I’ll pray for us and do a little in time in 1 John tonight and see how it goes. Good to see you guys on this lovely November evening. I don’t know what in the world is going on out there.

Father God, we do love you. We thank you that you’ve given us a life to enjoy, quite frankly, and you’ve given us people to enjoy it with. Thank you that we’re surrounded in this room by extraordinary people, many of whom we don’t even know, but God, thank you, that we have the opportunity to get to know one another and to be the church, to enjoy one another, to laugh, to live, to love, to support, to encourage as needed. Jesus, as we study tonight, would you please help us to get a better understanding of exactly who you are and exactly what you’ve done? Would you please take the love that you have demonstrated for us in your death and resurrection? Give that to us so that we might share it through the power of the Holy Spirit with one another.

God, it’s my prayer as we study tonight that we would be known as a joyous, loving, supportive, encouraging people. God, that this whole city would know that we are your disciples by the love that we would share one to the other. God, as we study, we ask that you would inform us and instruct us, to shape us as we need. We pray that your love would change us to be more loving you. Amen.

Here we go. We’re gonna get into 1 John, and now I’ll set the whole thing up. Our theme tonight is love. The topic that we’re talking about is love, and as we go through 1 John in this brief book of 5 chapters, on more than 40 occasions, Pastor John tells us that we can know. He uses that word “know.” He wants us to know that we’re Christians. HE wants us to know whether or not we’re Christians. From there, he breaks the book down to three categories. The first is Jesus. Do you believe Jesus is God and do you worship and love him? That’s the most important one, and from there, two things proceed: Love and hate, love and hate.

A Christian, a person who loves Jesus as God, has love and hate. They hate sin. They’re tired of their sin. They’re tired of their way of life, and they want to change. They want to be a different person. So they hate the things that they’re doing, but they also love. They love people. That’s the mark of a Christian. Jesus is God, and we hate sin, and we love people. That’s the goal of the Christian life. That’s the hallmark of Christian life is hatred of sin and love of people and love of Jesus, and as we get into this tonight, it’s gonna be important for me to tell you about what love is because that is the section we’re honing in on tonight is on love, but love is so widely misunderstood in our day.

I remember when I first got a Bible, and I read it for the first time when I was in college. The stuff on love, quite frankly, at first didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I just kind of read like some faux hippie manual. You know, like love one another. It was just sort of – because to me, love didn’t make a whole lot of sense because every time I had heard love, it was usually connected to sex. See in our culture, love and sex are almost synonymous. Usually, when you’re watching a TV show or movie, if the guy says, “I love you,” okay, that’s code word for be naked. That’s code word, right, and when the Bible says “love,” that’s not what it means because like I love the elders, but I don’t mean that.

I mean something totally different. So we’re talking about a different kind of love, and this is important because as you go into the New Testament, there is – there are different Greek words that the New Testament uses for love. There is one word in the Greek language, Eros, which is the sexual erotic love. The New Testament never uses that word because that’s not the kind of love that it’s talking about. So it’s not talking about this sexual erotic love. It’s talking about the familial loving affection of friends. That’s what it’s talking about.

The other thing, too, that is interesting is that in our culture, when we say love, we diminish it by applying it to things that are inappropriate. Guys will say things like, “I love doughnuts.” Well, of course. Who doesn’t love doughnuts, but we’re not using love in that way. We love people, not in the same way we love doughnuts, but some guys do love people the way they love doughnuts. How many of you ladies have met a guy, and he says, “I love you,” and he meant like a doughnut meaning, “There’s a whole box, and after I eat you, I’m gonna move on to the other doughnuts in the box”? I love you, you know. He loved you like a doughnut, not like Christ loves you.

We got to be careful that we define love rightly. The other reason I had trouble with love is I usually tied it to emotionalism, you know, like a junior high girl who’s not yet found the emotional centering point, and he just sort of ebbs and flows with life, happy, sad in the same 30-second period, just completely unpredictable. We’re not talking about love as being something that is necessarily emotional, not like you go to the Hallmark greeting card store and you read all the cards that are on Secretary’s Day and just fall into a heap on the floor just bawling because it’s just tapped your inner holiday self. You know, it’s just we’re not talking about that. What we are talking about is according to the Bible, love is not an emotion. It’s a passion. It’s a passion.

Now this makes more sense to me. See an emotion is tied to a circumstance. A passion is tied to a person and to a cause. It’s tied to that which is good. Emotion, you know, you say, “Well, I was inspired to love, and then, I fell out of love,” but passion doesn’t go away. Emotion does. I’m passionate about God, my wife, my kids, and this church, and to me, that’s not just emotional because there’s times where I’m not really inspired to be loving, but I’m passionate to be loving, and the passion overtakes the emotion, and so the other thing about love is – in Christian love is it’s passionate and it’s action-oriented. Okay, those are the two distinguishing hallmarks of Christian love.

It’s passionate and action-oriented. It does things. Love is what you do. ____ ____, the great Christian philosopher says that love is the works of love. The Bible uses this language, too, where it says that Jesus demonstrated his love for us in this. While we were sinners, he died for us. So God’s love is demonstrated through Jesus’ life and death. It did something. There was action. It wasn’t just a platitude. It was an action. So what I’m saying is love that’s Biblical is passion that leads to action. Passion that leads to action, and so as we talk about love tonight, the last thing I want to say to get you ready for this is there’s a good guy named Gary Chapman. He’s got a book called “The Love Languages,” and it’s really curious.

