John fifteen, verse nine as the father has loved me, so I love you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my father's commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. This is the Word of God. I pray that he seals it on your heart. Our Western world has made a mess of love, hasn't it? We have reversed everything that is true about love in our world. We want a love that is unlimited in scope, but limited in demands. We want everybody to love us, but not require anything of us. We want to love that receives us as we are in our Western world or our postmodern world. It is truly loving to accept me as I am without giving me any requirements, without asking me to change anything, just to respect me and receive me as I am. And we want everybody to do that. If a stranger doesn't receive you as you are, that is hatred towards you. It's a violation of love towards you, etc. you know, we do have an English word for that, by the way. We have an English word for receiving somebody as they are and accepting them as they are without requiring anything of them. That word is tolerance. That's the word that we use for that. You tolerate your neighbors. It's not even meant to be a negative word. You're okay with people that live around you, that act differently than you are, that don't worship Jesus, etc. you recognize we live in a pluralistic society, but the word for that is tolerance, not love. But our world has basically morphed those two, which is a very low bar. Low bar for love, isn't it? It's a it's a demotion of love for it to be equated with tolerance. And that becomes because biblical love is the opposite of Western love. Western love is unlimited in scope. In other words, it's indiscriminate. Everybody should love and receive everybody, but it is very limited in demands. It shouldn't ask anything of you. Biblical love is exactly the opposite. Biblical love is targeted and requires things. It comes after you. It seeks those that are its own. Now the confusion about love is not new. I mean, philosophers have long argued over what love is, much less what God's love is. If they can't agree on what love is, there's no way they can agree on what God's love is. This is a debate that was predated Christ. This was a common debate in the Greek world. In the Roman world, that Jesus was born into, what is the nature of love? And the Greeks, of course, had lots of different words for love. But they had two key words that kind of captured the debate in the Greek and the Roman minds about this. The first is the word eros. Eros comes into English as erotic. Um, but it's not even in the Greek world. It didn't have the sexual connotation. Although sexual love fits under the heading of Eros. But in the Greek world, eros is a love that you have towards somebody based upon something in them. So that's the concept that you love this person because of something pleasurable in them, something you see in them that is desirous. You see somebody that has something attractive to you, and so you love them because of what is in them. That Greek word for that kind of love is eros. There's even a connotation with that, that your love for them, based upon what you see in them, is making up for a deficiency in yourself. Bob Hartman's retirement party. A couple of nights ago, somebody gave a speech and talked about how Bob and Lisa were perfect for each other because Lisa had all these strengths that Bob didn't have. So they complemented each other well. And that's that's a good thing, right? Especially in marriage, you want a spouse that complements you. You're not good with people. They are great. You're not good with details. Your spouse's great. You work things out and you compliment each other. And this is the very nature of marriage. But notice that kind of love. It's reflects a deficiency in you and an attraction in the other person for what they bring to you. Eros. So you can see how that word becomes erotic or becomes sexual. Certainly that's under the umbrella of its meaning. But know that in Greek world it wasn't even meant as purely sexual. It was meant just. It was a way to say that I love that person because of something in them. The opposite of that, inside of the concept of love is the word agape. They. Agape is a love for somebody irrespective of who they are, irrespective of anything in them. You might even say you love that person in spite of who they are. They don't deserve it. There's nothing lovely in them, but you love them anyway. That's agape. Now that is not a romantic kind of love, right? Do not tell your spouse there is nothing lovely in you at all. But I have chosen to love you anyway. No, you can see how eros and agape can get pitted against each other. The question becomes, What is God's love? Even this Christianity comes into the world and the Roman Catholic tradition. They often elevate Eros, this idea that for God to love you, there must be something lovely in you. And that becomes this concept of meritorious grace that, you know, God gives you grace that energizes your works, that makes you lovely before him. Protestants have often elevated agape by saying that God loves