God’s Love Enables You to Love Others (1 John 4:10-11)

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God’s Love Enables You to Love Others (1 John 4:11)

Prepared and preached by Pastor Steve Rhodes for and at Bethel Friends Church in Poland, OH on Sunday, June 4, 2023

David Jeremiah shares the following story:

Rick Garmon opened his gun cabinet and took a long look at the weapons within it. He lifted his best rifle and began polishing it. He had been doing all he could to hide the rage inside him, but people knew.

What they could not know was that the fantasy of vengeance that had crept into his mind months ago had put down roots and grown into a genuine intention. He was going to take this gun, place it on the floor of his car, and drive slowly through the college campus. Sooner or later he would see him—the student who had raped his daughter Katie. Then he would calmly pick up the gun, aim it, and deliver justice.

His sweet Katie had been only eighteen, a college freshman. She couldn’t tell anyone for a long time. Instead, she switched schools, developed eating disorders, and fought severe depression. It was Katie’s mother—Rick’s wife—who finally got the truth out of her. She told her mother about the date rape and gave her the name of the boy. But it didn’t help. Katie became more and more withdrawn. It took a year of prayer and therapy before she finally began to turn the corner and get on with her life.

But her protective father did not turn that corner. He seethed with ever-deepening fury over the punk who had devastated his daughter. First Rick merely daydreamed about revenge, but at some point he found himself making solid plans.

Now he stood at the gun cabinet, ready to turn those plans into action. That’s when his young son Thomas came up behind him. “You going hunting, Dad? Cleaning your guns? Can I help you?”

For a moment Rick just stood without responding. When he turned around, he saw tears in his son’s eyes. He knows, Rick thought. Dear God, I think my son knows my plan.

Some kind of spell broke at that moment. “Come here, son. Give me a hug.”

Thomas ran over to his dad and then wrapped his arms around his father, hugging him with all the love and affection he could muster. And that was when the father realized the truth. He had thought his bitterness defined him—that nothing could stop the overwhelming hatred from growing stronger in his heart. Now he knew he was wrong. Love was stronger. A son’s love. A Savior’s love. It took a great deal more strength to restrain one’s rage than it did to act it out. That strength could be found only in love.

As Rick replaced the gun and locked the cabinet decisively, he also locked away something within himself. He would not exercise his anger. He would not be judge and jury; he would be a servant of God instead, and that meant forgiving. It would be the hardest thing he had ever done, and it might take several months, and innumerable prayers. But through the power of God’s love, Rick Garmon was going to forgive the man who had violently abused his daughter.1[1]

That day Rick Garmon encountered God’s transforming love in his son’s embrace. God’s love is more than just talk. It is real. It completely changes the way we think, the way we see others, the way we live each day. Love delivers us from the vicious cycle of vengeful retaliation. It makes life worth living. It changes everything.[2]

We have been talking about God’s love. Today, I focus on God’s love enables you to love others.

Today, my theme is:

God’s love enables you to love others.

(I am grateful to David Jeremiah’s book “God Loves You” for some of my main points and illustrations. Anything that is a direct quote, or illustration is footnoted)