He says that people give and receive love in five different ways, and I think he’s on to something. The first he says is time. How many of you feel love when somebody gets you time? They take time for you. They’re busy, but they give you time. My seven-year-old daughter, she’s kind of all five. She’s a little high maintenance for some, but I love her, and she’s time, though. Time is a big one to her. Last night, she came home from a play with her grandparents, had a great time, jumped into my bed, snuggled up to me and said, “I need Daddy time.” That’s code word for, “You’re gonna hold me until I tell you we’re okay.”

Okay, and I’m all for it. I’m all for it because otherwise, someday at junior high, a boy will slip in there, and I’ll have to kill him for taking my place. So we – so it’s time. She gets her time, and sometimes, it’s a long amount of time. Sometimes, it’s a short amount of time. She’ll look at me, and then, she’ll say, “Okay, I’m better now.” She just needed her time. For some, it’s touch. How many of you it’s touch? You love an embrace, a hug. I will feign an injury to get a backrub out of my lovely wife. I have on many occasions. I’m a toucher. I touch a lot. I like to be touched. So every night before I go to bed, I wash my – this is how pathetic I am. I wash my hair, and then, I snuggle into next to my wife and put my head on her lap so that she’ll run her fingers through my hair and brush my hair.

Oh, I like that. I like that. Last night, we did that, and my 10-month-old daughter was sitting next to my wife. My wife is brushing my hair. My 10-year-old daughter got the brush and started brushing my hair. Spirit-filled little girl right there. I tell you. That’s a good one right there. So some, it’s time. Some, its touch. Some, its words. It’s affirmation. It’s, “You look good. You are nice. You are doing great. I am praying for you. I love you. I’m sorry.” For some people, it’s words of encouragement. My two-and-a-half-year old son, Calvin’s like this. He’s just a little guy. I look at him. “You’re a little tough guy. You’re my man. You’re my buddy, Calvin. You know, Daddy loves hanging out with you. You were good today. You’re gonna go potty in the toilet because you’re a man.”

You know, and then, he just gets all straightened up, fills up his chest, just feels really, really, really loved, really loved, and for other people, it’s gifts, big or small gifts, presents. My daughter, too, she’s a gift giver. I’ll come home from speaking; have been out of town or something. There will be a banner in the front room of the house, “Welcome home, Daddy.” I’ll go crawl into bed, put my arm underneath the pillow. There’s a note from my daughter. You know, go into my study. There’s another note from my daughter. There’s little gifts left all over the house for me by my daughter.

So I thought, “Ooh, I better start writing notes so that junior high boy doesn’t beat me to it, that punk.” I’m strategic. I’m trying to beat the junior high boy to the punch and everything, and she’s seven. So I got him licked. That guy don’t know what’s coming. So I writer her little letters. “I love you, honey. You’re good.” Just try to encourage her, and what I find is she puts them on her wall in her bedroom. She puts them in her art note down in the kid’s playroom, and she loves gifts. She loves gifts big and small. So for some, it’s time. For some, it’s touch. For some, it’s verbal. For some, it’s gifts. For some, it’s service. Doing things is how some people give and receive love. How many of you love it when somebody runs an errand, helps you out, chips in?

My wife is a doer, total doer. I’ll tell you an example of service. Today, I woke up this morning. I was really tired. I rolled over. I looked. My wife wasn’t there. I was thinking, “Oh, what’s my wife doing?” I took a deep breath. What’d I smell? Bacon. Oh, my. That, if I were God and I had the Holy of Holies and we had incense, it would be bacon-scented. I love bacon. I mean who doesn’t love bacon? Every day is a good day if it starts with a gut full of bacon. That is just – I have a truck, an old truck with a bacon air freshener in it, literally, true story because I just love the smell of bacon. So I get up. Thank you, Jesus, for the bacon, so happy. Go downstairs. My lovely wife got up before and cooked me bacon.

Okay, that’s service. Me, I’m not getting up for nothing. My wife, though, being Godly unlike her husband, she gets up and she serves, okay? Different people give and receive love in different ways, and when we’re talking about love, I want to give you this huge definition, some practical examples. So when we read love, we know what it’s talking about. It’s not talking about just telling people you love them so that they’ll go to bed with you. It’s not talking about you love people like you love doughnuts. It’s not talking about love that’s tied to emotions and you fell out of love because you had a bad day. What we’re talking about is passion that comes from the heart of God to the child of God that compels them to do things for other people out of affection and love.

That’s what we’re talking about. So we’ll talk about love. Here’s what he has to say about Christians and love. This is the message you heard from the beginning. It’s talking about the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. We should love one another, very simple. It says, “Jesus began his ministry telling us to love each other. This is the hallmark of a Christian. We love.” Now in Jesus’ life, Jesus God, he became a man, did a lot of teaching. A lot of his teaching centered around love. They came to him, and they said, “Jesus, there’s over 600 commands in the Old Testament. Which one is the most important?” He said, “Love God. Love people. Love is the most important. Most important thing is love.”

