Gooding, David: 9 – God’s Love to Us

For we shall see him as he is. His manifestation in glory, as distinct from here in chap- in chapter one, the manifestation of his incarnation. So we have started with a progress, the manifestation of his incarnation. Now we think of the manifestation of his second coming. And John reminds us in section two that if we have this hope that we shall be like him when he has manifested at his second coming, then we shall endeavor to be like him as he was when he was manifested the first time. The first time he was manifested, he was manifested to destroy the works of the devil. Therefore, if we hope to be like him when he comes again, we shall give diligence that by his grace and his Holy Spirit we shall put to death the works of the flesh. But now we're going to think of the manifestation of the love of God, and of course that will in the first place remind us that that love has been manifested to its full in the Lord Jesus Christ and in his life here on earth. Now presently, this third section is going to put its emphasis here, that God is an invisible God. No one has seen God at any time, and still it is quite impossible for us to see God. How then shall men and women come to know God if they cannot see God? And one of the answers to that is this, that not only was the, uh, invisible God manifested through Christ when Christ visited our earth, but this very day, the invisible God and the nature of that invisible God is manifested in the lives of you and me. And it is not merely, as John is going to tell us, that we have learned that God is love, and therefore we better try on our side to love as well. The glorious and the marvelous truth is this, that if we are believers, that invisible God dwells in us, and when we love, it is the invisible God loving through us. And so in our humbler way, we become an incarnation of the very love of the invisible God, so that the invisible God becomes visible to people here on earth. So let us turn, as I say, and look at the table of contents, first of all, of the early verses of this section. Verses seven to eleven. And you will notice how John brackets them together. He begins in verse seven by saying, beloved, let us love one another. An exhortation to love. And when he comes down to verse eleven, he repeats that exhortation. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. A delightful few verses, like a diamond enclasped in its platinum, uh, holding. Here the exhortation to love, and here the exhortation to love, and the manifestation of the love of God in the middle, like a brilliant diamond. So then we have to love. And we shall pick up from John this repeated emphasis, beloved, let us love one another. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought to love one another, not empty talk and rhetoric meant to hype the exhortation a little bit. For herein lies the secret, the first secret of our ability to love and our duty to love. Why should I love? How can I love? All but consider that you are yourself beloved of God. Beloved, you have been loved of God. How is it possible that you don't begin to show that same kind of love to other people? First secret of our loving, we have been beloved. But now notice the verses seven and eight, and they tell us our resources, for they tell us the source of our love. Beloved, let us love one another, for... Here is the reason why this duty is upon us, and I take the reasoning to be this, let us love one another, for love is of God. That is to say, God is not asking us to make bricks without straw, like Pharaoh demanded of the Israelites when he tells us to love. He is not exhorting us to dredge up out of the bottom of our bankrupt emotions, the ability to love eh eh eh somebody. He's pointing out that there is a vast resource. True love comes from God, and everybody who loves in this sense loves because, and for this reason, and by this enablement, that he has been born of God. Love, says John, you have the ability to love. You have the vast reservoir of the love of God standing behind you, and you have been born of God with the life of God and the nature of God, and therefore the great infinite resource of the love of God behind you. It means that very often when we are called upon in a difficult situation to love other folks, we do well to admit to the Lord our own bankruptcy. Lord, I can't love these people, but Lord, you can love them. You gave your son for them, and if it is the fact that I am begotten of you and you dwell in me, God, you could love those people through me. We are not talking then of some natural bonhomie. Some people are good at being charming and kind, are they not? They were probably born with an emotional silver spoon in their mouth, and it's easy for them to be pleasant. And others of us were born like a lot of old frogs, all sort of nowled, uh, you'll see, with warts galore upon our emotional personalities. We find it very difficult to love, but we're not talking about natural love. We are exhorted to love because we have been born of God, and love is of God. And I may myself lie back upon the vast ocean of the love of God, and thus learn to allow some of that ocean to flow out through me. Love is, love is of God then, and tells us of the source of our love, and therefore the resource that we have for loving. And now he goes on to talk to us in verses nine and ten of the example and the standard of our loving, and also, of course, on what provokes that love within us. Notice then these two verses about the love of God, verses nine and ten, and they are not just repetitions, are they? The one says, herein was the love of God manifested. The other says, herein is love. In other words, the first one is going to talk to us about the actual demonstration of love. God demonstrated his love. And