“What Is A Christian?” Part 10” by Romans
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUnDKD1NMH4
We are continuing, tonight, our current Series, "What Is A Christian?” Last week we left off in our review and examination of agape` love as a facet of what it is to be a Christian. I would like to continue that with a very unusual approach to the subject. It is one that I have only used one other time. In the past, I read from the book, “The Purpose Driven Life” by Rick Warren, and I supplemented its Scriptural notations of book, chapter and verse with complete texts, and then commentaries after each chapter.
Tonight, and, God Willing, next week, I will be doing the same, Instead of reading from notes that are posted here on the screen, I will be reading from a chapter of a Daily Devotional by John MacArthur called “Drawing Near.”
If you are reading this in the Forum, this portion of tonight's Discussion will not be available to you except on Youtube where recordings of these Discussions have been posted. If it is available, I will provide the link to that recording for you to be able to hear what I did not cut and paste, tonight.
Let's consider something very important before we go to the Devotional: Before God created man, He said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). The Apostle John tells us several times in his first epistle that “God is love” (1 John 4:8aans 4:16). In both cases, the Greek term for love is “agape`.” I submit that, as we are made in God's Image and Likeness, that agape` love should also be the dominant characteristic that embodies who and what we are as Christians.
We learn from the Sermon Bible, “1 John 4:7-10 Love is of God; God is Love.
I. "Love is of God." This does not mean merely that love comes from God and has its source in God, that He is the Author or Creator of it. All created things are of God, for by Him all things were made, and on Him they all depend. But love is not a created thing; it is a Divine property, a Divine affection; and it is of its essence to be communicative and begetting, to communicate itself and, as it were, beget its own likeness.
"Love is of God." It is not merely of God as every good gift is of God. It is of God as being His own property, His own affection, His own love. (1) None but one born of God can thus love with the love which in this sense is of God; therefore one who so loves must needs be one who is born of God.
(2) Being born of God implies knowing God. It is a knowledge of God altogether peculiar, belonging exclusively to the relation constituted by, and realised in, your being born of God. It is the very knowledge of God which His Son has—His only-begotten Son, whom He sent into the world to manifest His love.
II. Every one that loveth knoweth God; he that loveth not knoweth not God: these are the antagonistic statements. The fact of a man not loving plainly proves that he knows not God; and his not knowing God explains and accounts for the fact of his not loving. How, indeed, can he know God—know Him as being love?
To know God thus, as being love, implies some measure of congeniality, sympathy, and fellowship. There must be community of heart and nature between Him and me. I must be "born of God." (1) We are to love as He loves His only-begotten Son. Our thus loving Him is one primary criterion and touchstone of our being born of God.
(2) Then we are to love, as God loves it and because God loves it, the world which He sent His Son to save. We are to love thus one another, with what intensity of longing, like God’s own longing and yearning, for one another’s salvation, that all may turn and live. R. S. Candlish, Lectures on First John, Part III., p. 104. References: 1Jn_4:7-10.—Homilist, 3rd series, vol. viii., p. 219. 1Jn_4:7-11.—N. Beach, Christian World Pulpit, vol. xxxii., p. 178. 1Jn_4:7-16.—Preacher’s Monthly, vol. i., p. 444.
I. In perfect love there are three elements, which may best be seen by examining the three states of life in which they are respectively most prominent: the filial; the fraternal; the parental. (1) The first form of love in the history of each of us is that of a child to his parent, and, as a rule, it is the weakest form; but it contains and exhibits in an exceptional degree the first and essential element in all true love: reverential trustfulness.
(2) But with the passing away of childhood a new need dawns upon the spirit of man: the wish to be one in whom others can rest, as he finds rest in them; the need for reciprocity of affection, such as is found in a brother, a friend, a wife. It is this reciprocity that is, in the common opinion, the chief characteristic of love;
and as in all natural reciprocity, so too here, the more distinct are the elements, the closer is the union; and in ordinary cases and for ordinary men, therefore, the love of friend is closer than the love of brother, and the love of woman than the love of friend.
(3) And yet there is a height above the reciprocity of wedded love. "Greater love hath no man than this: that a man lay down his life for his friends," which I have called parental love, or the parental element in love, because, again speaking of the average of cases and the average of men, it is in parents that such love is oftenest and earliest seen.
Such, then, are the three elements which go to make up love, reverence, desire, sacrifice, inextricably intertwined into a new something which is none of them, and yet all of them together—the whiteness of the prism, the trinity in unity of love.
II. Consequently, if God is love, that love must exist and be exhibited as possessing in fulness this trinity of elements; and if to dwell in love is to dwell in God, that love in which we dwell must have its full development, and we must pass in our spiritual history from trust through desire to sacrifice, just as in our natural history we pass from filial through wedded to parental love.
"Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks, so longeth my soul after Thee, O God." Then, but not till then, will love enter upon its highest stage, and put on the crown of sacrifice; for sacrifice is the language of love, its only adequate expression, the last effort of the spirit whom no union with the object of its love can satisfy short of the self-annihilation that shall make that object all in all. This is a goal very far from us, the love of saints, the love of the men whom God in His turn reverences;
but it has been realised by one and another lonely soul along the ages, living afar upon the mountains in the air we cannot breathe, to remind us that after all sacrifice is an element in love, and an element that will be present in proportion as love is stronger—that if God is love, there must be eternal sacrifice in Him, and that we cannot dwell in love without partaking of that sacrifice. J. R. Illingworth, Sermons, p. 130.
The Revelation of God’s Love the Distinctive Characteristic of the Gospel. What has Christianity done to make good its claim to the proud title of the Gospel—the one good message of glad tidings to mankind? I. It were easy to enumerate many eminent social blessings, many conspicuous instances of individual happiness, which can be traced distinctly to the Christian dispensation as their only authentic source;
but if I were asked to name what is its greatest gift of all, I should say unhesitatingly that it is the unveiling of the face of our Father who is in heaven—the revelation, all the more pregnant and influencing from the way in which it was made, that "God is love."