Jesus said, “By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love each other.” Jesus says, “Everything’s hanging on this. It’s the most important thing is that we be loving people.” We be loving people, and so John brings us back to the teaching of Jesus who is his mentor and friend and pastor. John was one of the inner circle of disciples that was closest to Jesus, and I believe he was Jesus’ dearest friend during Jesus life on earth, and he saw Jesus love firsthand. He said, “You know, from the beginning of his ministry, I was there from the beginning. Jesus told us to be a Christian means that we love each other. This doesn’t mean just that we feel. It means that we act, and we’re passionate about taking good care of each other as God’s people.”

He then contrasted this with another Biblical example. He goes back to Genesis 4. He says, “Do not be like Cain.” We’re gonna study the book of Genesis starting in the fall. I’m so excited. I can’t even tell you how ready I am for Genesis. I won’t get into all of Cain. I want to keep that gunpowder dry for the big fireworks display come October, but the story on Cain is this. He’s in Genesis Chapter 4. God created Adam and Eve, the first man and woman in the history of the world. They sinned against God. They were cast out of the garden. Then, they gave birth to two sons, Cain and Abel. They had other sons, Seth and children, but Cain and Abel were the first two children, and Cain and Abel are very tragic story because Cain killed his brother, Abel.

The first man to die in the history of the world was murdered by his own brother, and the first man to get killed was a Godly man, and he got killed because each of them was a herdsman and a farmer, respectively, and they went to bring their offerings to God, the first fruits of what they made. Abel did it with a heart that loved God. Cain did it with an unloving heart. God saw Cain’s heart. God looked at Abel’s heart. God was pleased with Abel’s offering. God was displeased with Cain’s offering because Cain was not worshipping from a pure heart and from love, and rather than Cain repenting and saying, “You know, I need to worship God with a pure heart like my brother, Abel.” Instead of changing, he killed his brother out of envy and jealousy. Tragic story.

What he says is, “Do not be like Cain who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother, and why did he murder him? Because his own actions were evil, and his brother’s were righteous. Do not be surprised, my brothers, if the world hates you.” Jesus said the same thing. Don’t be shocked if people that aren’t Christians hate you Christians because they hated me, and they’ll hate you as well. Don’t be shocked. Okay, here’s the point. We are to be like Abel and Cain is the type of the world. Now as we love people, if they don’t know God, they may hate us because they feel convicted by our love for them. How many of you have had someone that didn’t like you and you were nice to them and they hated you, and then, you were really nice to them and they really hated you?

“I’m so sorry. Here’s cookies and a New Testament. Will you forgive me? What can I do?” “Kill yourself.” “Well, how come you” – “I hate you.” “I’m so sorry. What can I do to make it up to you?” You know, sometimes, people feel convicted around loving people because they’re unloving people, and they despise the loving people. Here’s the point. Abel was the Godly man. Cain was the ungodly man, and in that whole circumstance, Cain and Abel go to worship God. They could have went three ways. Cain could have looked at Abel and said, “There’s something wrong with me. I need to repent, and I need to be like Abel.” Abel could have said, “You know what? I’ve been loving my brother, and it’s not working. I give up,” and he could have stopped acting like a Godly man or they both could have continued in their path, which is invariably what happened.

The point is simply this: You and I should never seek to love someone so that they will change. Many of us seek to love someone in an effort to change them. Right, ladies? This is how most of you find boyfriends. “I will love him until he is a decent person.” No, you won’t. He will corrupt you until you’re as bad as he is or the two of you will continue in this disconnected fashion, but you can never love someone to change them. You love them because you love them, and you love them because God loves them, and you love them whether or not they change because if your efforts to love them are predicated upon them changing, if they don’t change, you will stop loving. A lot of you have done this. You love someone. Ah, didn’t work. Done. That’s not the kind of love that the New Testament is speaking of, that we love them because he loves us. We love them because he loves them. We love them because we want to be like Abel.

We love them because, ultimately, we want to be like Jesus. Whether or not they change, whether or not they join us in worship of God, whether or not they become the kind of person that is also loving, that really doesn’t have anything to do with us. It just doesn’t. Abel worshipped the Lord, and he didn’t worry about what Cain was gonna do. Abel loved his brother. His brother never changed, but we’re admonished to be like Abel because he did the right thing just because it was the right thing. I want you to take the perfunctory nature of your love away. Okay, husbands love your wives. Wives love your husbands. Parents love your children.

It’s not working. They’re not changing. The point is not for them to change. The point is for you to show Christ to me and his unconditional love, and if their heart should change, then praise be to God, and if not, continue to love them because our goal is to be like Jesus whether or not anyone else responds to that. He said, “So be like Abel. Don’t be like Cain. Don’t get jealous and envious and mad and angry. Don’t try to cause someone else to be like you and don’t, if they make you unhappy, seek to harm them. Just continue to love them.” He goes on. He says, “We know that we have passed from death to life because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death, and anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life.”

Okay, this doesn’t mean that a murderer can’t be saved. What’s he’s typifying is that one of the greatest sins, the most impactful sins, is murder. God made us. We’re his image bearers. We have dignity, value, and worth, and someone who runs around taking human life is doing a despicable and deplorable thing, and you can’t say, “I’m a Christian, and I hate people,” and he says here that hatred is as bad as murder. Jesus said the same thing. “No one should say in their heart toward their brother ______. No one should say, ‘You be cursed. I hate you,’” because it is intending harm toward a person. It is intending injury toward that person. It is wishing that they would die.

