God Is Love by Ed Pruitt

1 John 4:7-21

God Is Love
Sunday June 29 2003
Pastor Ed Pruitt

The greatest words of love in the Scripture are found in 1 John 4:7-21
7 Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is born of God and knows God.

8 But anyone who does not love does not know God—for God is love.

9 God showed how much he loved us by sending his only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him.

10 This is real love. It is not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.

11 Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other.

12 No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love has been brought to full expression through us.

13 And God has given us his Spirit as proof that we live in him and he in us.

14 Furthermore, we have seen with our own eyes and now testify that the Father sent his Son to be the Savior of the world.

15 All who proclaim that Jesus is the Son of God have God living in them, and they live in God.

16 We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in him. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.

17 And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect. So we will not be afraid on the day of judgment, but we can face him with confidence because we are like Christ here in this world.

18 Such love has no fear because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of judgment, and this shows that his love has not been perfected in us.

19 We love each other as a result of his loving us first.

20 If someone says, “I love God,” but hates a Christian brother or sister, that person is a liar; for if we don’t love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we have not seen?

21 And God himself has commanded that we must love not only him but our Christian brothers and sisters, too.

In this passage, the simplest & yet most profound statement of all is, God is love.

That sounds wonderful, but what does it mean?
People use the word love, a lot, and I’m afraid that our use of it can be rather confusing at times.

For instance, It is easy to tell you that I love my wife.

She is my companion, my encourager, and my counselor.

She is faithful and loving, and I can tell you with boldness that I love my wife.

I also love Amarillo.

I love it because of its sunny days.

But most of all, I love it because of this church and you people here.

But even though I used the same word "love" to describe my feelings toward my wife and toward Amarillo, I trust you realize that I don’t love them in quite the same way.

Our English language is limited.

We use this one word as a catch all for many different feelings.

I love my wife.

I love Amarillo.

I love our dogs.

I love peach cobbler.

I love a sunny day.

I love my home.

We use the same word to express all those different feelings.

We hope that the person who we are talking to can take our words and figure out what we are meaning when we say them.

When I say, "I love my wife," I hope you understand that I Love my wife differently than I love my dog!

We all put a lot of trust in people when we are talking to them.

We hope that they will reach the right conclusion to what we really mean with our words.

To confuse things further, the word "love" is also used in many different expressions.

Love is something that we fall into. Love brings stars into our eyes!

Love causes our hearts to go pitter pat. Love makes the world go ’round.

There are a lot of people that get confused when it comes to the subject of Spiritual Love.

The Bible tells us that God is love, and that I am to love the Lord, my God with all my heart.

It even tells me to love myself, and to love my neighbor as much as I love myself!

Then it even tells me to love my enemies!

So what is love, really?

Much of our confusion is because of the limitations of our language.

Most of you realize that the New Testament was written originally in Greek and not in English.

Many of you have also heard of the three Greek words that are most often translated love

Eros, Phileo, and Agape.

We realize that they express different kinds of love but, at the same time, we generally translate all three of them into the single English word love.

Because we don’t have any other single words that would translate them better.

Let’s look at those three words to help us understand a little bit better what God is saying to us when he tells us to love one another.

Eros means physical love, sexual love.

And when that is mentioned in church, there are two common reactions.

Some react nervously.

Others are even shocked a bit about the subject being discussed in a Holy environment.

You see, our problem is that Christian people have not always given Biblical definitions to Biblical things.

We need to realize that Eros, erotic love, is a gift from God.

He gives it to us and says, It is good.

God gives erotic love as a special gift to us.

Now, of course, it has limitations.

Anything that intimate must always have limitations.

So the Bible clearly teaches that erotic love is to be shared only by two people, husband and wife.

People who are married to each other, who have made a deeper commitment, who have promised each other that for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, they will keep on loving each other until one of them dies.

When they make that kind of commitment, then as God’s special gift, they are given the privileges of erotic, physical love.

As beautiful, as pure & holy as it is, erotic love has its imperfections because, by nature, erotic love is selfish.

Erotic love depends upon emotions & feelings.

Erotic love is always looking for something that will satisfy its own desires.

So if erotic love stands alone, then all of its imperfections come to the surface.

But in its original state, as a gift from God, it is beautiful, a perfect gift that God gives to us.

Then there is the word phileo.

It means brotherliness, companionship, and friendship.

It includes the idea of a boy meets girl type of relationship.

Those of you who are old enough can remember the good old days when we’d go into the drugstore & order a large soda with two straws.

Then we’d sit together, each with our own straw in the same soda, gazing into each other’s eyes, sharing the sweetness of those moments together.

Try to imagine that scene this evening.

Boy and girl sitting together in the booth, sipping out of the same soda, looking into each other’s eyes.

He says to her, I like you.

And she responds, I like you, too.

He says, I like you more than I said.

And she responds, I like you more than I said, too.

He says, I love you. And she says, what?

He says, nothing.

She says, Oh, no!

Go ahead and say it again.

Well, all right, he says.

But don’t laugh.

I love you.

I love you, too, she responds.

Finally there comes the day when he asks her.

Will you marry me?

She answers yes.

And they are married and live happily ever after until the honeymoon is over.

He looks up from behind the morning newspaper & says, "I’m tired of burnt toast."

She says, "You ought to be in Mexico. People are starving to death in Mexico.

There are some there who would love to have a piece of burnt toast."

He says, "From some of the meals I’ve been having lately, maybe I would be better off in Mexico.

She says, If you love Mexico so much, why don’t you move there?

He says, I think I will, and he walks out the door and slams it.