then the second one is going to peer behind the scenes and let us into some secrets of the very essential nature of love and the principles on which it works and the cost that it involves to the one who loves. Let's take a a little analogy. Here is a young gentleman and he's gone for his education to the States, you see, and he hasn't written home much at all. In fact, his parents rarely hear from him, but suddenly they get a letter in the post that he's got some marvelous opportunity of a course in Harvard, and that will make his whole career, do you see? And please could mum and dad fork up, you see, the ten thousand dollars necessary, and it's got to be here by next Thursday, do you see? And mum and dad getting the letter have a kind of a conflab together. Well, ten thousand dollars, wow, wow, wow. That's going to break the bank, do you see? Ah. And can they afford it? And father says, you know, I don't know whether he deserves it, the ungrateful old rogue. The way he treats us, the more we give him, the less we hear from him, and all that kind of thing. And mother says, yes, but he is our only son, you know, and we shall wish we have done it for him. You know, the kind of conflabs that go on, do you see? But father says we, we haven't got it in the bank. Oh yes, but mother says we've got it in the building society, you see. Ah yes, father says, but I was going to have a, a, a, we were going to have a holiday, weren't we, for our twenty fifth wedding anniversary. And you see, um, and uh, I was going to get a new car, actually. Well, I said, if we're going to give it then, that will mean giving up the holiday, won't it? And going with the old banger and just getting it repaired and putting it through MOT. So this is all going on behind the scenes, what it's going to cost, you'll see. And in spite of the lad's ingratitude, and eventually the check arrives. And the boy doesn't know that mother has now got to take a part-time job to make the money, and they're going without their holiday. He sees the manifestation of the love. Do you see? In this was manifest the love of mum and dad that they sent the check for ten thousand dollars. Little knows, perhaps he'll never know, what went on behind the scenes, the cost of it, which is the very essence of love. And for as far as we're concerned, first comes the demonstration, isn't that nice, of God? Whether we understand it or not, the cost involved, first the demonstration. In this was manifested the love of God, and then the cost of it, what was involved in it. Herein then was the love of God manifest, says John. That God has sent his son into the world. Ah, lovely, isn't it? And so practical. He didn't sit up upon his celestial throne and just send us a message or two. No, he acted. He took the initiative. He approached us. He sent his son into the world, and as far into the world as he could possibly come. What extraordinary manifestation of the love of God. See Jesus Christ, that sinless son of God, sitting in the cafe in, in Palestine, next to some very doubtful and disreputable woman and a few very shady men. Herein is manifested the love of God. He sent his son into the world. Love taking the initiative, making the first approach. And it tells us that we ought to be like it, doesn't it? Not just speaking, we ought to be the ones that make the approach to the other people. Not standing back and say, well, I didn't talk to him because he didn't talk to me. Well, somebody's got to make the first approach. And then it is said he not only sent him into the world, notice the tense of it, he has sent him into the world. This was not a very brief, fleeting visit. The perfect tense of the verb, he has sent him, and that's that. God has never repented of it. This remains the abiding attitude of his heart. And he sent his only son that we might live. Oh, that's love, isn't it? That God would send his son and share his life with us. Not to com- uh, compare great things with small. I remember years and years ago, the dawn of civilization, I was charged with transporting a little niece and nephew of mine up to, uh, the northern country to see their, uh, aunts and uncles and, uh, their other little nieces and nephews, you see. So the little niece who sat in the back of the car had been provided with a large bag of sweets, although when she arrived, she might give them to her opposite number, you'll see. So she had them clutched in her hand on the back seat. Well, of course, she had to see what kind of sweets they were, didn't she? So she opened them and had a look, and then, hmm, well, you can't give to others what you haven't experimented with, can you? So she took one, do you see? As the, uh, miles rolled by, but they were sweets, weren't they? And so she began to take the rest. I'm afraid when the bag came to be offered, there weren't many left in the bag, you see. I mean, sweets. If it had been pound notes, she'd have freely given them, wouldn't she? I mean, well, pound notes to her, but bits of paper. But sweets! She'd give them to anybody else. And if God had given you a stellar galaxy, well, what so? He's got thousands of them. But he only had one son, says the passage. And in this is the demonstration of the love of God. He gave his own very vital, his only begotten son, that we might share the life of God, that we might live through him. That is what the first section told us. What greater demonstration than that infinite God should share with us. So first the demonstration of the love of God, and then secondly, the principle of it, the essential nature of it. Uh, beloved, herein is love. This is where the essential nature of love resides. Now we're going to get the principles and the cost of it. For this will tell us of the difficulties that were in the way and had to be overcome. First of