  1. Because God loves us, we can love others (1 John 4:10)
    1. Let’s look at 1 John 4:10 (ESV)
    2. 10 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.
    3. God initiated love. He loved us when we were still in our sins.
    4. He sent Jesus to be the propitiation for our sins. This means Jesus appeased the wrath of God.
    5. God loves us and this leads to us loving others.
    6. David Jeremiah: Just as the sun is our only source of daylight, God is our only source of love. Sunrays reflect from all objects they strike, permeating the air with light and making it possible for us to see. In a similar way, God’s love enters the world and reflects off our hearts, making it possible for us to love Him and others. We have no innate capacity, no self-originating store of love to give. We can give only what we receive from Him.[3]
  2. Because God loves us, we can love one another (1 John 4:11)
    1. Look with me at 1 John 4:11 (ESV)
    2. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
    3. We extend God’s love for us to others.
    4. See the progression in John’s writings:
    5. John 13:34-35: A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
    6. John 15:12: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
    7. 1 John 3:10: By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother.
    8. 1 John 4:8: Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
    9. David Jeremiah sharing from Francis Shaeffer: In his book The Mark of a Christian, the late Francis Schaeffer pointed out that Jesus gives the world the right to judge believers by their love for one another:
    10. Jesus says, “By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one to another.” In the midst of the world, in the midst of our present dying culture, Jesus is giving a right to the world. Upon his authority he gives the world the right to judge whether you and I are born-again Christians on the basis of our observable love toward all Christians.
    11. That’s pretty frightening. Jesus turns to the world and says, “I’ve something to say to you. On the basis of my authority, I give you a right: you may judge whether or not an individual is a Christian on the basis of the love he shows to all Christians.”
    12. In other words, if people come up to us and cast in our teeth the judgment that we are not Christians because we have not shown love toward other Christians, we must understand that they are only exercising a prerogative which Jesus gave them.
    13. And we must not get angry. If people say, “You don’t love other Christians,” we must go home, get down on our knees, and ask God whether or not they are right. And if they are, then they have a right to have said what they said.2[4]
    14. Wow! That is powerful, isn’t it? But it comes right from the Bible. I read the passages to you.
    15. Another example from David Jeremiah: This can turn out to be a pretty tough task. We can heartily agree with one Christian writer who describes how nothing in the world is more important or more difficult than truly loving other people:
    16. That odorous person with the nasty cough who sat next to you on the plane, shoving his newspaper into your face; those crude louts in the neighborhood with the barking dog, that smooth liar who took you in so completely last week—by what magic are you supposed to feel toward these people anything but revulsion, distrust and resentment, and justified desire to have nothing to do with them?3[5]
    17. We can look at many other scriptures:
    18. The greatest commandment in Matthew 22:37-39.
    19. Love your enemy (Matthew 5:43-45, 48).
    20. Clearly, loving others is what we are to do.
  • Applications:
    1. How do we love?
    2. God loved us (1 John 4:10), we must worship Him.
    3. We must thank God and worship Him for His love.
    4. God loves us so much that He took care of our sin. Jesus became the sin offering. Jesus took the wrath of God and turned it into favor (1 John 4:10). We must thank Him and worship Him.
    5. Jesus satisfied the wrath of God in our place. Praise God!
    6. What can we do, but love Him and love others.
    7. We must love others (1 John 4:11).
    8. We must encourage others (1 Thess 5:11; Heb. 10:24-25).
    9. In his book A Simple Blessing, singer Michael W. Smith tells of Justin, a high school freshman who was walking home from school one day when he saw a group of students bullying a smaller boy. They knocked him to the ground, scattering his books and sending his glasses flying. Justin started to walk on, but when he saw the hurt in the boy’s eyes, he stopped, found his glasses, and helped him pick up his books. The boy was so overloaded with books that Justin offered to help him carry them home. On the way, he learned that the boy, Kyle, was a recent transfer to the school, had no friends, and was often harassed by those bullies.
    10. Out of sheer pity, Justin invited Kyle to come over and toss a football with him. The two became fast friends, and at the end of their senior year Kyle emerged as valedictorian of the graduating class. As he began his valedictory speech, Justin was stunned. Kyle told of his early misery. Uprooted, friendless, bullied, and hopeless, he had decided to end his life and was taking his books home so his mother would not have to clean out his locker. But this time when the bullies attacked, Justin came along with kindness and encouragement, which turned Kyle away from despair and gave him a new grip on life and hope.5[6]
    11. We must say things to encourage others with our words (Eph 4:29).
    12. We must share with one another (Eph 4:28).
    13. We must serve one another (Matthew 5:16; Heb 6:10).
    14. We must be kind to one another, forgive one another (Eph 4:32).
    15. These applications could go on and on.

Christians have always been different. From the beginning Jesus freed us to love self-sacrificially:

Tim Keller shares:

Rodney Stark wrote a book called The Rise of Christianity. If you want a book that gives you a synopsis of early Christianity and why it triumphed in the Roman Empire, you couldn’t do better than that book. It’s readable, great scholarship. It uses sociology as well as historical scholarship. In the book he says there were at least three major ways in which the early Christians were remarkably different than their pagan neighbors.

One is when the great epidemics hit the urban centers of the Greco-Roman world, while other people just fled the cities, Christians stayed in the cities, took care of the sick, even though in many cases they died doing so. Secondly, when Christians were persecuted, that is when they were put to death unjustly, they did not respond with terrorism. They did not respond in violent retaliation. They did not respond with guerrilla warfare, but they died praying for their enemies’ forgiveness.

Rodney Stark points out the third thing. At the height of the Roman Empire, Rome had conquered all the nations in that part of the world. It had never happened before. For the first time really in history in that part of the world, all national borders were open. The nations weren’t against each other. They were all subjugated to Rome, and that meant for the first time in history the cities of the Roman Empire became fiercely multiethnic. That had never happened before.

In those cities there was a great deal of ethnic tension. Those kinds of folks had never lived together before. Rodney Stark said the Christian church was the first institution in the history of the world that brought people together across those ethnic barriers and said, “Race means nothing. Race isn’t important. There’s no pecking order of races and cultures here.” Rodney Stark said no institution had ever done anything like that.[7]

You see Christians have always been different.

This week, remember God loves you and go and serve in Jesus’ Name.

Prayer

1 Rick Garmon, “My Secret Hate,” Today’s Christian (May–June 2006). Cited in Craig Brian Larson and Phyllis Ten Elshof, 1001 Illustrations That Connect (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008), 226–27.

[1] David Jeremiah, God Loves You: He Always Has–He Always Will (New York City, NY: FaithWords, 2012).

[2] David Jeremiah, God Loves You: He Always Has–He Always Will (New York City, NY: FaithWords, 2012).

[3] David Jeremiah, God Loves You: He Always Has–He Always Will (New York City, NY: FaithWords, 2012).

2 Francis Schaeffer, The Mark of a Christian (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1970), 13.

[4] David Jeremiah, God Loves You: He Always Has–He Always Will (New York City, NY: FaithWords, 2012).

3 Quoted in Ray Stedman, “The One Commandment,” May 10, 1985, accessed May 21, 2012, http://www.pbc.org/system/message_files/4298/3867.html.

[5] David Jeremiah, God Loves You: He Always Has–He Always Will (New York City, NY: FaithWords, 2012).

5 Michael W. Smith, A Simple Blessing (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), 145–46.

[6] David Jeremiah, God Loves You: He Always Has–He Always Will (New York City, NY: FaithWords, 2012).

[7] Timothy J. Keller, The Timothy Keller Sermon Archive (New York City: Redeemer Presbyterian Church, 2013).

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