone who loves is born of God, and love becomes the benchmark that you cannot miss.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: 1 John
Recorded: March 31, 1989
Duration: 43 min
Themes: love, faith, assurance, salvation, forgiveness, sacrifice, obedience, confidence, doubting salvation, questioning faith, struggling with love, new believer, feeling unloved, parent teaching children, pastor counseling, christian relationships
Scripture: 1 John 4:7-21, Romans 3:23, Luke 9, Isaiah 6, 1 Timothy 1:17, Romans 1:20
Theological Themes: propitiation, atonement, assurance of salvation, eternal security, agape love, divine love, sanctification, indwelling spirit
Full Transcript
First John, a little book all the way in the back of the Bible. If you've been with us, you start to see a pattern in the book. In fact, let's just do something a little different. Let's read the passage today ahead of time, and then come back and tear it apart.
First John, chapter 4, verse 7:
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we love God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. No one has beheld God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in Him, and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. And we have beheld and bear witness that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. We have come to know and believe the love which God has for us.
The one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us, that we may have confidence in the day of judgment, because as He is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love because He first loved us.
If someone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar. For the one who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should also love his brother.
John's Teaching Technique
If you've been around for any length of time, as we've studied this, this is John's third or maybe fourth time of saying essentially the same thing. And I really think, not that I have any new revelation at all, nor do I have particularly any new insight, but I have something exciting that I've seen in here, and I don't know if I can translate it to you. It's been a personal discovery, and it's a verification of something I knew all along. Whoever wrote these books is pretty good.
It's an interesting technique. If you've ever taught, you know how important repetition is to teaching. Even in this day of sophisticated audio-visual computer aids and training, teachers today will tell you repetition is still the key. The problem with repetition is, repetition becomes what? Well, if you're classy, you would say repetitive. But boring is what the result is.
But John has a technique. It's important to understand - we're saying John wrote this book, but who wrote it? The Holy Spirit. God wrote this book, and God has a great literary style.
The Pattern of Truth and Love
Here's what He does. He interjects a subject, and then He begins to expand on that subject just a little bit. He teases your mind, He opens it up, and then He moves out. He moves to another subject, but He comes immediately back to this subject of love, this time from a little different angle, and He opens your mind a little further. Then He moves out again, now He's coming in for the kill. He moves in for the kill, He expands your mind, and then last week He just stuck this spear called truth in the middle of it.
Remember, we said two words are inseparable. And those words are love and truth. If I love, I'm going to be committed to truth. And that's exactly what happens here, that you need to understand the truth. If you weren't here last week, next week that tape will be out. It is really important to understand the truth, and to test every spirit, and to seek the truth, and to understand that God has given us the truth in His word.
But John doesn't leave it there. See, you can be very truth-oriented, in fact, to the point that some people call you dogmatic. So the key to truth is not truth in and of itself. The key to truth is truth coupled with love.
The Transformation of John
Now it's interesting, because John is called the apostle of love. And he's always depicted in that vein. In fact, he's always depicted as kind of a meek guy, maybe just a little borderline. And that's the way we see John.
It's important to remember, in Luke chapter 9, John and his brother James were walking along with Jesus, and the people had rejected Him. And remember what John said? He said, "Jesus, sick them, send down lightning and thunder, blow these people away." That's the apostle of love.
Now what has happened in John's life? See, John has been not reformed, because John couldn't produce that. John has become the apostle of love, because his life has been transformed by a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. John's not just going through some kind of self-talk thing. It's not just that he said, "I will be loved, I will be loved, I will be loved." What's happened is, John's life has been transformed by the person of Christ.
The Benchmark of Love
And he's saying, "I want you to understand something. This way we love one another becomes the benchmark. It is so important that you cannot miss it. In fact, if you miss it, John says, you may be in trouble."
Here's what he says now. Look at it. He said, "Everyone who loves," verse 7, "everyone who loves is born of God." A couple of observations that we can make. One is, love is obvious, and it's inevitable. If you know Christ, you'll love. You can't help it, John says. Jesus said this. He said, "They're going to know you, they're going to know My disciples, because you love one another."
