Paul Tripp Ministries, Inc

PAUL TRIPP MINISTRIES, INC. Love’s Model July 6, 2008 1 John 4:10-12 There are two things I want to say to you before we look at our passage this morning. One is they've removed the clock from the wall. I'm an excited man; it’s sort of a preacher's dream. The second is I would really appreciate your prayers for some travels this summer. This coming week, I will be at Southern Seminary lecturing on pastoral care for a week, have a bit of a vacation break with my family, and then head for a speaking tour of South Africa for four weeks. You can pray for that if you would. I looked at that schedule this week. I think I speak over 40 times while I am in South Africa. I'm a man in need of prayer. So I would appreciate your prayers. Well, it was one of those very unremarkable human moments. Fortunately, by God's grace, He caused me to think about it afterwards. It was a phone call; it was a phone call from somebody that I care for whom I hadn't talked to in a while, and we were both excited to be talking. Well, I was actually excited by what I wanted to say. About 7 minutes into the phone call, I began to feel impatient. It felt like this person was just droning on, and I wanted to say what I wanted to say. I had glorious things to say and couldn't wait. I finally honed my way into the conversation, took over and said those things that I wanted to say. I got off the phone and not a few minutes later, began to think of how selfish I was on that phone call. How hard it is for me, even in a brief phone call…to love. It's not that I failed to love my enemies. I don't love the people that I would tell you that I love. And so, it's important for us to look at this thing the Bible calls ‘love.’ I mean, how quickly do you grow impatient? How fast does irritation come? How good are you at keeping a record of wrongs? How much unforgiveness marks your relationships? How often do you just feel like giving up and quitting the call to love? Well, turn in your Bibles to I John 4. We’re going to continue in this passage that I've decided to speak to you on this summer three times and because it is probably the New Testament’s clearest, most practical, most easy-to-understand treatise on love. I’ll begin reading with verse 7 and read through verse 12. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. I want to look this morning at verses 10 through 12. What is love? The first time that we looked at this together, we looked at “Loves Rescue”, and I summarized that with this sentence: “Love rescues you from love in order that you can love.” Love rescues you from love so that you would love. God, who is love, rescues you from you, so that you would become a person capable, desirous, willing to love. This morning, we want to look at “Love's Model”. Where do we find a definition of this thing called love? Well, you won't find it on the Internet. If you Google ‘love’, you will get thousands, hundreds of thousands of websites, and if you would read your way through those websites, you would end up massively confused about what in the world love is. It would be ethereal and cloudy and foggy to you, and you would despair of ever understanding love. But you don’t have to do that because in I John 4, verse 10, you have your definition of love, “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” You don't find a definition of love in philosophy; you don’t find your best definition in theology; you don’t find a definition of love in a sort of cultural research. Love is most powerfully defined, not by abstract concepts, but by an action, the redemptive action of God on our behalf. Love is best defined by God's initiative to satisfy His own anger by the sending of His Son. Redemption defines love for us. And the epicenter of that love is God's willingness to offer His own Son as a sacrifice that would atone for our sin--that's what propitiation means. It means ‘atoning sacrifice’. Now hear me say this because this is scary. “Our definition of love must be nothing less than the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. You have been called; you have been chosen to live in cruciform love, love that forms itself to the shape of the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Now the minute I say those words, my heart is filled with grief because my love falls so short of the willing self-sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ. It just does. I wish I could say that last week everything I did and everything I said was an expression of Christ-like, cross-shaped love, but it wasn't. And I'm afraid for us, that our tendency is to define love as something much less than that action of sacrifice that we see on the cross. Jesus says to you and to me this morning these words, “Love as I have loved you.” And perhaps our problem is that much of what we would call love is not love at all. It falls short of this calling. Brothers and sisters, this calling should make you uncomfortable. It should produce in you neediness; it should produce in you self-awareness; it should produce in you hunger for the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. Oh, that we would be a community of this kind of love, that loves the way that Jesus loved us. Husbands, that’s your calling. Wives, that’s your calling. Parents, that’s your calling. Children, that’s your calling. Neighbor, that’s your calling. Citizen, that’s your calling. Brothers and sisters, in the body of Christ, that’s your calling. You have been called to offer to the people that God, in His sovereignty, has placed in your life, cruciform love. God help us! That love is a call that is so powerfully depicted in verse 11. Let me read this for you, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” If God loved us in this way, we ought to love one another in this way. And I actually want to spend a little bit of time just unpacking one word in this verse, the word ‘ought’. We ought to know what ‘ought’ means in this verse. Now when you hear the word ‘ought,’ immediately you think moral obligation--you ought to love; it's your moral obligation to love; you’re commanded by your Lord, by the King, to love. This is your moral obligation and surely that's in this passage. You are morally obligated to love, but if you leave the word ‘ought,’ there, you miss its power and its genius. This is not just a word of moral obligation. Hear this, this is a word of design. You were created to love. That's what you were designed to do. When Christ reduces human calling down to two commands, what kind of commands are they? They are commands to love: “Love God above all else and love your neighbor as yourself.” You say, “Well, Paul, I’m not sure what you mean.” Let me give you some illustrations. Birds ought to fly. Honey ought to be sweet. Night ought to be dark. The sun ought to be bright. Fish ought to swim. Things were created in creation for a particular purpose. You don't keep your poodle in an aquarium because you know that violates the purpose for which that being was created. You won't see your neighbor walking his fish on a leash down the street--if you do, run fast! Something has happened to the universe! You see, this call to love gets right at the heart of the reason you were given life and breath. This is what human beings were created to do. We were created to love, and there is something weird and something horrible and something broken when the human being doesn't live in love; when he shrinks his life down to what he wants, to the confines of his own little agenda, there's something wrong with that. And love defines who you are as a human being, and the failure to love is not just a spiritual problem.

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