CHURCH

LUTHERAN

Our Savior's of Elderon

May 12, 2024             I.N.I.                                 I John 4:13-21

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.This morning we have learned that true love is agape love. It is a giving, a self-sacrificing love. We also learned how this love is put into practice in our lives. By living for and loving others as Christ loved us. May God the Holy Spirit instill this love in our hearts and lead us to put it into practice each day of our lives. To God aloneMay 12, 2024             I.N.I.                                 I John 4:13-21Type your paragraph here.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

May 12, 2024             I.N.I.                                 I John 4:13-21

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

This morning we have learned that true love is agape love. It is a giving, a self-sacrificing love. We also learned how this love is put into practice in our lives. By living for and loving others as Christ loved us. May God the Holy Spirit instill this love in our hearts and lead us to put it into practice each day of our lives. To God aloneMay 12, 2024             I.N.I.                                 I John 4:13-21

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

This morning we have learned that true love is agape love. It is a giving, a self-sacrificing love. We also learned how this love is put into practice in our lives. By living for and loving others as Christ loved us. May God the Holy Spirit instill this love in our hearts and lead us to put it into practice each day of our lives. To God aloneMay 12, 2024             I.N.I.                                 I John 4:13-21

One evening a husband said to his wife, “Honey, would you make me a cheese crisp, please?” To which she responded, “I’d be happy to.”

Now, this man admitted that he was perfectly capable of making a cheese crisp himself. He said, “after all, you just take a tortilla, spread some salsa on it, spread some cheese over the top and then put it in the microwave for about 1; 20.”

“My wife makes cheese crisps exactly the same way I do,” he said. “We use the same ingredients, the same everything. But here’s why I asked her to make the cheese crisp for me. Her cheese crisps always taste better. Why’s that? It’s because of a special ingredient she puts into the cheese crisps. Her cheese crisps taste better because they’re made with love.”

What is this thing called love? Can you define it? Can you measure it?  We talk a lot about love.  It shows up in songs and in movies and TV programs. But what is love? 

Well, our text for today is from I John which is often called the “love epistle” or the Bible’s “love letter.” In 5 short chapters the apostle mentions love some 43 times. And here in chapter 4, John gives us what’s perhaps the most compelling, the best of all definitions of love when he says simply:

“GOD IS LOVE”

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We are going to define what true love is and then talk about how to put it into practice.

1. The definition of love.

        The Bible uses different words for love. The word used here is (agape). God is agape.  Agape is love that gives. It’s love that sacrifices.

The other words for love in the Bible refer to passionate love and friendly love, but that’s not the love John’s talking about here.

Agape is love in action. The Bible describes this love in more detail in I Corinthians chapter 13.  This is the great love chapter of the Bible that often gets read at weddings. Paul writes: “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.  Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.” (I Corinthians 13:4-8a).

In his Gospel John quotes Jesus as saying the familiar words which we call the Gospel in a nutshell. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son…” (John 3:16). 

Just before our text from I John the apostle writes: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (I John 4:10).

This is God’s love in action. Perfect love that gave, that sacrificed. Perfect love that was born, that lived, breathed, suffered, died and lived again. Jesus Christ, the Son of God is the perfect revelation of God’s great love. Jesus is agape in the flesh.

Now let’s compare God’s definition of love with what the world calls love. As soon as we understand God’s definition of true love, we’ll quickly see that much of what the world calls love is not really love at all.

When a man passionately says to a woman, “I love you,” because he wants to seduce her (or vice-versa) that’s not love. That’s lust. That’s not the same as love. It has no connection with true love. That kind of love isn’t about sacrificing and giving. It’s about getting and taking. That’s selfish and egocentric.  It’s about personal gratification, not mutual fulfillment.

As we look at God’s definition of love it quickly becomes obvious that love is more than just an emotion.  True love isn’t something you just fall into.

Think about God’s definition of love, about giving and sacrificing. Romantic love isn’t about that. Instead it’s about how the other person makes me feel. Romantic love is empty and shallow and when the romance is past and the feeling is gone, people wonder what happened to make them fall out of love.  It’s very sad, but it probably wasn’t true love in the first place.

That’s because true love, selfless love, giving love, comes only from God. John says: “We love, because he first loved us.”  The only way you and I or anyone can truly become selfless and giving in our love is when we’ve experienced God’s selfless act of giving his  love to us.

That’s, when we come to know and believe God’s love for us in His Son, Jesus Christ. This means that only Christians can truly experience and truly give unconditional agape love.

As a matter of fact, love is what makes the Christian stand out from the rest of the world. Jesus said to his disciples on the night he was betrayed: “By this all men will know you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  (John 13:34) That is if you show one another agape love.  And the only reason we can show agape love to anyone is because God lives in us and through us.

