Bible Lesson 173
HE LOVE OF GOD
“Behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God! Therefore the world does not know us, because it does not know Him.” 1ST John 3:1
“Our Lord told His disciples that love and obedience were organically united. The final test of love is obedience.” John 14:15, 21-2 A.W. Tozer
Perhaps our greatest need at the front end of this message is to attempt to really understand what love is and what love does in this dark and dreary old world that we live in. We do not see much love manifested among the masses that we know today, because love does not look like hate, and that is what is going on in so many communities in our time.
We begin by looking at God’s kind of love, which is revealed by the Greek word Agapao. Agapao or Agape are both a noun and a verb; however we find it most often used as a verb which tells us that God’s love is active and it works for the benefit of those who know His love. We find in John 3:16 that “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”
What does that statement tell you? It’s important if we are ever to understand God’s love, that we go past that mental nod of our heads, to the fact of God being a God of love, to what does that mean to each one of us. Yes, 1st John 4:8 tells us that God is love. That means that one of God’s virtues is that He is loving; but what does that mean to most people who hear it or read it.
Does it mean that God loves every human being in the world, or does it simply mean that God’s nature is such that He could love everyone ?.that is, if they proved that they loved Him by their obedience to all of His commandments? This may be a rocky road and a rough ride for some who read it because you hardly ever hear this question, about God’s love, asked in relation to what the Bible has to say about God’s love for mankind. Fasten your seat belts, and hold on as we ask hard questions and supply God’s loving answers to those questions about His love.
Let’s begin at the beginning, and that has to be with the first man that God made. God made Adam from the dust of the earth and breathed into him the breath of life. Incidentally all life is from God, because life is the breath of God (Genesis 2:7). Next God put Adam to sleep and took one of Adam’s ribs and made the woman, and Adam called her Eve (Genesis 2:21-23; Genesis 3:20). God at the time of the Garden of Eden loved everybody in the world because everybody at that time was Adam and Eve.
However, God had given Adam a command’ ‘not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’; and we all know that Adam listened to his wife rather than God and He disobeyed God and they were separated from God by their sin. Since Adam fell in the garden and He being the source of human life, his nature which was one of disobedience was passed to everyone who has ever been born of the flesh into this world and so we all begin our lives under the wrath of God (Ephesians 2:1-3). Remember now that we have looked at the beginning of mankind and are now looking at the present age and we find that it is not man who saves himself, just as Adam had no way to redeem himself in the garden. Thankfully, God had promised His creatures a Messiah or Savior (Genesis 3:14-15), and God himself covered Adam and Eve’s sin with the skin of animals before he forced them out of the Garden of Eden.
Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, that Paradise on the earth, with their sins covered, innocent in the sight of God. Now fast forward, to you and I today, we are born into this world in the same predicament that Adam and Eve were in when they sinned, we are separated from God by our nature and our continued sinfulness. God has provided the perfect way for us to be innocent of sin, by sending His One and Only Son Jesus Christ, God in the flesh to pay our sin debt by dying on the cross in our place. So how do we receive God’s pardon’ We are born separated from the love of God; If you don’t believe that read Ephesians 2:1-10.
So far in this message we have proven that it is God’s nature to love, and that in the beginning, God loved everybody and everything that He had created; but Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s instructions and fell from Grace. They were separated from God by their sin of disobedience, and lost paradise for themselves and for us; however God because He is love covered their sin by the death of sinless animals before he sent them out of the Garden. That brings us to the present time; from Adam and Eve, to you and I, and we find that we are separated from God by our nature that we received from our great grandfather several times removed, and by our continued sin. It is not normal but every now and again I have run into people who really thought that they had never sinned; but these have never known the true God. We were all, born as con-men, ready and able to deceive those around us but we have never fooled God. We readily claim that God loves us as He does everyone else, and we even say that Jesus died for everyone’.but unless you have torn some pages out of your Bible, that is not the truth. The truth is that God could not stand any of us when we were born, and before we were born again (saved by the blood of Christ, and created as new creatures, who live completely different than we did before God decided to save us.
If you read your Bible, you will find that every person who has ever been born to the flesh is born dead in trespass and sin, under the wrath of God, unless and until God made the decision to call us, and save us. (Ephesians 2:1-10; Romans 6:3-14; 2nd Corinthians 5:17; Hebrews 5:8-9; John 14:15, 21-24). I am sure that by the time you get to this point in this lesson, you are probably saying to yourself, brother bob is just too strict, too narrow, too critical of the way that we live. I am truly sorry that you think that way but I was called by God to preach the truth, not to make sinners feel good about themselves, but to break their hearts when they come to understand their miserable condition before God. If you think that I am too critical’just wait until the judgment day, and you will find that God is a lot more judgmental than I am. I am not being judgmental at all, what I am doing is telling you what God has said. It is a wonderful and glorious thing to be loved by God, but we cannot constrain God to love us on our terms, He only loves those who will obey Him. Brothers and Sisters we have for years been led down the primrose path by ministers who would have people love them for their being so nice and sweet as they preach, Peace, Peace when there is no peace.