And I want to talk about this because our city is completely jacked up. Okay, I tell you all the time I love the city like a drunk uncle, right, which means I don’t know what to do with it, but I love it. Now our city has the distinct impression of itself that it’s a very loving place, very educated, very liberal leaning, very kind and nice and helpful and polite, and we’re not like the East Coast, especially the Northeast. We’re very nice, civilized people, and some of you will hear, “Oh, murder. Oh, yeah. That’s a terrible thing, terrible thing.” It’s a terrible thing when someone kills another innocent human being. It’s a terrible thing when there’s a culture of violence that allows people to kill each other. That’s terrible.

Guys, you’re in the one of the most murderous cities in the world. We kill our unborn. One-third of all children don’t even make it out of the womb. You are part of a hating society that hates to be inconvenienced, that hates to be responsible, that hates to be burdened by the life that they themselves have made. You’re in a culture that hates life that takes life, and just does so in a very orderly and legalized way so that it seems very genteel. I don’t want to get off on my whole pro-life ____. Somebody asked me recently. They said, “Do you lean pro-life?” “No, I fell that way. I’m not leaning at all.”

I know that we’re made in the image and likeness of God and that life has sacred value and because of that, if we are Christians, we know that we come from God. We know that life comes from God. We know that life is sacred and because of that, we don’t hate people and we don’t unjustly terminate their life. We don’t kill. We don’t. That is not the hallmark of a Christian. Our city is so messed up that one day, you’ll have a big protest against war on terrorism, and the next day, a big protest for abortion. I mean we should just put them together, be logically consistent. Have one sign that says, “Don’t kill the terrorists. Kill the children.” That is the logical outgrowth of the philosophy that drives the city in which you live.

“Don’t kill the terrorists. Kill the children.” “Don’t kill the evildoers. Kill the innocent.” Why? Because we hate – well, we don’t hate the children. We just hate the inconvenience. Love is inconveniences. Love of another is inconveniences. Love is never convenient because love says I will do what is best for you, not what is best for me, and I will do what you need, which may not be what I want. Every mother knows this. Every good mother practices this, and every Christian should have the heart of a mother that says whatever is in the best interest of the other members of the family, the brothers and sisters in Christ, that is what is priority for me, but we live in a world that hates people because people are the means by which our life gets inconvenienced.

So we’ll kill our own children because we hate the inconvenience that they bring, which is just a very clever way of saying that we hate them. You live in a murderous, hateful, fallen culture. It is a culture of death and despisement. It is, and what he’s telling us is this: We should not be like Cain. We should not hate people and the inconvenience of people, and we should not run around taking life, and sometimes, just hating people is the same thing as killing them because we wish the same intention in either regard. Heavy stuff, heavy stuff. He then moves on to tell us. Here, he’s told us what love is not. He will then tell us what love is. This is how we know what love is, Jesus.

Okay, here’s the hope, Jesus. You can look around. You won’t find love. If you look up, you’ll start to see it. We don’t know what love is apart from Jesus. That’s why when I ____ ____ on Christians, they will tell me, “I’m a loving person.” I always like to ask, “What is love?” I have yet to get an answer. I have yet to get an answer that is anywhere satisfactory. It’s always, “Well, I’m a nice person.” What is that? As Christians, we don’t have a philosophical objective of love. We have a living example of God and human flesh. We look to Jesus, friends. When it comes to love, we look to Jesus. We look to Jesus, and we want to live as he lived. We want to love as he loved. God becomes a man, a sinless, perfect man. The Bible says in 1 John 4 that God is love. Jesus Christ is love walking around, and if we want to know what love is, we look at him.

This is how we know what love is. We look at Jesus, and Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. Some of you don’t know this. Some of you still think that in order to be pleasing to God, you need to be a good person. You don’t need to be good. You need to be loved because you’re not good. You’re not good. I had a guy who recently said, “I’m a good person.” I said, “No, you’re not, but you’re loved. You’re not good, but you’re loved.” Your security is not in your ability. It’s in his affection. We know that Jesus loves us because he died for us. We know that Jesus loves us because he lived for us. We know that Jesus loves us because he’s alive today. He rose in our place. Guys, you are a loved people. So many people are walking around the earth, just seeking out love, giving themselves away, sexually, relationally, emotionally, spiritually to other people, desperately crying out for love, not knowing that they have already been loved.

When Jesus Christ hung on the cross and he breathed his last and he cried, “Father, forgive them,” that was love, and we said, “It is finished.” The love had been applied practically to the children of God. Our sins were on him. We were forgiven. We were loved, and he loves you today. If we want to know what love is, we look to Jesus and we realize that he’s loved us through living and dying in our place as a friend, and he told us that. You don’t have any more love than when you lay down your life for your friends, and Jesus Christ is a friend who has laid down his life and love for us.

Is this how we know what love is? Jesus Christ laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. This is the issue of sacrifice and of giving. We do not hold this as a virtue in our society. We hold consumption as a right. We do not hold service as an obligation. This is one of the great problems in our culture. People believe they are entitled to receive and do not believe that they are likewise obligated to give. So we’re a nation of takers. Jesus is a giver. He gives grace and life and forgiveness, and James says that, “Every good and perfect gift comes from God.” So all the good stuff we have comes from him. He is the giver, and that if we truly are Christians, we have to be givers willing to give of ourselves, sacrifice of ourselves, pour out of ourselves so that others might be blessed, others might be loved, and I’ll tell you where this shows up.