Two weeks ago, he said look, not just in word, but in deed. You're going to see a need, and you're going to want to meet it. You're going to want to take an opportunity, whether it's in business, whether it's in the family, whether it's in the church, whether it's in the community at large. You're going to see a need, particularly a need of a brother, and you're going to want to meet that need.
In fact, Jesus said at one point, in the area of giving, he said, "I don't want the left hand to know what the right hand is doing." And that's not that He wants you giving willy-nilly. The picture is this: almost everybody in that day and age was right-handed. And He said, "I want you, as you're moving along, when you see a need—that's the context—you reach out to meet that need, and it happens so fast and such a reflex that the left hand doesn't even know what the right hand is doing." There's just a reaction in us that wants to meet needs. Now that's what John says. He said, first of all, this love becomes inevitable.
Love as a Conscious Decision
Secondly, look at the second word in verse 7: "Beloved, let us love one another." See, it becomes a conscious decision. It's a determination that you make. It says, "I will love."
The other night we got a call from a couple in our Sunday school class, and they were having problems in their marriage, or at least they felt they were. She wanted to leave, so that usually is an indicator of a problem, and she was gone. So we went out and sat and listened to them, and most of the conversations are pretty similar. Most of the times you get through the tears. The tears are usually the first 15 or 20 minutes, and once you get through the tears, we get down to anger, and all the hurt and all the pain and all the things come out.
And then she said, "I know what I need to do, I just don't want to do it. I know that I can't leave, but I want to." Then she said, here's the $64,000 comment: "I don't feel anything. I can't even muster up enough strength to hate this guy. I mean, I feel nothing." And we went right to this passage, and we said, "Hey, you know what? Love isn't a feeling, it's a commitment, and you have to resolve in your mind that you're going to love this guy, you're going to be committed to him, not because he deserves it." In fact, I think we could take a vote in this room that night, and I think we could unanimously save one vote, agree that he doesn't deserve it. But I'm loving him because I'm committed to him.
The World's Definition vs. God's Definition of Love
Did you ever look for a definition of love? It's kind of interesting. Here's what Webster says. Let me tell you something first about Webster's definitions. A lot of them are really good. I don't sit and read the dictionary, but I go a lot to Webster to see what he says. We looked up secular the other day, and he did a great job of saying secular is temporal compared to permanent—it's really a good definition.
Here's his definition of love: "Love is a feeling of strong personal attachment induced by sympathetic understanding or by ties of kinship, ardent affection." Webster says love is essentially affection or a feeling. That's not what love is. Love is defined by God. Verse 8: "God is love." Now you want to know what love is? God is love. When it's time to define love, you could be correct in just writing one word: love is God. That's what verse 8 says. That doesn't help us much though, but it gives us the basis for a discussion. God is love.
And almost everybody who acknowledges God seems to say that He's a God of love. There's a poll from the Phoenix Republic, August of 1985—97% of the people polled think God loves people. And it's almost the same in every poll that I've seen. You see about the same statistics: 94 to 97% of the people believe in God, and virtually everybody that believes in God believes God loves people, that God is a God of love.
God's Perfect Balance
And I want to show you something today, because that is true. But there is another side to God. Is God love? Does God love people? Anybody disagree with that? No. I mean, God is love, and God loves, doesn't He? But that's not the whole picture of God.
And what happens is, along come people and say, "God is love," and we embrace this God as a God of love, and we think He loves in lieu of every other aspect or attribute that He has. That He's a God of love, therefore He mustn't have any other qualities, and if He has any other qualities, they submit to His love. And that's not the way God is. And you'll never have an accurate picture of God if you see God as a God of love in lieu of everything else, or put everything else in submission to it. God is a God of perfect balance.
If I say to you, Chris is a businessman. Is that right? Yes, Chris is a businessman. But I certainly have not defined everything that Chris is. He's a father and a husband, he's a church man, he's a leader, he is an athlete. It's the same thing with God.