 This, is a very important concept to understand.  The secular world can talk about love all it wants to, but there isn’t one single unbeliever on this earth who can truly love, who can love with agape love.

 True love, agape love, comes only through God in Christ.  The Bible says: “We know that we live in Him and He in us, because 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 him and he in God.  And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him.”

2. Putting real love into practice.

Now let’s take a closer look at how God’s love shows itself in our lives as we celebrate and live in his love. Let’s look at what it means to put real love into practice, how to do it. God tells us in his word:  “In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 

When we know God’s love in Jesus Christ it will drive away the fear of death and of the judgment to come.  Just think about that for a moment. Who wants you to be afraid of meeting God? Who  wants you to be uncertain about your forgiveness?  Who is it that tries to convince you that you’ve sinned too much, or your sins are too bad for God to forgive?

The answer is obvious, isn’t it. It’s Satan. He’s the enemy, the accuser. He’s the master of lies hatred and murder who wants to drive a wedge between you and your loving God.

Think of what he did to Adam and Eve. Satan deceived them, he led them to disobey God, he made them so afraid of their Maker that they went and tried to hide in the garden because they were naked. That’s the kind of fear he wants to put in your heart. He wants to fill you with doubt, so you’re afraid of the coming judgment.

 Satan doesn’t want you to know your Savior’s love. He doesn’t want you to know and believe that your relationship with God is restored through Jesus Christ. He wants you to go through life, worried, paranoid, stressed  out and afraid. Afraid of living. Afraid of dying.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, God’s love drives that fear away. The love of God has come to you in your Savior and Friend, Jesus Christ.  And Jesus says to you and every sinner who repents of his or her sins and who sincerely desires not to sin, “Don’t be afraid. God loves you and has forgiven your sins.

The blood of Jesus Christ has cleansed you of all your sins. The blood of Jesus has destroyed the murderous work of the devil. You don’t have to be afraid of life because Christ is your life. His love drives out our fears in life. You don’t have to be afraid of death, because Christ has destroyed the power of death. You don’t have to be afraid of the judgment, because on the day of judgment you’ll be found innocent of all sin, for Christ’s sake.

 Paul wrote: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”  (Romans 4:25) That means you are no longer guilty in God’s eyes.

That’s the first example of real love put into practice: God’s love drives out our fears. The second example of love in practice that John gives us is demonstrated in the Christian love we have for one another. “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”

The application, here is obvious. If you say you love God and are a follower of Jesus Christ, but yet you hold a grudge against someone you are a liar!  Don’t fool yourself. If you‘re holding a grudge against someone, if you refuse to forgive them, you cannot claim God’s promise, you cannot be forgiven as long as you refuse to forgive.

 Do you realize if you have that condition in your heart when you come to the Lord’s Table you are receiving Holy Communion to your judgment.  You cannot call yourself a Christian until the Lord has broken that pride, humbled your heart and led you to repent of your persistent sin of lovelessness. That truth applies to all of us.

  May God keep us from believing the lie that our relationship with God has nothing to do with our relationship to people on this earth.

However, loving our brothers and sisters, as John tells us, is more than not being spiteful or holding a grudge. Loving other people in practice means that we actively look for ways to show love to one another. Christian love means we stop focusing on ourselves and our own problems, our self-centeredness, and self-love, and focus on others and their needs.

 Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.

This morning we have learned that true love is agape love. It is a giving, a self-sacrificing love. We also learned how this love is put into practice in our lives. By living for and loving others as Christ loved us. May God the Holy Spirit instill this love in our hearts and lead us to put it into practice each day of our lives. To God alonev Christian love means stepping out of our comfort zone and making a visitor to our church feel welcome on Sunday morning.  Christian love means being willing to put ourselves out, to sacrifice of our time and treasure to reach out to others with the Gospel instead of coming up with excuses not to.

 Christian love means reaching out to others and inviting them, even bringing them to God’s house to hear the Gospel. Christian love means that when we see a fellow Christian slipping away from Christ, we don’t say, “that’s the pastor’s job or the elder’s job, let them take care of it.”  

Christian love means that each of you as a loving brother or sister in Christ sees it as your personal privilege to love someone enough to call them to repentance. Christian love means that sometimes we as a congregation have to share the tough love of saying to a sinner who doesn’t repent; “Your sins are not forgiven and you stand condemned before God until you repent.”

Christian love means that I as your pastor, having confessed my own sins before God and found his forgiveness in Christ, now have to convict you of sin. And in love I need to break your pride, lust, and greed with the hammer of God’s Law.  I need to tell you that where those sins rule your life there is death and damnation. That’s not easy to do. Believe me, it’s not fun.

 But Christian love demands it. So that I can then bind up your broken and sorrowful spirit with the salve of the Gospel. So I can refresh you in Christ, so that the Holy Spirit can warm your heart with his love. So that God can remake you into a loving person who reflects his eternal love for you in Christ.