He’s gonna get into it next. It shows up and here we go from like practical application to full-blown meddling, right, and this is where it crosses that line. How you spend your money is indicative of how much love you have for other people. Some of you didn’t want to hear that. Some of you like to think, “Well, I love everybody.” C.S. Lewis says it well. If we love everyone, we love no one, and we’re hypocrites, and we’re liars. You don’t love until you put a name and a face of a human being that you are seeking to give love to unconditionally for their betterment.

If you ask the average person, “Are you a loving person?” “Oh, I’m a loving person.” “Who do you sacrifice to better the life of? I want a name.” Very rarely, you’ll get anything beyond a spouse or a child if you get that at all. He’s going to tell us here that if we truly love as Jesus loved, it won’t just be something that we feel. It will be how we live, and it will be demonstrated in how we love our money, how we spend our money, how we use our money. Money is an indicator of the heart. Jesus said as much. Here we see, “If anyone has material possessions” – do any of you have material possessions? Yeah, you have storage. You have junk that you don’t even need that someone else is using money to go buy. Welcome to America.

“If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need” – now what does this assume? That in this church, there are people with legitimate needs. We’re not talking about the guy next to the freeway entrance with a sign that says, “I need beer money.” We’re talking about legitimate needs, right? My son, Zack, and I were driving in the truck not too long ago, saw a guy about my age, healthy with a sign, “I won’t lie. I want beer money.” Zack says, “What does the sign say?” “He wants beer money.” He says, “Tell him to get his own beer money.” Right, see that’s not a legitimate need. Zack said, “Well, where would he want you to get this money?” I said, “He wants me to take it out of your college fund.” That’s what I told my son.

And I’m thinking to myself, “You know, that’s not a legitimate need. I’m not gonna pull over and say, ‘Well, here’s beer money in Jesus’ name.’ You know, go get a job for the futon or the mattress store if you want to sit there and hold a sign. They’ll pay you to do that. You can earn beer money.” You know, we’re not talking about a legitimate need, and there are lots of illegitimate needs. People who parade as Christians and people who are lazy and people that are freeloaders and people that take advantage of kindhearted people, we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about a brother, somebody you know, somebody you pray with, somebody you study with, somebody you care about, somebody you live your faith with.

You see that they have a legitimate real need, a real need, right? The mom who their family just had their first kid, she quit her job. They’re downsized to one income. At times, you’re tight. So you help out with baby items or food or whatever. You know, the college student who’s working hard and he can’t pay his books for his last quarter of his sophomore, you chip in and help him buy his textbooks. That’s what we’re talking about, getting to know people well enough to see their needs so that you can respond to it. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need, but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?

Okay, this assumes that we’re looking for need. As we see need, we meet it. Now what that also infers is that for those of you that have need, you’re gonna have to make those needs known, not in an inappropriate or a desperate or a greedy way, but if you have a legitimate need, you got to articulate that so that the other Christians in the church can meet it. You know, because sometimes, as a pastor, you meet people. They would be like, “Are you guys doing okay? Like your wife is skinny, like really skinny.” “We’re fasting,” he says. “We’re fasting this year.” Its like, “Well, you know, we can get you groceries. I mean if it’s that tight, you know, let the people of God chip in.” In the history of this church, I think this is one of the things that I have seen that is one of the most encouraging aspects of my job. I have seen where there’s a legitimate need, people meet it. It’s really beautiful.

I love seeing that because that’s what it means to be the church. We’re family. We take care of each other. There was a family a while back got in a car wreck, lost their car. A young married couple in college with a baby, somebody gave them a car. Somebody had an extra car. See that’s beautiful. That’s great. How many of you have received a gift from somebody at some point that really made the difference? Man, it might have been food or a car or furniture or somebody paid your light bill. Somebody kicked down, and you were blessed, and you felt completely loved. Love is a gift. Love is money. Love is giving to help somebody in need, and the thing of it is, too, I don’t want you to think about this in a way like God is taking our possessions like some big Communist in the sky, and then, reallocating resources.

That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about a big program. We’re not talking about big fanfare. We’re not talking about the way the pagans do it where if you give something, you get a big, fatty check, and then, you call a press conference, and you look over the big, fatty check. We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about in this room, there are people with needs, and there are people with excess, and that if the people with excess give to the people with needs, everyone is taken care of. We had probably 2,000 people here last week. The average person in Seattle makes $40,000.00 to $50,000.00 a year. Can you even figure out? Can you contemplate what our economic power is as a church?

We are a very, very, very powerful economic force in our city, and how great would it be if we took care of our own, if we took care of one another? This person’s struggling. They get a hand up. They get on their feet so that they can help somebody else. This is the process by which we take care of one another, but in this city, it doesn’t happen very much, and truth be told, we’re one of the least philanthropic cities in America. People in Seattle don’t give money to philanthropic organizations, churches and non-profit community groups because we pay a lot of taxes. People think, “I’m a loving person. They tax me heavily. I have loved other people. I gave money. If they need help, then my taxes have paid for the institutions that will care for them.”