R.C. Sproul tells of a time that Madeleine Murray O'Hair was on David Frost's show, and they were talking about theology. They were going along, and David Frost was journalistically neutral, as all of them are, and as he was interviewing her, Madeleine Murray O'Hair was so offensive and so obnoxious and so one-sided that Frost became the greatest theist in American history. So Frost began to talk, and then he did what all of us should do in every situation. He said, "Well, let's ask the audience."
So he turned around and said this: "How many of you in the audience today—and turn the camera so we can see the result of it—how many of you in the audience today believe in a God who's a God of love? In fact, you believe in this higher power who may or may not really have supervised the creation of everything, but He is a higher power."
a God of love. How many of you believe that? Well, every hand in the place went up. And he turned to Madeline Murray O'Hair and he said, see? And she said, well, all that proves is that the people that come to this show aren't very bright.
But she had a great opportunity to use that studio audience to make a terrific point. She should have said, hey, that's sweet. That's fine. That's cute. But how many of you believe in a God who judges sin, a God who hates sin, a God who at one point in time almost destroyed all of mankind through a flood, a God who has allowed and encouraged people to slaughter hundreds of thousands of people in battle? How many of you believe in a God that will one day judge the sin of the whole wide world and you'll stand before Him in judgment? Not a lot of hands.
See, God is love. Don't ever, ever, ever forget it. And that's the context. But God demonstrated His love. God is love. And we ask, how do we know God is love?
The Proof of God's Love
Here's the proof in verse 9. God is love, and His love was manifested in us in that God sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. And this is love, not that we love God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
Keep your finger right there, and let's try to clear this whole thing up. Turn to the left, toward the front of the New Testament, to the book of Romans and the 3rd chapter, and let's try to put some meat to these words. Romans chapter 3 and verse 23. Now John has told us we know God is love because He sent His Son into the world to die for our sin and that He is the propitiation. Here's that $64,000 word, propitiation for our sins.
The Universal Problem of Sin
Well here's the situation. Romans chapter 3 verse 23. This is Paul writing. He said, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Paul said, here's the basic premise upon which we're all going to start. Everybody has sinned. And we remember we define sin. We said sin is lawlessness, but it means literally to miss the mark. He said everybody that's ever lived has missed the mark. James says if you violated one of God's commandments, you've violated them all, meaning that you are entirely guilty. And he said everybody, everywhere, every time has sinned.
And I've never had but one person dispute it. It was a guy I used to work for, and I went in one day and we were talking about this. We were talking about reincarnation and he believed he was somebody, I can't remember who it was, but he was somebody and he believed in perfection. And I said, there's nobody perfect in the world. I was trying to get him to this. I said, let's just agree on one thing. Everybody's sinned. He said, oh, I don't agree with that. And I said, well, wait a minute. You're in the real estate business. How can you... I don't understand if anybody should understand this, you ought to understand. He said, oh no, there are perfect people in the world. I said, are you telling me that you met somebody who's perfect that's never sinned? He said, oh no, no. I've never met him, but they're in the world. And I said, well, name one. He said, well, I can't name you one. I just know that they're in the world. I said, well, let me tell you something, pal, there aren't any. All have sinned.
The Consequences of Sin
And we're going to take just a little second to explain what happens when we sin. You and I come into this world, sinners. We haven't sinned yet, but we have a sin nature. We then confirm that nature as we sin. The moment we sin, we become separated from God. We're separated from Him. We're dead spiritually, alive physically, dead spiritually. In fact, that's what he said in 1 John, he said, His Son has come that you might have life, because you're dead spiritually. You've sinned, you're separated from God. You in fact owe God something. You owe Him a life. The result of sin, the penalty of sin is death.
Remember the guy last week, he's got about, in cash and assets, about $25,000 and he owes somewhere around $5,000,000. So he thinks he's in trouble. But you don't know, he's got a clever accountant. That's what I told him. But my point is, I could come to him, and it doesn't matter if I ask him for $50,000 or $500,000 or $500,000,000, he can't pay the $50,000, he's got a debt he can't pay. That's exactly where you are in your relationship with God, when you come into the world. And as you sin, you've got a debt you can't pay. There's no way you can pay it. You will never, ever, ever be able to pay it.