you in spite of who you are and you know, without conditions. Neither one of which, though if you really wrestle with the biblical text, is the full picture. And so I want to do that this morning. I want to get into the Word of God this morning and look at what love means as it relates to the Word of God. I want to give you an outline that God's love is moving, moving the movement of God's love. God is not static. He's not stationary. He's not stoic. He's not just at peace with himself and, you know, relaxing in heaven and everything's happening. God is action. He is active. He is light. He is life. He is love. He's overflowing his banks. He's always giving. He's generative. He always gives himself. He creates life. That's who God is. And so God's love has a movement to it. It's not still pond, but it is recycling. It is moving. It is moving water. So we're going to look at what the movement of God's love looks like. First of all, God's love is towards himself. You see this in verse nine as the father has loved me. So this is the Son of God speaking as the father has loved me. God's love is towards himself. God loves himself. In other words, God's love is towards God. And you understand this conceptually. If God is holy and perfect, he can only love that which is holy and perfect, or his love would love someone holy and perfect more than somebody unholy and unperfect. You can chart it out that way. If God's love is perfect, it terminates on something perfect like himself. And so God loves himself because he alone is perfect. He alone is holy. He alone is eternal. So he loves himself. The father looks at the son and sees himself in the son and loves the son. The father generates the son. Uh, you know, not out of a decision that God doesn't decide to give life to the son. He just always is, because he's eternal Father and the son is the Eternal Son. But the father in love are bound by a union of love. The father fills the son, the son fills the father. That is a union and a union, really a unity of love. They love each other. Their love is towards each other and in that sense terminates on each other. God cannot love anything unlovely. And the most lovely thing there is, is himself. And so he loves himself entirely. That's where Jesus begins here. As the father has loved me. But this love keeps going. So I have loved you. The pattern in here is as the father loves the son, so the son loves us. So note the pattern, though, as the father loves the son, which is the love that goes back to the father. So the son loves us. It's just in itself a love that goes back to God. The son loves us because we are in Christ and so in loving us. He is loving God. We are given as the church to the son. We are his body. So the son loves us because we're a gift from the father. Notice that in the son loving us, he is truly loving God. And as God loves us, he is truly loving God Himself. There is, of course, a loveliness inside of us, but there's a loveliness inside of us. That's because we are in the image of God. Everything lovely in us, we have because God gives it to us. He makes us in his image. And so it does go too far to say, and I've heard people say this agape love means that God loves you irrespective of who you are. You're nothing. You're trash. You're worthless. God loves you anyway. You're horrible. God still loves you. That's. That's not true. That's sloppy agape. I'm sorry. I can't help it. No. God loves you because there is something lovely inside of you. But it's not something that you deserve. It's not that God looks at all the people and chooses the lovely ones to love. What draws God's love towards you is what God Himself gives you. There's a sense in which you could say God loves nature because he made nature. It's his creation. But if that's true, he loves people even more because he makes people in his image, and then he loves his elect even more because he chooses them and he puts his name on them. He sets them apart before he created the world. He loves us in Christ. He chose us to be holy and blameless in him. In love he predestined us. That's what Paul says in Ephesians one. He chooses us to make us his own. And so in loving us, God is showering us with love. That is, of course, returned back to him because he is the true object of that love. God's love, in that sense, is God centered, and God loves us by enabling us to in turn love him. He puts his love on us. He appoints us for his love, puts his love on us. We experience his love. And as a result of that, what do we do? We love him back. We love him because he first loved us. So it's a love that returns back to God. It still has God as its object, God as its end. His love towards us doesn't terminate on us but goes back to him. Now there is an assumption in our world that authority and love are in conflict with each other. And this goes back to what I meant earlier with this Western concept of love. That love makes no demands on you. It receives you as you are. Any demand on you is by definition unloving. If you have that as a worldview, authority and love are in conflict, aren't they? Because authority is bossing you. Authority