That is our mindset in Seattle, statistically. I can prove it to you. We don’t give money to non-profits because we believe our taxes are high enough that we’ve done all we can. We’re loved out. In the church, we’re not supposed to think, “Well, that’s somebody else’s job.” We’re supposed to think, “No, that’s my brother, and if I see the need, God has apparently brought it into my views because I’m the one he wants to have meet that legitimate need from that person that I love,” and God doesn’t do this just to take your resources. God does this so that you could share in his joy. Let me ask you this. Is it better to have something or to have something and share it?

It’s always better to share it, isn’t it? It’s always better to share the good things that we receive. God is a giver. He delights in giving, and he loves it when we enjoy what he has given us, and that he wants us to turn around and to share what he has given to us with others so that we can share in the joy of them. You know, and honestly, too, this isn’t a get rich quick scheme, but what the Bible does say is that he who is trusted with little, will be trusted with much. The context there is money. Jesus’ point is simply this. If I give you blessing and you share that, I’ll give you more. Some of you say, “Well, does that mean the Christian should have all the money?” No, that means the Christian should distribute it.

See God wants to love people and help them. So he will put the money into the hands of the people that will share it, right? Doesn’t that make sense? God doesn’t want to put the hands of – into the hands of the hoarders a lot of money. If God gives a lot of money to a guy that’s like, “Thanks, God. All for me?” God’s like, “You’re not getting any more.” If God gives money to somebody, and they say, “Thanks, God. There’s a lot of people I know, and I could really help a lot of them out.” God says, “You know what? You’re the kind of person that I could give resources to because of your generosity. You’re the kind of person that I can entrust with my resources,” and then, you and I get the blessing of delighting in what God does. We get to help. We get to serve. We get to share.

We get to bless, and we know that, ultimately, it all came from God and we’re just distributors of what ultimately belongs to him, and we get to delight in sharing the same way God gets to delight in sharing, and what he says is if you claim to be a Christian, and you’re not looking for need and you don’t see any need or if you do see a need, you don’t respond to it, how in the world can you be a Christian because that is completely antithetical to the nature of God the giver? Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but with actions and in the truth. The truth is you don’t love unless you act.

That’s the truth. Now I’ll defend the Dad. Some of you are disappointed because your fathers didn’t tell you that they loved you enough or you call Dad. “How are you?” “Fine, hold on. Let me get your mother,” because Dads don’t talk a lot. “You okay?” “Yep.” “All right. Hold on. Is your car running?” “Yep.” “Okay, I’ll get your mother.” You know, very basic, sort of perfunctory, and but the problem is in our culture, we oftentimes judge whether or not someone loves us. I think too much based upon verbal communication and not non-verbal communication because everyone says that they love, but they don’t do anything, right?

Like I meet young women all the time. “He said he loves me.” Did he get a job? Did he buy a Bible? You know, if not, he doesn’t love you. Love is what you do, and love is how you spend your money. That’s why, ladies, I will tell you this. If a guy takes you out to dinner Dutch, and over that Dutch dinner, I don’t know why we say that. The Dutch must be cheap people, but if he takes you out to Dutch dinner, and he says, “I love you.” Say, “You know what? I read 1 John. You are a liar and the truth is not in you. You are a child of the Devil. You are masquerading in the light, and if you love me, you’d be a giver. Don’t love me with words. You pick up the tab, McFly, and then, we’ll talk about the love of God.”

See love is actions, right? I get frustrated when I meet guys that they’ll tell me like, “I really love my wife and kids.” Wife’s driving a beater car. He’s got a nice car. Kids don’t have decent clothes or decent coat and he’s got a bass boat or a motorcycle. He says, “I love them.” “No, you don’t. You love bass. You love bass. You love your hobbies. You love your things,” and it is not a sin for a guy to go, you know, fishing or have a motorcycle, but he needs to love his wife and his kids first. If there’s anything left over, then he can pursue his hobbies, but love gives to those we love first. That’s what it is.

You know, the wife who says, “I love my husband. I just nag at him a lot.” You don’t love him. Love is what you do. Love is what you say, but it’s also what you do, and sometimes, the actions outweigh the words. I mean my dad growing up, he didn’t say I loved you a lot. He was a union drywaller. I had a construction worker dad named Joe like Jesus did, and he wasn’t an incredibly verbal guy, but you know what he did? He got up every day and he hung drywall my whole life until he broke his back to feed his family. He coached my Little League team all growing up.

When I’d get home from school and he’d get home from work, he would be exhausted. He would go outside with his construction boots on, and we would play catch, and we would play ball for hours. I knew my Dad loved me because of what he did. He worked. He came home. He served. He cared. He coached. My car broke down. He worked on the car. My Dad did things, and if I took a step back and said, “Does my Dad love me?” Everything my Dad is doing is because he wants to take care of his family. He loves us. I would rather have someone in my life who showed me love with action that was earnest than someone who spoke of an un-earnest love.

I would rather have someone show me love than just say they loved me and never execute on it. What he’s saying is this: If it comes down to sang it or doing it, the priority should always be on doing it. You should be able to look and say, “That person loves me,” and they should be able to look at you and say, “That person loves me.” He then goes on. “This then is how we know that we belong to the church and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence. Whenever our hearts condemn us, for God is greater than our hearts and he knows everything.” How many of you, upon hearing this, feel terrible? You’re like, “I am a jerk. I am terrible. I am selfish. I am proud. I spend all my money on me. I think about me. I’m thinking about what people could do for me. I don’t think about what I could do for them. I am terrible.”