The Solution: Christ as Our Propitiation
That's what Paul says in Romans chapter 3, verse 23, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation. Now the word propitiation means to satisfy. When Jesus Christ died on the cross and shed His blood, and when I come to Him in repentance of faith, God stamps my bill figuratively, if you will, paid in full. Jesus Christ has satisfied my debt, and I've been justified. It's a legal term. It means the verdict is in and you've been acquitted. You've been declared not innocent, you're innocent. You've been declared guilty, but the bill is paid. Someone else paid the bill. The Lord Jesus Christ paid the bill.
Now there's the picture of what propitiation is. Jesus Christ died in your stead. You deserved it, He got it. And when I come in repentance and faith, I become justified before God.
He Loved Us First
And that's exactly what John is saying in 1 John. Let's go back there because he makes an incredible point. 1 John chapter 4, verse 10, and this is love, not that we love God, but that He loved us. Look at verse 19 in the same chapter, 1 John chapter 4, verse 19. We love God because He first loved us.
I want you to grab this because this should take you to a new level. I can tell you about four years ago, I began to understand this and it took me to a deeper response of thanksgiving to God than I'd ever had before. Here's...
how I visualize that. I believed all that stuff that I just told you, and I still do, and I believe that I had faith. In fact, I believe I had what the Bible says is a mustard seed of faith. I don't know if you've ever seen a mustard seed, but it's a little tiny seed.
But here's what I believe. I believe that I generated the mustard seed. Oh, it wasn't much, but I generated it. What in essence I did is I came into the world and looked at all the alternatives that were out there in the marketplace. I looked at all the different religions. I looked at humanism and I looked at atheism. I looked at all the different things and in my wisdom and out of my love and out of my feeling and out of my emotion and out of my intellect, I came to a point where I said, "Okay, Jesus, you're it. I'm buying in with Jesus."
God Loved Us First
But John says, that's not what happened. Now hang in with me because this gets a little theological, but it is incredibly important to you. That's not what happened. That may be what I experienced. That may be the way that I would report it. I may tell you that that's what happened. I may tell you that I was searching for God, but God says, "Nobody's searching." In fact, He says this: the only reason you love me now is because I loved you first. Because I reached out and loved you first. Because I gave you the mustard seed.
You couldn't even muster up the mustard seed. I gave you the mustard seed. It's all a gift. I did it all. I died on the cross and I gave you the ability to believe this. Now when you say, "Lord, thank You for my salvation," does it have a different meaning?
See, when you understand that God sent His Son out of an act of love to save, to die, to save mankind, and then God gave you the ability and the strength and the wisdom to love and to come to Him, all of a sudden what happens is this: God gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and you get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller.
The Practical Impact of Understanding God's Love
Here's the practical aspect of this. If I figure out that I was smart enough to choose God, I'm going to take some credit for this. And He said, "I don't want you to take any credit for this. I want you to understand how lost you were. I want you to understand how hopeless your situation was," because it's going to generate a response.
John is logical. Look at verse 11. He said, "Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another." John is saying, look, if this is really true, if this is really the case, then there should be some response on your part. And the response is, you've got this debt, you're going to want to repay it, you're going to want to repay God in some way if you can, or at least respond to it.
You understand you can't repay Him, so what you do is you move to an experience of obedience. If you love Him back, you'll keep His commandments. And here's the commandment: love one another. There's the picture of it. He said, you're to love one another.
A Picture of Sacrificial Love
There was a story on CBS Nightly News a couple weeks ago of a guy who, he and his buddy were in Vietnam and the buddy literally fell on a grenade or did something heroic to save this man's life and died in the process. And they tracked this guy for 20 years as he tried to deal with that. And as he dealt with it, he realized he had this enormous debt to pay this guy back. And then his search to find this guy's family and then the reunion of the two families. And it was really a touching scene.
And the man said—20 years later, and I mean he is filled with tears and sadness and indebtedness—he said, "Twenty years ago, your husband and your father gave his life for me. He said, I don't know what I can do. I owe everything to you."