is telling you it's commanding you. But if you think about it critically for a second, You recognize there is no conflict between true godly authority and true godly love. They are, in a sense, one and the same. There are one hundred human illustrations for this, but here's one that I like because it's effective and makes the point. You picture the new fat of gentle parenting, right? Where a parent doesn't correct their child, but reasons with them. You've seen this in Walmart, I'm sure, with the kid grabbing Grinch style all of the candy off of the shelf and putting it in the cart, and then the mom sits down on the floor to say, Johnny, we don't. We can't spend all this money on candy. You know, your dad hasn't got his raise yet, and he's having a conversation about budgeting with the four year old to get Johnny to agree to put the candy back. And you know, Johnny can't count to four, much less budget. So it's not going to be an effective conversation. Johnny is good at eating candy, but he's not good at, you know, the kind of conversation of, oh, Johnny, that's not reasonable what you're doing. Think of the greater good. La. And what happens in that kind of relationship parenting relationship is eventually the the mom runs out of love for the child. This is the kind of relationship where the dad comes home from work and the mom's like, I don't love the kids anymore. Like, I'm just calling it like it is. It's too much. It's too much there, you know? And of course, people passing in the hall in the aisle at Walmart don't love the kid either. Like, the whole thing is a scene. It's a mess because authority gets pitted against love. But when authority and love are seen in the same stream, that God is the authority over you and he loves you and you in response, love him. That brings the two together. In our world, love is often self-expression. Love is often receiving me as I am. But that is not biblical love. Biblical love doesn't terminate on self. And here's a place where biblical love is different than Shakespearean love, Shakespearean love, or hallmark love, or whatever you call it, does terminate on self as an object. You look at someone and say, I love you. If you love me back, it's it's terminating on you as a human. One of my daughters is taking a Shakespeare class right now, and we read Romeo and Juliet several times this year, and something new struck me that had never struck me quite the same way before. You know, Juliet, in Romeo, there are kids there, fourteen year old kids. And their love for each other is supposed to be portrayed as immature. You know, when Juliet says, you know that nothing Romeo is in your name, so that's not truly who you are. So doff thy name, and for thy name, which is no part of thee, take all of me you know. Reject your name so that your love can terminate on me. There's a sense in which that creates this Shakespearean kind of romance in our life, where you want somebody to love you like Romeo and Juliet's love. But what hit me new this year is reading that I thought Shakespeare is almost critiquing that kind of love. He's not prescribing it. I mean, the two of them die at the end. Spoiler alert. Sorry about that. It's not meant to be an example of virtuous love fully. It's meant to be immature and sad and tragic, isn't it? That someone's concept of love terminates back on themselves? If you live for self and you love someone because of how they make you feel, it leads to a thirsty life. I would say wandering in the desert looking for water and not finding it. This is what Augustine meant when he wrote, you have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. We were made to be loved by God, and we are restless until we recognize that we are not the terminating point of love. But God is. Our heart is restless until it learns to trust in the Lord. That's what Jesus is describing in verse nine as The Father loves me, so I love you. Abide in my love. So recognize that love comes from the father to the son, then to us, but always terminating in the father. As love moves from God to God. We recognize that God is pouring out his love on us because we are in the image of His Son. When God looks at us, he sees His Son. For those of us who are in Christ, he looks at us and sees His Son and loves us because we are hidden in the son. This leads from the movement from love to obedience. Notice it doesn't terminate in love. Verse ten if you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love. Just if I just as I have kept my father's commandments and abide in his love. Notice that love has a transforming effect on you. Love brings you into a relationship of obedience with God. There's an order here. Obedience doesn't make you lovely, but God pours his love on you, which makes you obedient. God loves you because of what he's predestined you to be, and then he transforms you into that. That's why Paul says we're all being transformed from one degree of glory to another. We are growing in holiness because we are growing in love. And if you're growing in love, you are growing in obedience. If you love me, Jesus says, you obey my commands. Somebody who's just