You are. Go with that. You hit a lovely groove. Stick it and ride it until you see Jesus face to face in the end. That is a very healthy place to be. People who read the Bible and look at Jesus and look at his love and compare themselves to him, if we don’t go, “Oh, man, there’s a lot of work to be done,” then we have missed something, right? We have really missed something when we look at Jesus and we look at us, no matter how good we’re doing, we go, “You know, there’s room for improvement here. I could love a lot better than I do.” We feel bad. Our hearts condemn us. “Oh, man,” because sometimes it’s even the motives.

We’re arguing with a guy some years ago. He said, “I’m a good person. I do good things.” I said, “Why do you do them? He said, “Makes me feel good.” “Ah, you do them for you. Selfish motive. Good things don’t count unless they’re done with good reasons.” I mean we’re just corrupt to our core. You know, we’ll do good things because it makes us look good or feel good, which is still about us and not about them. That’s still not love. That’s still narcissism. When you hear this, you will feel bad. “Ah.” You feel bad because you’re bad, right? Say, “I just feel bad all the time.” It’s because you’re bad all the time. You’re just consistent. You know, just okay, this makes sense now. Now here’s what happens.

Some of you have a real sensitive conscience and you feel terrible. You feel condemned. Okay, do I feel condemned by this? I’ll tell you a story. I am sitting home yesterday, books all over me in my Daddy chair, my version of the Driscoll throne, looking at all my commentaries, studying this verse. We need to love people with actions, not just with words. They need to see it. I’m thinking, “Oh, this will preach. This will be glorious. I’ll do an extraordinary job,” and then, my five-year-old son. His name is Zack. I call him Buddy Zack. He’s my buddy. Zack and I are tight. He’s just awesome. He is my little guy. I just love hanging out with that guy, and his love language is wrestling. Okay, now my daughter’s a cuddler. My son is a warrior.

So when he wants love, if I wrestle with him for 45 minutes, he will literally look at me with huge eyes and say, “Daddy, I love you,” because I have full-Nelsoned him. I have given him the claw. He really loves the claw, and so he’s a wrestler, and that’s how he gets his physical love ____ through wrestling with his Daddy, which I’m down with. It’s cool. So he comes up to me while I’m studying these verses, and he says, “Daddy, can we wrestle? I want to wrestle now.” I said, “I can’t right now, Buddy. Daddy is busy studying the Bible.” Zack says, “What does it say?” Heart condemned. “Well, it says that we should be selfless, loving people who allow other people to inconvenience and interrupt us, that we should do what’s best for them, not best for us so that they know that God loves them and that we love them, too. Do you want to wrestle?”

You know, so I pushed back the coffee table, get down on the floor, and wrestled with my son. So I’m condemned, too, right? We’re all guilty as charged. We all have ways to learn and grow and love, and when our hearts condemn us, the good news is this. God knows our hearts. God knows everything. God is greater than our heart. God looks down and says, “I know you’re selfish. I know you’re a taker, not a giver. I know. I know your heart, and I love you, and I died for that, and I’ll forgive that, and I’ll work in you to make you more like me,” and then, we’re at rest. The way we then experience this change is in his concluding thoughts.

“Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us” – we go from that place of our hearts condemning us to realizing that that’s why Jesus died was because of our sin and that he loves us and he’ll forgive us and he’ll give us his love. At that point, we can have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask because we obey his commands and do what pleases him. This leads us to prayer. Once we compare ourselves to Jesus, we see our sin. Oh, man, I feel condemned. That’s because you’re guilty. Oh, wait, but Jesus loves me, and he died for me, and he’ll forgive me. He will. Okay, now we can have confidence to approach God in prayer. God, I’m very convicted of my sin, my pride, my arrogance. I’m selfish. I’m always thinking of how to use people, not how to love people.

I’m saying I love people, but I don’t show it. God, please give me your love so that I can be more like you. I want to be a conduit for your affection of people on the earth. God, please help me. Please forgive me. Please change me. Please give me your love. See God is love. Love comes from God. God’s love changes us so that then we can share the love that God has given us and if we’re not connected to God in prayer, then there is no way that God’s love can get to us to share with other people. So if we’re not loving other people, the key is to get back to Jesus in prayer. He will then answer our requests to be more like him because here’s the thing a lot of people struggle with. “Well, I don’t know how to pray. I don’t know if I’m praying to God’s will.”

You can know this. If you come to God and say, “God, I would like to love people better. Could you please help me?” That’s in God’s will. God delights in answering that prayer. God’s just told you the whole point of being a Christian is to take the love of God and to share it with people, and so if you come to God and say, “God, you’re a loving God. Please give me your love, and please help me know how to share it.” God loves to answer that prayer, and he always answers it in the affirmative, and you can have confidence that he will answer that prayer. If you’re struggling with this, your answer is to go to Jesus to receive his love and to ask of him to teach you how to love because he’s the only one that truly and perfectly knows how to love, and so he will instruct you, and he will lead you, and he will inform you on how to be a loving person.

And this is his command: To believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ and to love one another as he commanded us. He said it all starts with this, first believing in Jesus, being a Christian. Jesus is God, lived and died and rose for my sin. He loves me. First things first. Then, that love that he gives me, I am now free to share it with other people as a loving person, as a Christian taking the love of Jesus and dispensing and distributing it to others. Okay, now this sounds great. I think we would probably all vote for it. So many organizations and institutions in our city and in our country exist just to get people to do nice, kind, selfless things to help other people.