And in that case, that was the unrighteous dying for the unrighteous. When I understand the Holy God died in my place, I want to respond. I've got to respond. That's what James says. That's what John says. That's what the New Testament says. I've got to respond some way. And here's the response: I'm going to want to love you and you love me.
How the Early Church Lived Out Love
Apparently, the first century church took this pretty seriously. The first century historian and Christian philosopher, Aristides, wrote this, speaking of the church in the first century:
"They walk in humility and kindness and no falsehood is found among them. They love one another. They despise not the widow and grieve not the orphan. He that has distributes liberally to he that has not. If they see a stranger, they bring him in under their own roof. They rejoice over him as if he were their own brother, for they, in fact, call themselves brethren. Not after the flesh, but after the Spirit and in God.
When one who is poor passes away from the world, and any of them see him, then he provides for the burial according to his ability. And if they hear that any of their number is imprisoned or oppressed for the name of their Messiah, all of them provide for his needs, and if it's possible that he may be delivered, they deliver him. They even take his place. They pay the debt for one another if they can. And if there is among them a man that is poor and needy, and they don't have the abundance of necessities, they fast for two or three days that they may supply the needy with the necessary food."
Hello. Jesus said, "If you love Me, you'll keep My commandments." And then He said, the whole world's going to know you're My disciples because they're going to look at you and they're going to say, "Look at that love. That's got to be supernatural."
Multiple Decisions or One Transformation?
Do you ever walk down an aisle in response to some message that somebody gave and say, "Jesus, come into my heart"? Maybe you've been to a banquet, a breakfast, or a lunch, or a dinner, and somebody's asked you to respond: "Just accept Jesus as Savior." In fact, it's at least a weekly event for me to meet somebody that says, "I did that when I was eight, and then I did it when I was in high school, and then there was a time in college where I was in real trouble,"
Accepting Jesus: Assurance and Reality
I got myself in so deep that I had nothing to do, so I accepted Jesus again. Then I got married and I accepted Jesus. We were in California doing an outreach breakfast, and they chart their response, kind of Californianish. They chart their responses, and they pointed out to me that one guy had now checked a box on a card that he had accepted Jesus for seven consecutive months.
Did you ever say, "Jesus, come into my heart"? Let's be honest. Okay, just one second. We won't have to be honest again the rest of the day. Let's just be honest one second. Did you ever wonder if He came in? I mean, how do you know? I say, "Okay, Jesus, I'm serious, deadly serious. Come into my heart right now. I accept You as Savior." Did you ever wonder if He was there? I mean, how do I know that He's there?
How You Know Christ Is There
Here's how you know. First of all, He said He'd be there. If I reach out in faith and repentance, and if I reach out in faith, God says, if you believe and if you call upon My name, you'll be saved. If you confess Me as Lord, you'll be saved.
So how do I know mentally that He's there? He said it. There's a little bumper sticker that says, "God said it, I believe it, so it's true." Well, the bumper sticker's not true. God said it, so it's true. Whether you believe it or not makes no difference. Makes no difference whether you believe it or not. If God said it, it's true. I got a whole bunch of people that God said it and they don't believe it. It's still true.
And God said if you cry out in repentance and faith, He'll be there. If you sincerely, openly, honestly ask Christ to be your Lord and your Savior—maybe come into your heart or not, He doesn't occupy a certain part of the anatomy and there's nothing in Scripture that says, "come into my heart"—but if you just say, "Jesus Christ, You're my Savior," here's the acid test. If you were going to stand before God today and He said, "Why should you be in heaven?" If your answer is "because Jesus died for my sin and I have the promise of eternal life because I've trusted Him," you've got eternal life. Now you can know it right up in here. That's how you know it, that He came in.
The Practical Test of Love
But there's another way. That's book knowledge and that's true and it's real and it's there. But John says there's a practical affirmation that takes place. Your life will become a life of love. Your life will become a life of commitment. John said if you abide in Him and He abides in you, you'll love one another. There's the practical test of it.