experimenting with Christianity might say, yeah, I'm going to obey Jesus as long as everything he commands me checks out with my own intuition. That's not obedience. That's the again, the four year old who says, dad, I'm putting my plate away. Not because you told me to. Because I want to. That's not obedience. That's not obedience. Obedience requires an ordered love that you recognize. God's love for himself is above his love for you, and his love for you goes back to him and terminates on him. And so, because of how much he loves you, you submit your life and your intellect and your will and your hands and your finances and your time to him, you surrender to him not abstractly, but in real life. You surrender to him and submit your life to him because you've experienced his love. We love him because he first loved us and out of love for him. It makes us want to obey him. We're transformed. Following Christ is not like joining a summer swim team, or joining a country club, or joining some club that you get things out of, and that's why you're joining it. And when the schedule ceases to work for you, you join a different club. That's not what following Christ is like. Following Christ is more like. The analogy that comes to my mind is playing college sports. You know, a student is on a scholarship, plays college sports, and his life belongs to the team. It belongs to the team. Uh, school is free for him. Of course it's free. It doesn't cost him anything, but he is going to go to workouts. When he's told you he's going to take the classes, his coach tells him to say take. He's going to do laundry. On the days the team does laundry, everything belongs to the team and nobody's making him do it. He's there because he loves it. He's there because he delights in it, but he obeys. It's free, of course, but it costs him everything. That's the image of the gospel here. God showers us with his love. His love makes us obedient. In verse ten, it's. This is why I don't like saying that God's love is unconditional because he says, if that's the conditional phrase, if you obey me, you're walking in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love. Now, of course, this is not works righteousness because God gives us the heart to obey. Our heart was dead and then God makes it alive. The living heart loves Christ and obeys Christ. He loves us because we're in his image. He loves us because we're holy. And he makes us in his image and he makes us holy. When we were yet sinners, he chose us to be holy in him. But this love carries on. It doesn't just make us obedient, it makes us joyful. The obedience produces joy. And this is in verse eleven, these things I have spoken to you, so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. So do you see the progress here? God loves his son In that way. His son loves us. It's love that returns back to God, that love makes us obedient because we've had an experience with God's love, we want to obey him. That obedience then produces joy in us. We delight in it. We're not reluctant in our obedience. We are delighting. God doesn't drag you screaming and kicking into the kingdom. He brings you into the kingdom by changing your heart. Your heart was dead. He makes it alive. The living heart loves Christ, obeys Christ and is filled with joy. You're transformed. It's not a burden to obey Christ. You know, some people who have not experienced the love of God view obedience to the Bible or obedience to God as a joyless experience. But it's not. If you've had an encounter with the love of God, you recognize that it is your desire to obey Christ because of the joy that it brings you. Jesus is the pattern for this, isn't he? He scorned the shame of the cross for the joy set before him. He endured all things for the sake of the elect, for the joy that was set before him. And this is our pattern for the joy set before us. We're the farmer who sells all he has to buy. The fields we sell. We have to buy the pearl of great price. We're like obedience to God is like Jacob working for fourteen years for his wife, it seems like. But a moment, but a moment because it brings us joy. That joy is from God through love and obedience and returns back to God. I went to the Gaylord Hotel recently out in National Harbor and watched the fountain show. I'm sure many of you have seen it, and I was thinking, this is an image of that. The water comes from the tank, it comes from the source. It brings joy to all those who are watching. And then it goes back to the tank. It cycles back around. That's how love of God is. It's from God. It returns back to God. But before it goes back to God, it comes through Christ, through us. In us it makes us obedient. And that obedience makes us joyful and makes us joyful. We serve the Lord out of joy, motivated by love, motivated by love. We don't serve the Lord out of desiring everything to be submitted. It's not Islam here. The motivating factor here is not hatred or surrender. The motivating factor here is love that produces surrender, not hatred that produces surrender. We serve God because we love him. That love produces joy in our life. That joy