all, there was the fact that we didn't love God. And this is love, you see. Not that we loved God, we didn't. We were in some sense his enemies, kicking his shins when anything went wrong and blaming him all the time, and living in rebellion against his will and going our own ways and ungrateful and so forth. We didn't love God. If God had behaved like we behaved, that would have been the first and the last barrier, which is to say, but they don't deserve it. Look how they treat me. But then, you see, there was something worse than that. There was our positive sin. And here the God of heaven had a real excuse, didn't he? How could the holy God of heaven have any truck with us at all? When if he came and had fellowship with us, the whole universe would want to know what the holy God of heaven was doing, having truck with evil men and women. Didn't that compromise his holiness? Doesn't it compromise his holiness still to have truck with us because we are far from perfect? Think then of the difficulties that lay in the way of God demonstrating his love to us, and the divine ingenuity and love overcame the difficulty, then there'll have to be a propitiation for our sins. Then there'll have to be a sacrifice that demonstrates to the whole world that God, in being friendly with us, is not compromising his holiness. And in order to love us, in order to be able to demonstrate his love, God had to provide a propitiation, and he sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. And it is an incredible story. When Israel, living in the desert surrounding the tabernacle of God and having fellowship with God, were made aware of their sinfulness and the difficulty God had in staying with them because of the uncleanness of their sins that defiled the tabernacle of his presence. Then they were told to bring a propitiatory sacrifice, and they took a goat, two goats, in fact, and the second of them, they confessed their sins over its head, and they took it out into a land uninhabited. And the verse is telling us the cost to God of loving us, that he who was the eternal word of God, who was with the Father, whose being was enough to satisfy all the infinite desires of God, was led out into the land of abandonment and forsakenness. That God might rightly have and enjoy our fellowship. Herein is love. This is the kind of thing that love does to overcome the difficulties in the way. It is an awesome thing to think that it is that God of whom we have been begotten, and who, as the verses are now going to say, lives in us. But brethren, says John, if God has so loved us, we ought to love one another. But now let's go on to look at the remaining verses from John four twelve to nineteen. I suggest that what we have in verses twelve and thirteen is an explanation of what is happening when we love one another. No man has beheld God at any time, says John in verse twelve. But if we love one another, two things are happening. God abideth in us, that's the one thing. And two, his love is or has been perfected in us. It is not surely that, eh, uh, the condition, if we want God to abide in us, we must earn it by loving one another. It's not saying if we love one another, well, that's the condition for having God dwell in us. It is surely an explanation. If we love one another, then what is happening? See one believer going to another believer and demonstrating the love of God. See a, a believer going to an unbeliever around the corner or in the wilds of the Bolivian forests. What is happening? It is this that the unseen God that nobody has ever seen is in fact abiding in that believer. The love of God and the nature of God is thus being manifested through that believer. And then John says the love of God is perfected. Now we shall notice, of course, that in one sense the love of God is nothing ever else than perfect. These words do not imply that the love of God is imperfect. But the love of God, rather, has need to find its way in our hearts to come to full growth and full expression in our hearts. God is love, but he wants that love to take effect in the world, and he has designed that that love should take effect through us. And so when we love one another, the love of God reaches its full goal and comes to complete expression, is what John is saying, surely, in verse twelve. And of those two things, he's going to speak first of God abiding in us, in verse thirteen to verse sixteen. And in verses seventeen to nineteen, he will speak about what it means to have the love of God perfected among us. How do we know then it is the God himself abiding in us? How do we know, in fact, that he does abide in us? Verse thirteen tells us, we know that we abide in him and he in us because he has given us of his spirit. Yes, we shall never here on earth be infinite as God's Holy Spirit is, but we have been given of that spirit. Let me remind you of a similar observation that Paul makes in Galatians. He says, you know, because you are sons, God has sent forth the spirit of his son into your heart, by which you cry, Ever Father. Did I ever tell you that silly story? Probably, yes, I tell silly stories. But, um, there once was a devoted man and wife who had their first child, and they were sincere believers, and they determined that the first word that this infant should ever speak would be Jesus. So at suitable hours in the day, the infant was propped on dad's knee, and he said to the infant, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. And the infant looked as they look, you know. After some many sessions of this course, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, the infant responded, Dada, it said. Yes, Dada. You say, why was that? Well, Dada is the natural thing for the child to say. Mama, Dada. It's simply the nature coming out. Because you are children, God