1 John 4:7-21 - God is love

Finish this statement. God is …What finishes this statement? God is holy, we know. God is pure. God is kind. God is patient. God is jealous. God is eternal. God is powerful. God is wise. God is. But all of these words just describe what God is like. They’re all adjectives. They don’t describe His substance. They describe His character, His personality, not what He is.

There are four places in scripture that tell us what God is. John 4:24 tells us that:

Hebrews 12:29 says that:

1 John 1:5 describes God:

Spirit, fire, light, these are all nouns. What is God? God is spirit. God is fire. God is light. This is God’s substance.

And then, one other, in 1 John 4:7-21. Open your Bibles, and let’s read what God is.

John has something on his mind. He’s noticing something among Christians, something that is bothering him. He’s noticing a distinct lack of love. They may be working, they may be serving on committees, they may be showing up for worship services, but there’s something missing. They’re not loving.

Now, John could just get tough with us. He could shake his finger at us and scold us and command us, "You better start loving." But he knows what we know, that love can’t be commanded. We can’t be told to love someone. We can be told to SHOW our love. We can be told to express our love in holy ways. But we can’t be told to actually love someone. That has to come from somewhere else.

And so John brings us to the place where love comes from. This is our second look at the love of God, and this week, we hear that God not only loves us, and that can’t change, and nothing, neither life nor death nor angels nor demons nor anything else can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Now we hear that God is the origin of love. And not only the origin, the source of love. But that God IS love. Love is His substance.

So, in order for us to love each other, first, we need to hear verse 7:

We need to do a little Greek here a minute. We have one word for love, and that is love. You’ve maybe heard this before. The Greeks were a little more particular with their words. They had one word for love between family, a brotherly kind of love, a friendship kind of love. They had another word for love between a husband and wife, a romantic kind of love, a passionate kind of love.

And then they had a word for the kind of love that outshone all the others. It was a love that didn’t need being loved back. It was a kind of love that didn’t need at all. It’s a pure, selfless, giving, unbreakable kind of love. The word was agape, agape love.

And it’s this kind of love that John is talking about. In fact, he talks about it a lot just in verse 7. It’s hard to see in the English, but what John is saying is,

People who are unconditionally loved, unconditionally love one another, for unconditional love comes from God.

And to John, it’s simple. Verse 7:

If you agape, you must know God. If you don’t agape, then you don’t know God. The way this works is, verse 8:

Now, next week, we’re going to look at our response to God’s love. Next week, and the week after, we’ll talk about loving with agape love. But this week, we need to look at God’s love, His agape love. Because if we don’t know God’s love for us, there is no way we’ll love each other, or God for that matter.

We need to take a good long look at God’s love, and we begin with what we’ve already heard, but really can’t hear enough of. We begin with the death of His Son. Verse 9:

Please don’t let this just glide over. Please don’t hear this for the millionth time and shrug it off. I know you’ve heard this before. Try to hear it for the first time. We are affected when we hear of sons and daughters dying in Iraq and Afghanistan. That gets us here, as it should. How about the Son of God, dying in Israel? He went to Israel, knowing He would die.

This is how God showed His love. Verse 10:

This is what God is made of, loving us before we loved Him, loving us even when we don’t love Him, loving us and not needing anything back from us. Did you hear that? He doesn’t need anything from you in order for Him to love you. He doesn’t need anything. His love is without strings.

Next week, we’ll talk about how we respond to this love, but we’re not going to respond very well unless we get this. If we respond to a demanding God, a God who needs us to love Him, that’s a pretty weak God and not one that is easily love. If we can understand this, if we can let this sink in, if we can hear Romans 5:8:

If we miss this, if God’s love becomes cheap, if the song "Jesus loves me" is for children, it’s something we outgrow, if mature Christians spend their time on more important things, everything else falls apart. Christian life begins with God’s love, and when we move past God’s love to more important things, our lives will begin to unravel.

For one, we won’t love each other, because we don’t know the source of love. We will tolerate each other. We might even do nice things for each other. But if we’re not doing them out of love, we’ll grow resentful, we’ll grow judgmental, we’ll feel taken advantage of. Unless we love each other.

We will love, the love will be there, if Jesus is inside, if Jesus is there. Verse 15:

Do you know Jesus? Do you know He died for you? Do you know He came back to life for you? Then you have the love of God on you, around you, supporting you, shining out of you. You can know that. Verse 16:

God is love. God want us to know this so strongly that He repeats Himself. He says it in verse 8 and again in verse 16, God…is…love. Which means that God cannot not love. He loves. He can do nothing else. For Him not to love us, who have Jesus, would mean that He is not God. It’s His love that motivates Him to do what He does. He forgives us, because He actually does love us. He provides our food, our clothes, the gas in our cars, because He really does love us. He leads us into our futures, He gives us the answers to our dilemmas, because He loves us.

This is the love that we rely on. If God did what He did for any other reason, other than love, then we can doubt His promises. He might just give up on us. We might not give Him what He wants, so He’ll walk away. But that’s not our God. That’s not the God who is agape, the God who is love.

John talks about judgment day, the day we stand before God with all of our nasty stuff for all the world to see, and if there’s any day that we might doubt God’s love, it would be this day. What’s God going to do, what’s He going to say? And John comes back to who God is. God is love. So, verse 18:

Standing on the judgment day, you will look up, and because Jesus is your Savior, you’ll see a God who is beaming. He will be beaming glory. He will be beaming light. But He will also be beaming His love. Not because of what we’ve done. Certainly not because of what we’ve done. But because He is love.

And if we don’t have to fear judgment day, then we don’t have to fear any other. Our fears, our anxieties, our doubts increase in proportion to our knowledge of God’s love decreasing. As we ignore His love, we grow more afraid. As we "move on to other things", we move deeper into confusion, even terror.

And then, again, we hear God. And we hear His heart. We hear who He is. He is love. And we see how He drew us with His tender, firm love to know Jesus as our Savior. And we see how He lovingly corrects us when we think we know better. And we see how He gently heals our wounds, even the ones we did to ourselves. And this morning, we hear Him inviting us. Come to My table. I want you here. Eat with Me. Drink with Me. Have a taste of what I have planned for you, an eternity where you and I are together, forever, in communion.

We come to the table, not out of fear, but being loved. We spend time with God, here, at home, before we sleep, when we wake up, not because we really ought to, but because we are loved. There is no other motivation for why God does what He does. He cannot deny who He is. He cannot be any other way. He cannot not love. God is love.