No matter how much money we spend and no matter how many laws we pass, no matter how much tax revenue we raise, it still doesn’t happen because it comes from the heart forward. It comes from the inside out, and so in the last verse, he tells us how this is all possible. “Those who obey his commands live in him and he in them, and this is how we know that he lives in us. We know it by the spirit that he gave us.” His point is this. It takes a miracle. It takes a miracle of God to take out our selfish, proud heart and to put in a humble, selfless heart, and it takes the spirit of God to empower us to live like Jesus, that we in and of ourselves can’t just will ourselves into being loving people, that our hearts condemn us, but it’s the spirit that changes us.

The good news is this: The Holy Spirit is poured out to the children of God so that they can love. What this means is this is not whimsical idealism. This is Biblical realism. This is not a hope. This is a guarantee. This is not an aspiration. It’s a lifestyle. You and I can be the church. We can love God. We can love each other. That love can be passionate. That love can lead to action. That love can be time, service, words, gifts for people who need it, and in their times of need, we will love and care for them as brothers and sisters in our church, and then, as we have need, they will reciprocate in kind, and God’s people can and should and will and do love and care for one another.

And the world looks at that and says, “Why?” And the answer is, “We’ve been loved Jesus. It’s changed everything. He’s given us love to share, and we’re sharing it. Would you love to meet him? Would you love to be loved by him? Would you love to be loved by us?” That’s what Jesus says. “By your love for one another, everyone will know that you belong to me,” because it’s distinct, and it’s other, and it’s countercultural, and it’s strange. You’re not being nice to me to use me. You’re not being nice to take advantage of me. You’re not being nice to have sex with me. You’re not being nice to manipulate me.

No, I’m being nice to serve you because I love you because you’re an image bearer of God because God cares for you because you have dignity, value, and worth and because I don’t need to manipulate you to get my love. My love needs are already met by God, and so I’m just coming to meet your needs in his name. By the power of the spirit of God, the life of love is made available. Paul says in Romans 5, “That the spirit of God pours out the love of God into our hearts.” Love is made possible. It’s come down from God. So what we’re gonna do now is simply this: We’re gonna stop loving with words and my tongue, okay?

You guys are gonna spend time in prayer together. We’re gonna break you off into groups. You’re gonna get to know each other ____. In a larger church, sometimes it’s hard to love because you don’t know the names and faces sometimes of the people even sitting with you. Okay, this church should not be like the world where we walk in and we sit down and we don’t talk. “Hi, how you doing?” There should be warmth and kindness and greeting and affection here, prayer and help and service. We want you just to meet each other. Say “hi.” If you have a need, make it known. Perhaps the people that you meet today will meet that need or if it’s something beyond them, like you need a healing, well, let them pray for you and let God meet that need and if you ask, since we have great confidence that God hears and answers pray, so we’ll pray for you.

I know some of you are thinking, “I don’t like people. I don’t like intimacy. I feel freaked out. It scares me. Ah.” Repent, okay, and say “hi.” Today is your first act of just “hi,” and if you’re not a Christian, that’s okay. You don’t have to pray, but just let other people pray for you. I mean what’s the harm? And just spend some time getting to know each other. There’s some wonderful – honestly, there are some great people in this room. There’s some extraordinary people in this room, some of my dearest friends are in this room, some people that you’ll be blessed to know and be blessed to share with. When we’re done, we’ll take of communion, which is remembering Jesus’ body and blood. The band will come back up.

If you’re a Christian, you’re welcome to partake of communion at that time. As you hear the music, wrap up your prayer groups and put your chairs back so that we can organize the room so people can get forward for communion. If you’re a non-Christian or first-time visitor, you can put your offerings in the baskets. If you’re a visitor or non-Christian, I’m saying don’t give. You’re our guest. If you’re a visitor or non-Christian, just drop your credit cards in the bucket, and we’ll pray about the amount the Lord has for you. No, I got that all backwards.

Non-Christians and visitors don’t give. For those of you that are Christians, give as Godly is on your heart, and then, we’ll sing and celebrate, and we’re gonna leave here as the church to go do what? To go love people, whether or not they change but just because Jesus has loved us with an unconditional love and we will love them with an unconditional love, and whether or not they change is between him and them. I’ll pray for you, and then, you guys can get to know each other.

Lord God, we do love you. We thank you for your love for us. We thank you that you are love. We thank you that you loved us first. We thank you that you demonstrate your love for us and the death and the resurrection in Jesus. We thank you that you’ve sent the Holy Spirit to bring your love into our hearts. We thank you that you have made us into a church so that there are other brothers and sisters in the faith that we now can love. God, it’s a great opportunity, and God, I pray that we would go the way of Abel and not the way of Cain, that we would be loving no matter what, and that whether or not the people that we love change in the way that we would hope, that we would love them as you had loved us, without conditions and without cessation.

And God, I pray that as we love, that we would walk around with our eyes open looking for ways to love, words of encouragement, prayers, acts of service, giving of gifts, meeting of needs, time, the warm embrace of a friend, a hand on the shoulder for prayer. God, may we demonstrate your love. May we share your love and as we do, I pray that you would get glory, that we would get joy, and that those that we encounter would get love in Jesus’ good name. Amen. Thanks, guys.