finally moves to sacrifice. That joy moves to sacrifice. You can see that in verse twelve, this is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. And the example of this is that someone lays down his life for his friends. This again is not reluctant obedience. This is a church built by unity in light of the gospel, where people share their lives with each other, willing to lay down their life for one another. It's people that have counted the cost and do what Paul does. We count all things as loss for the surpassing value of knowing Christ. That is not a reluctant calculation. That's not. You did the math and the math checks out, but you don't like it, so you do it again. This is. I've sized up everything in my life and it is worthless compared to the joy of being obedient to Christ. I love Christ so much I surrender all things for him. Being joined to the body of Christ is a joy and an ultimate act of love. There are those that think of the church as authority, and it represents abuse and contrary to God's love. But that's getting back to the heart problem. Remember, if you pit authority against God's love. This everything on the screen doesn't make sense. If you view authority as unloving, then you don't have the grid for this. But when you recognize that God is the authority and he sheds his love abroad in our hearts, that love produces an obedience to His Word, we're under his authority, and we're keeping His word. That obedience produces joy. That joy motivates somebody to even lay down their own life for their friends. When you put all this together on the screen, you recognize it starts to look a lot like the cross, a lot like the gospel, doesn't it? That God so loved the world? He sent His Son, that his son came and lived a sinless life, took on our sins not reluctantly, but out of obedience to the the plan from before time. The plan that the Son himself wrote. He submits himself to that plan out of joy set before him that sinless life, that joy in obeying His father leads him to the cross where he lays his life down on the cross for us. He gives up his life, sacrifices it on the cross for the objects of his love, namely us. That love is in returned back to the father as we have God's love implanted in our hearts. We worship God, we magnify his love, and the love returns back to God. Remember, love is just multiplied and magnified all the time. God is love without sending His Son to the cross. But God's love is magnified by sending His Son to the cross. God's love is still there, even if nobody gets saved. But God's love is multiplied and magnified through our hearts as more and more. This is second Corinthians four. As more and more come to joy in Christ. God's glory is magnified to the grace of God. Its multiplied and God's love. Notice it doesn't just map on to the shape of the cross, it maps on to each individual believer. Go through the same list again. You're living for yourself. You're seeking your own happiness and your own love, and you're not finding it. And so step one is you repent from your sins and receive the love of God, that repentance changes your heart. You're no longer living for yourself, but you're now walking in Christ. That love is now transforming you into somebody who's obeying, and that obedience is now producing a joy in your life to where you are truly walking in the joy of the Lord. And because of the joy in the Lord, you now don't view your life as your own, but a stewardship that you have to use in service of another to use in season service of the Lord. You're willing to sacrifice your own life. You've in some sense already done that by surrendering your life to God. And you delight in it. You delight in that surrender. I started by saying, what is? The philosophers have long argued about what love is, but here's probably the best biblical definition. I wouldn't even try to write a list down. Just take it into your your heart. It's the affection you have for another where you want what is best for them and what is best for it to be true. Godly love is God Himself for you. Desire what is best for the other person. That's godly. Love you in first Corinthians thirteen. Love is patient. Love is kind, does not envy, does not boast, keeps no record of wrongs, is not jealous, doesn't insist on its own way and you go through that list. God is patient. God is kind. But then you run into trouble, don't you? God boasts the heavens declare the glory of God. God is a jealous God. God keeps a record of wrongs. God insists on his own way. He is sovereign. And you think well. When you take a step back and you recognize at a human level, love is those things in first Corinthians thirteen, because you are not what's best for the other person. A husband who keeps a record of all of his wife's wrongs. Oh my goodness. Who do you think you are? You're not what's best for your wife. She's a gift to you from the Lord. So you receive her as such. But God, who is what is best for everybody, must insist on his own way. It'd be unloving if God didn't insist on his own way. And so we recognize for you to love somebody, you want what is best for them. I told you that we're