How are you doing? I mean, do you love one another? Do you love the brothers? Do you love the unlovable? Do you find yourself in situations and say, "I can't believe I'm doing this"?
I've got a friend that's really a neat guy, but he hates hospitals. He hates everything about hospitals. Probably a lot of guys in the room like that. He doesn't like the smell, he doesn't like the people, he doesn't like doctors. He hates it all, he hates everything about it, he hates hospitals.
And then a guy in our church got sick, and he got very sick. They began to just cut the guy away, literally. They got a disease and they had to amputate from the ankles down, I don't remember what it was, and then from the knee down, and they started to cut apart his legs, and then his liver began to—and this guy was sick. And this guy who can't stand hospitals found himself in that hospital every day. Every day. To the point where not only did he get through the lobby the first time, but now he'll walk in and say hello to the people around Him. In fact, he's even discovered that in our church bulletin, it tells you who else from the church is in the hospital, and he's knocking on their door to see if they're doing okay.
Well, man, that's not just some self-willed action. That is a life that's been changed by the Holy Spirit. See that? Nothing dramatic, no horns, no bells, no whistles, just the simple execution of life. He didn't have to quit his job, he didn't have to change his career, he didn't have to go to bongo-bongo land. He knows today that God lives because he's seen Him live in his life. He's got His word that says it, and he's seen the practical application of it. And John says, that's exactly where you and I are. He said, we are to love one another—that's the proof that we're responding to God.
The Word "Abides"
Now beginning in verse 12 through verse 16, if you're somebody who writes or underlines in your Bible, there's a little word in there, and we want you to mark it. The word is "abides." I think you see it six times in these four verses, and three times in verse 16.
Here we go. "No one has beheld God at any time." Let's stop for a second. Nobody's ever seen God. Nobody has ever seen God. Now Moses saw some manifestation, but he didn't see God. Right before Moses saw the light, God said, "Moses, you can't see God, nobody's seen God."
Isaiah's Vision of God
And Isaiah had an experience where he looked up, in fact, and he said that he saw God. It was in Isaiah chapter 6, and here's how Isaiah says it. He said, "In the year of King Uzziah's death"—now I always wondered why that was in there, because that's not important to anybody unless your name is Uzziah, then that's pretty important—"but in the year he died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted in the train. And the seraphim stood over Him, having six wings, two to cover their face, two to cover their feet. And he flew back and forth, saying, 'Holy, holy, holy.'"
But he didn't see God. He saw a manifestation, he saw a vision, he saw something. Because Paul writes in 1 Timothy chapter 1, verse 17, nobody has seen God—He's invisible. John says it here, nobody has seen God. God is invisible.
God's Invisible Nature and Manifestation
God is invisible, and yet He wants to manifest Himself to the whole world. Now how does He do that? Well Paul says in Romans chapter 1, verse 20—I don't know, we don't talk about it much. It's not like it's a taboo or anything. But I don't know, do you try to think about God? Do you try to think...
God Becomes Visible Through Creation
I don't have a picture in my mind when I think about what He's like and see Him. Maybe I'm weird, but I don't. I mean, I don't try to picture Him. But I have found I can begin to comprehend and understand a God when I look at His creation.
When I look at this earth and the way it functions, if we leave it alone, and this solar system, and this universe, and the billions and literally billions of other solar systems that are out there, I've got to go, wow, an invisible God becomes somewhat visible through His creation. That's how He becomes visible. I've never met John Steinbeck, but as I read some of John Steinbeck's creations, his literature, I get some insight into Steinbeck. We're not trying to equate the two. The point is this: the invisible becomes visible through his creation. God becomes visible through His creation.
The Church as God's Visible Manifestation
He says, now here's what happens. The church becomes my visible manifestation of this. If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love has been perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us because He's given us the Spirit. And we have beheld and bear witness that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world.
Verse 15: whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides, God dwells, God lives in him and he in God. And we have come to know and believe that love which God has for us. God is love. The one who abides in love abides in God and God abides in him.
It's a circle. I love, I abide, He abides in me. It's a continuing circle. It never ends. It goes, it goes, it goes.