Oh, it may even take two months, but more often than not this day and age something like that happens.

The reason, you see, is not because there is no love in their marriage.

There is love there.

There is erotic love and there is phileo love, but too often they are a temporary type of love.

It is a love that says, I will love you as long as you love me.

Or, I will love you as long as the waves are smooth.

I will love you as long things are going all right in my life.

I will love you as long as I am getting what I want out of the relationship.

But that is not the depth that is needed in love for it to be lasting.

Phileo love, too, is a gift from God, a beautiful gift, but by itself it is never enough.

The third word is Agape, and Agape is the word that is used in 1 John 4, where it says, God is Love.

It is a love that is different from the other two because it is totally unselfish.

It is a love that is more concerned about making the object of love feel loved, than it is in making the lover feel loved.

The lover is willing to sacrifice, to make any sacrifice necessary just to make the object of love feel loved.

That is what God did.

When He looked down at the human predicament, He didn’t consider how comfortable it was in heaven.

He didn’t consider His own situation, but He willingly sacrificed Himself & came to earth & lived with us.

He breathed our air and experienced our life.

It is the kind of love that reaches down and picks up clay and anoints blind eyes and causes them to see.

It is the kind of love that stands beside the grave of a loved one and weeps with mourners.
It is the kind of love that blesses children.

It is the kind of love that does not regard itself, but unselfishly goes to the cross and sheds its blood.

It is the kind of love that gives its life so that there might be hope for those of us who are hopeless without it.

That is Agape love.

If God had loved us with eroticism, or if God had loved us with phileo He would have packed His bags the first time He was rejected.

He would have gone back to heaven and said, "I’ve had all of this that I want."

He would never have endured and persevered and gone to the cross.

Instead, He would have said, I don’t need to take any more of this.

I’ll go back where I am appreciated & respected.

But because it was an Agape love, He was more concerned about the objects of love than He was about Himself.

And that is how it must be in marriage or in friendships or anything else.

Do I love my wife with an erotic love? I surely do.

But you see, agape love becomes an umbrella over erotic love, and that makes sexual abuse or unfaithfulness impossible.

It is impossible, because the agape love of our relationship is more concerned about the other person than about self.

With agape love, eroticism is not out looking for new frontiers to satisfy it self.

It is satisfied in satisfying, and it gives itself unselfishly to the object of its love.

Do I love my wife with a phileo love? Absolutely!

But because that is overshadowed with the umbrella of agape love, and it says to her, If things aren’t going well for us, I am not going to turn around and walk off.

I’m not going to leave you stranded here.

My phileo love is overshadowed by agape love, which says, "I am going to stick this out.

We’ll work through it together.

We’ll hurt together.

We’ll solve our problems together.

We will not allow something else to destroy the love that we have for each other.

That is the only way marriage can survive.

So when the Bible says, that God is agape love it means that God doesn’t love us with just a surface type of love, but He loves us with an all-sacrificing love.

He gives Himself completely to express His love.

Do you want to see love acted out?

Turn with me in your bibles to,

1 Corinthians 13:1-13
1 If I could speak in any language in heaven or on earth but didn’t love others, I would only be making meaningless noise like a loud gong or a clanging cymbal.

2 If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I knew all the mysteries of the future and knew everything about everything, but didn’t love others, what good would I be? And if I had the gift of faith so that I could speak to a mountain and make it move, without love I would be no good to anybody.

3 If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would be of no value whatsoever.

4 Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud

5 or rude. Love does not demand its own way. Love is not irritable, and it keeps no record of when it has been wronged.

6 It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out.

7 Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.

8 Love will last forever, but prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will all disappear.

9 Now we know only a little, and even the gift of prophecy reveals little!

10 But when the end comes, these special gifts will all disappear.

11 It’s like this: When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child does. But when I grew up, I put away childish things.


12 Now we see things imperfectly as in a poor mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God knows me now.

13 There are three things that will endure—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.

Those beautiful, familiar words are practical words, too.

Because what Paul is saying is, this is how agape love is.

This is how it behaves.

In verse 4, he says, "Love is patient."

That means that I don’t get into a hurry with you if you don’t do things the way I would like for you to do them.

I’ll wait.

I’ll wait for things to change.

I’ll wait for those edges to be knocked off, and I hope that you’ll wait for me in return.

He says that, Love is kind.

I wouldn’t say anything unkind to you because you are the object of my love, and the important part of my love is to make sure that you feel loved.

Therefore, I couldn’t be unkind.

I won’t envy you.

I won’t boast about myself.

I won’t become proud, because I am more concerned about you than I am about myself.

Love is not rude, means that I won’t crowd before you in line, and if we get to the door at the same time, I’ll open it graciously and let you go before me.

It means that I am not self-seeking.

It means that I am not easily angered.

I won’t throw temper tantrums any more.

It means that I won’t keep any record of wrongs.

We must all tear up our lists and throw them away and start anew with each other.

Love doesn’t delight in evil, but it rejoices in truth.

And it always protects and it always trusts.

Love has to trust.

When Jesus is hanging on the cross He is open to us, saying,
I am trusting you to treat Me the way you ought to treat your Lord and God."

Ironically, He is being crucified while He is saying, I trust you.

We do the same thing with one another.

I open myself to you. Here I am, vulnerable.

You can hurt me.

But I trust you not to do that, because I love you, and because you love me.

Love always hopes, and it always perseveres.

Most people who pass out heart shaped boxes of chocolates, who give roses, and expressions of love have no idea what real love, God’s love, is all about.

Like the apostle of old, we can only exclaim, "I love Him because He first loved me."
 

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