II. God, having spoken in time past partially and variously by the prophets, in the last days, when the time was full, spoke unto the world by His Son. The darkness passed away; the true light shone: the day broke, and the shadows fled away. One who had lived under that darkness and felt it, described in vivid and emphatic language the change that came over the spirit of his mind when, as one of the Israel of God, he found himself blessed with light in his dwelling.
Christ, says Clement of Rome, was taught His message of glad tidings by the Father, and the Apostles were taught theirs by Christ. The Gospel was not only an atonement: it was a revelation. Not only was God in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, but God also was in Christ making Himself known unto the world. The Son, by whom He spoke to men in the last days, was the "brightness of His glory and the express image of His person."
III. The doctrine of the love of God when imbibed, not speculatively or conventionally, but really and practically, not as the badge of a party, but as a conviction of the soul, is little liable to perversion. Antinomianism in a religious mind seems to me to be an impossible moral phenomenon.
For whom are we more likely to obey—one whom we love, and whom we know to love us, or one whom we simply fear? Who renders the more willing service—a son or a slave? Surely, under a law of liberty, all obedience freely paid becomes by that very freedom more hearty, more trustworthy, more true. Bishop Fraser, University Sermons, p. 288.
References: 1Jn_4:8.—Spurgeon, Evening by Evening, p. 157; E. Blencowe, Plain Sermons to a Country Congregation, vol. ii., p. 327; J. J. S. Perowne, Church of England Pulpit, vol. iii., p. 109; Homilist, 1st series, vol. v., p. 333; F. Wagstaff, Christian World Pulpit, vol. viii., p. 398; J. Baldwin Brown, Ibid., vol. xvii., p. 328; F. W. Farrar, Ibid., vol. xxix., p. 385; E. Hatch, Ibid., vol. xxxi., p. 385; G. W. McCree, Ibid., vol. xxxvi., p. 182. 1Jn_4:8-12.—H. W. Beecher, Ibid., vol. xxiv., p. 106.
I. God is love. The text takes us up, as it were, above the veil; we are caught up through the door of this vision to the sanctuary of God’s throne. We are suffered to know something, not of His working only, but of His being. We are led to the fountain of all good and joy. And that fountain is this, says St. John: "God is love." Is there not something to grasp, to embrace, in these words, "God is love," when within the glory of the Godhead we see the revealed love of God for God, the infinite, embosomed tenderness of the Eternal Son to the Eternal Father?
Yes, there is something here which meets the human soul in its longings more lovingly, more warmly, than the God of mere philosophy, the God of mere Deism, the God of man’s own inventing. In revealing the truth of the Trinity, God does much more than show to us an abstract doctrine: He unveils to us Himself.
II. God is love. Such is the fountain, worthy of its stream. This love of the being of God came forth unasked, unmerited, in the love of His actings. He, this God, loved the world, so loved it that He gave His only-begotten Son for the sinner’s life. "Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another."
Here is indeed the point of contact between the sublime truth of the Holy Trinity and the humblest, smallest, most trying claims which one poor, suffering human being may lay upon another, if this other is a Christian, a child and servant of this God. Here descends this great ladder of light from the throne above all heavens to the stones of the desert road.
If God is this God, if this God hath thus loved us, then we cannot own His tenderness to us, we cannot see this glorious depth of lovableness in Himself, and yet remain cool, calculating, and selfish in our thoughts and wills towards our suffering brethren. H. C. G. Moule, Christ is All, p. 151. References: 1Jn_4:10.—C. Kingsley, Westminster Sermons, p. 15; Christian World Pulpit, vol. v., p. 268; R. Tuck, Ibid., vol. xiii., p. 69. 1Jn_4:10, 1Jn_4:11.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxix., No. 1707.
Matthew Henry adds to this, “He that loveth not knoweth not God, 1Jn_4:8. What attribute of the divine Majesty so clearly shines in all the world as his communicative goodness, which is love. The wisdom, the greatness, the harmony, and usefulness of the vast creation, which so fully demonstrate his being, do at the same time show and prove his love;
and natural reason, inferring and collecting the nature and excellence of the most absolute perfect being, must collect and find that he is most highly good: and he that loveth not (is not quickened by the knowledge he hath of God to the affection and practice of love) knoweth not God;
it is a convictive evidence that the sound and due knowledge of God dwells not in such a soul; his love must needs shine among his primary brightest perfections; for God is love (1Jn_4:8), his nature and essence are love, his will and works are primarily love.
Not that this is the only conception we ought to have of him; we have found that he is light as well as love (1Jn_1:5), and God is principally love to himself, and he has such perfections as arise from the necessary love he must bear to his necessary existence, excellence, and glory; but love is natural and essential to the divine Majesty: God is love.”
Let us take another look at agape` love, this time translated “charity” in 1 Corinthians 13. It is from here, called the Love Chapter, that John MacArthur devotes the entire month of August to reviewing and examining. Tonight, I am going to read from August 1st through August 11th, including his suggestions for prayer as he closes the devotional for each day.
I have tried to time this so that we will wrap up right around our usual forty minutes after the hour. Let's see how I did...
Next week, God Willing, I plan to finish John MacArtur's insights regarding agape` as presented in the month of August from the Daily Devotional, “Drawing Near.” I invite all of you who are hearing or reading my words to join us as we continue in our our review and examination of agape` love, and our current Series, “What Is A Christian?”
This concludes this evening's Discussion, “What Is A Christian? Part 10”
This Discussion was presented “live” on February 28th, 2024.
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