Love Brings Confidence for Judgment Day
And He said, I want you to understand this for one reason. Here it is, verse 17: By this love is perfected with us, love is matured within us, is what He's saying, that we may have confidence in the day of judgment because as He is, so also we are in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear because fear involves punishment and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love because He first loved us.
John said, I want you to understand this and I want you to get this point, and he says, don't miss it. I want you to live confidently.
The Ultimate Question About Eternity
Let me ask you this. God is love. 1,000% of the people around say God is love. Everybody agrees God is love. Now the ultimate question in life, if I believe in heaven and hell, is where am I going to spend that eternity? I mean, that becomes the ultimate question in life.
Would a loving God keep you in suspense about your eternal destination? It doesn't even make sense. I mean, even using the broad sense of the term that everybody uses, that God is love, in lieu of everything else, if I were to take the wrong interpretation, forgetting the right one, if I were to take the wrong interpretation that God is love and solely love, would I in any sense think that God wouldn't want me to know where I was going to spend eternity?
See, that's what He says in verse 17 and 18. He said, I want you to have confidence. I want you to have knowledge. I want you to know where you're going to spend eternity.
God Wants You to Know Your Eternal Destination
Now let me ask you, men, do you know where you'll spend eternity? He said, I want you to know it. And if there's any question in your mind, He said, something's wrong. Either we need to give you more information, or we don't understand it, or we haven't responded. He said, I want you to know. I want you to understand. I want you to be confident.
Have you ever seen somebody that's confident? I don't mean cocky, confident. He said, I want the Christian community to be the most confident of all the people in the whole wide world, because they know that they have the answer to life's ultimate question. They have the antidote to death, which is life, eternal life, in the person of Jesus Christ.
Now I ask again, do you know where you're going to spend eternity?
No More Excuses
I'm convinced there's going to be a lot of people who are going to stand before God and go, "You know, I never really heard. I mean, we went to a church, and the pastor wasn't that good, and he never really explained this stuff very good. So God, I mean, I ought to have some sort of special compensation here, but explain it to me. You explain it to me one more time, and then I'll tell you whether..." No. He said, "Well, you know, my folks, my folks never really, they weren't church people. And so I never really got a lot of that church stuff, and..." No.
Let me tell you, men. You are now without excuse. Consider yourself warned. I don't care if you have no church background or you've been in church since day one. I don't care who the pastor's been or not been or what you've heard or what you haven't heard. Today, you have heard the gospel of Jesus Christ clearly.
The Gospel Clearly Stated
Here it is. God loves you. You have sinned, and you're separated from God. God is calling and saying, come to me in faith and come in repentance. Men, if you know that, if you know that you're going to spend eternity in the presence of a holy God based on your response to that calling as you come, evidenced by a changed life, doesn't that change your life? Doesn't that change your outlook? Doesn't that take everything in your life and kind of begin to put it in perspective? That's what He's saying.
Let's pray, and as we pray, let's pray that God sends the Holy Spirit through all of us. The Holy Spirit, in fact, lives in many people in this room right now, but not necessarily in everybody. If you've never responded to Christ's call of the gospel, men, I encourage you to respond right now. As we pray, we're going to take a couple of seconds, just in silence, so you can take a look at your life quickly. And those of you that say you're Christians, how you doing? And here's how you know how you're doing. Do you love one...
another? Let's pray.
Father, we love you. We love you because you loved us first. And Father, maybe somebody today for the very first time is crying out and responding to your call. I just ask, Father, that you give that person the boldness to step forward, the boldness to step forward in your presence and to call upon you.
Father, maybe there's somebody here that's confused now. Maybe this doesn't make any sense. Father, give them the courage to reach out and to get some answers, to maybe talk to the person that invited them, or get a hold of somebody afterwards, and Father, get some answers to these questions.
And Father, we say thank you, and I pray with a new depth and with a new meaning and with a new sincerity, with a new reality, understanding now better than ever, Father, what you did for us when you sent your Son to die on the cross. Father, we thank you for Jesus, and it's in His name we pray. Amen.