has sent the spirit of his son, because you are sons, spent the sent the spirit of his son into your heart, and naturally the believer says, dada. There's the Holy Spirit within him. And from that expression to his father, you will perceive that God has given that man of his spirit in the same way. How do I know that God abideth in us and, uh, uh, uh, and we in God? Because you will find in a believer, yes, there are these divine instincts God has given them of his spirit, and in that sense, the natural thing for them to do is to love. And uh, then verse fourteen goes on to say how this has, um, all come about. How has it come to be that God dwells in us and we in God? And the answer is that though God himself is invisible, we have come to perceive him and to perceive what God is like. We have come to perceive that ourselves, and we have perceived it at Calvary. We have beheld and bear witness that the Father sent the Son to be the savior of the world. Oh, what a wonderful thing that has been. As our blessed Lord was hung, beaten, scourged, and naked on that terrible cross, multitudes went by. They saw him hanging there. They saw nothing in it, but one more criminal, they thought, coming to its end. Oh, but what a wonderful thing has been true of you. You stood by that same cross, and as you have looked upon that crucified form, your eyes have been opened, and you have said to yourself, do you know what? That is the Son of God hanging there. What's the Son of God doing there? Is that what like, is that what God is like? If that's God's son hanging there, what's he hanging there for? And the Holy Spirit's opened your eyes to see what the invisible God is like. There on that cross, there's God incarnate hanging. And the stunning realization comes home. He is hanging there for me. That's what God is like. And I've seen it, you say. Ah, happy your eyes, for they see what multitudes of eyes don't see. And you say with Paul, the Son of God. He loved me and gave himself for me. To see that, says John, and to confess it, see what that implies. Verse, um, fifteen, whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God abideth in him, and he in God. Pray read it in its context. This is not just giving vent to some theological statement in vacuum. This is coming to see who this Jesus Christ is at Calvary, and you see he's God's son. And with it the realization that he's there for you, and you confess Jesus is God's son. Why, that very moment, the infinite love of God that he expresses abides in you, and you in God. How could it be otherwise? This is God getting through to us, isn't it? The invisible God making himself known. And when I see it and believe it, then God abides in me. And we have known and believed the love that God has towards us. Not merely known it, but believed it. There are multitudes of people around who know about the love of God. But of them, there are many who have not yet believed it. When we come to the end of this third section, John will show us how to take that necessary step of believing the love of God. But this is a position of the true believer, and the Lord dwells in him. Now, finally, what does it mean when John says that the love of God is perfected, comes to its complete expression. And my time is far gone, Uh, but we were a little late in starting, and I'll cut the difference with you. Isn't that generous of me? Late in starting, so if I have taken five minutes, then you can take, uh, the other ten. Uh, the purpose and result of God's love being brought to completion in us. But John says not merely that the love has been made perfect, he says it's done with a purpose, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment, and all fear be banished. Notice the purpose of God for every believer. It is God's wish and will that all fear in light of that future judgment shall be banished. How can that be done in a practical sense? Well, not just by assenting to certain theological propositions. But in a practical sense, it is done this way, because as he is, and the prepos- the personal pronoun he presumably refers to the Lord Jesus, as he is, so are we in this world. If he was and is God's beloved son, then in lower but very real sense, we are God's beloved children and know ourselves to be that. Beloved, beloved, says John. As he is, so are we. You will want to discuss in your study groups, doubters, whether the verses go beyond this and tell us of the legal side of our acceptance with God, that the Savior who died for us is now accepted in the presence of God, and everyone who trusts in him is as accepted with God as the Lord Jesus is accepted with God. You, I say, will want to discuss that. But of course, it goes further, doesn't it? That with this love of God, with God's abiding in our heart and his spirit working out the love of God, not only to my fellow believer, but to God himself. Then the thing is done at a practical level. For if I love God, how can I be in fear, that is servile fear, in terror of him? You can't simultaneously love somebody and be in terror of them, can you? Ah. And if I love the Lord, how could you not love him when you have seen him in our blessed Lord Jesus Christ at Calvary for you, and if you come to love him, then with gladness and joy you shall approach him in that August day of the final judgment. Finally, John remembers to, uh, re- record again that when we talk of loving God, and thus all fear of God goes. The love that we show doesn't originate with us. We love. Whether it is God we love or whether it's our brethren we love, we love because he first loved us. One day, my brothers and sisters, we shall see God in all his glory. How fortunate we've seen him first in his son Jesus Christ at Calvary. And because of that, all fear of God's glory is gone forever. And so to our study.