pausing our study in Matthew eighteen with that concept of love. Do you see how unloving it is to say that you're not going to confront somebody about sin in their life? And I'm not talking about, like, the kind of sin that love should cover. Like they cut me off in the parking lot. I'm unloving if I don't tell them how rude that was. I'm not talking about that kind of love. You let love cover as much sin as you can. Of course you do. I'm talking about the kind of sin that's going to rob somebody of joy in life. Rob somebody of the joy of obedience. Separate families make shipwreck of faith that kind of sin. See how odd it is to say, because I love that person, I'm not going to confront them because I love that person. I'm not going to pursue Matthew eighteen with them. It would be unloving to call them out on their sin. It'd be unloving to make an appeal before the congregation for them the repentant. That'd be so unloving to them. This is why I called the sermon the Surprising Offense of God's Love. Because God's love makes this kind of distinctions. God's love terminates back on himself. And if you are deciding you're going to do what makes you happy, that puts you outside of God's love. God's love is offensive in that regard. It elevates itself over you. It makes you just like the gospel itself. It makes you say, I'm dying to what I think is best for me. I'm dying to it. I submit it to you, Lord, I surrender. I give up my life. This doesn't mean you enter a life of sin. Sinlessness. Of course not. People go astray all the time. That's why the shepherds got to go get the sheep. The sheep got stuck in the rocks back there. Go get em. That sheep thinks. That sheep thinks that other field is going to bring it joy, doesn't it? When it goes frolicking that way as much as sheep think it thinks that field is going to bring it joy and then get stuck in rocks, or there's a predator after it. No joy there. Now the shepherd, out of love for the sheep, has got to go get that and turn that sheep around and bring it back to the fold. A few years ago, when the key Bridge in Baltimore was struck. You know, a couple people died, construction workers. But it was a bit of a miracle, if you remember that. Not a lot more people died. And apparently the captain or people on the boat had called nine hundred eleven. And in a remarkable example of government efficiency, the nine hundred one operator knew what to do, like called the State Patrol. And like within a few seconds of the call, if you remember this, got patrolmen on both sides of the bridge that shut the bridge down, blocked traffic, and one of the officers talked about how everybody's honking at him like he blocks the car with his road and people are honking at him. They were probably angry at him for approximately one minute. Right? And it was not more than a minute between when the call came and the bridge went down. It's amazing. It would be weird for the officer to say it's unloving of me to block the road here. These people have places they want to go. They're late. It's the middle of the night. Some of them want to get home. Some of them work in the morning. They're trying to do what they think is best for them. So it's the most loving thing for me to do to get out of their way. I need to accept them like they are and where they're going and just streamline the process. No greater love has no one than this. Jesus says, you lay your life down for your friends. Lord, we're thankful that you have given us your love, and your love transforms us. We're not merely objects of your love, but we are reflectors. We bring it back to you. And in so experiencing your love, we are changed from one degree of glory to another. We are made more like Christ. Your love transforms our hearts. It doesn't even simply transform us, Lord. It makes us live for the good of others. It transforms us and it fills us with joy. We're persuaded, Lord, as Paul says in two Corinthians five, we are persuaded that one man died for many, so that all might live in him. We're persuaded that life spent following Christ is the life of joy. We are persuaded it is the best life possible. We are persuaded that it is the life of love. May we never pit obedience and love against each other. May we never pit authority and love against each other. Recognize that your word is truth. Your word is love because you are love and you've given it to us in the person of Christ. Make us a congregation that obediently delights in you. We ask this in Jesus name. Amen. And now for parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson. If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website. If you want more information about the Master's Seminary or our location here in Washington, D.C., please go to TMZ.com. Now, if you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, D.C. area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Emmanuel. I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service. But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church. Now, may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly. Serve the Lord faithfully and share the gospel boldly.