You can and should love your preacher, but your loving him will not get you to heaven. And if these purveyors of half-truths and outright lies ever began to preach the good news of the gospel which puts all sinners on their faces with their hearts broken, crying out for God to forgive their arrogance”.they would lose a good portion of their congregations. Be that as it may, we must come to the understanding that the Lord will not simply hold the false prophets that you sit under for your not knowing the truth. He will certainly punish them, but you will have no excuse, because Bibles are available and God expects and even demands that you read them ‘that is if you are interested in missing hell and gaining heaven. It is almost impossible for you to obey all the commands of Christ, unless you spend time and effort in the Bible in order to find them out. Listen to me now’.God separated Himself from Adam and Eve and took His spirit away from them and began the act of physical death because they broke one single command’.that one that He gave them there in Chapter two of Genesis, that says “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat of it for in the day that you eat of it you will surely die.” God had made Adam and Eve to live for ever and now because they ate one piece of fruit, they lost every thing’their home, their lives, their communion with God and the leisure of living in a paradise and instead going out into a world that they had corrupted because of their disobedience. God says what He means and means what He says, and we seem to think that if we don’t like one of two or more of the commandments that Christ left for us to obey, that we simply won’t keep them. If you think that will stand up in the Judgment, you can bet that someone has some property in the everglades they would like to sell you.
Let me ask you a question and if you will think about it and answer it to yourself. Let’s have a conversation with me writing my thoughts and you being sincere, answer them to your self. First question’do you believe that God is the Creator of all that we know including ourselves’ Do you believe that God inspired the Bible and that it is the absolute truth that God desires his creators to know and be responsible for’ Does your Bible have any place that you can find where God gives his approval for one of His children to sin’ Are you a sinner or a saint’ Do you love Jesus Christ supremely, more than your Mother, Father, Wife, Children and your own life’ Are you keeping the commandments of Jesus Christ’ Think about all of those question for a while and then come back and finish reading this message.
The answers to the question should be’that is if you are a Christian. I asked you first if you believe that God created the earth and all that is in it’.the only correct answer should be: Yes! I asked you next’.Do you believe that the Bible is the Inspired, inerrant, Word of God and that all that it speaks on is God’s absolute truths. The only correct answer is Yes. I asked you if you could find any place in your Bible where God approves sin from any of His children’ I also asked you if you are a sinner or a saint. The only correct answer is ‘Saint. Next question was Do you love Jesus Christ more than you love Mother, Father, Wife, Children and even your own life’ The answer should be that you love Jesus Christ so much more than you love anyone or anything that your love for them looks like hate. Then I asked you if you are keeping the commandments of Christ as they are found in the Bible. The only correct answer for a true Christian is ‘.Yes. That is the long and the short of it. That will tell you if you are saved. Now unfortunately, contrary to popular belief today, there are not degrees of salvation. If you are 10% saved you are simply a lost sinner going to hell for eternity. If you are 99.9 % saved you are simply lost and going to hell. There are no carnal Christians, and there are no nominal Christians, or those that are not obeying the commandments of Christ. Obedience is the proof of love for Christ so if you are not obedient and saved, you do not love Christ and you do not know the love of God.
How many of you who read this message have been lulled into that little easy ‘cheap grace thought’ that some false prophets have, that says ‘Oh, we are all sinners and we sin every day” Do you like that kind of preaching’ If you do then you are not saved. All of us are born sinners; but when God shows mercy to any sinner, He makes him a saint. Can you think of any good reason that an omniscient God would send His son to die a terrible death to save people that would not live according to His rules’ Could it be that we really do not believe that God has the power to give a saved person the ability to live above sin. We have to know that when we sin, it is because we love sin more than we love God. Can you identify one single sin that you just cannot keep from committing’ Whose fault is that, is it that God has not rebirthed you and given you His Holy Spirit to live in you’ If that is true than you need to seek the face of God and ask Him to save you because you are lost. God gives every person saved, that second birth, where he puts the old nature to death and gives you a new nature that will walk in newness of life (Romans 6:1-14). In order to sin and there are many who may be Christians today who decide to defy God and commit some sin.
I say that not to encourage anyone to sin, because in order to sin we must deny our profession, crawl over the prayers and wishes of all our brothers and sisters, tread in and on the blood of the Savior, then crawl over the cross and that crowd of saints who watch us from heaven’.it seems that by the time we do all of that we should be too tired to sin, but there are those who do sin; however never think that God encourages it. Those who are saved and then sin will receive the Spirits convictions like they never have before and then they will repent and be forgiven. If we read 1st John 2:1, we find that the Apostle opens the possibility of sin by those who are saved; however it is shown to be a possibility not a probability. There are those who seek all kinds of dodges to find something in the Bible to permit them to sin. Most like to use David and His adultery and sin with Bathsheba; but before you attempt to use David, stop and think about what happened to David about that sin:’..His son that Bathsheba produced was taken in death, and the sword never left the house of David. Is the sin that you are contemplating worth all of that’ David was visited on occasion by the Holy Spirit, you are indwelled by the Holy Spirit, and He is with you always. David looked forward to the Cross of Christ, and you look back on it. David had some of the old Testament and you have all the Old Testament and the New. Maybe you want to use Samson and his dalliance with Delilah, and if so perhaps you need to go back and read Judges chapter sixteen and find out what happened to Samson when he departed from the Lord. You will find that the Lord left Samson and he ended up with his eyes gouged out and he was fettered to a grinder. In the Old Testament we find that over and over again, God sent prophesied chastening upon the nation of Israel. They could not or would not remember that even though the creature forgets or ignores God’s commands, God does not!
Apparently we do not think that God has done enough for us, to cause us to love Him enough to obey him. After all ‘.all that God has done for us is to create us and create a wonderful world for us to live in. Beyond that God has sustained us and will save those who love Him enough to obey Him. God even sent His Only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, God in the flesh to die in the place of those who would obey Him (John 3:16-21). How much more do we want God to do for us’ It looks like what most sinners want is for God to remove the penalty from sin. You know the one that tells us that we are all sinners and that the wages of sin are death (Romans 3:23; Romans 6:23). We would also like to have God not require that we love Him to prove our love, by keeping His commandments (John 15:9-10). For the life of me I cannot understand how we have come so far from the Word and Will of God that we now think that we can set aside anything that does not allow us to sin without any responsibility or punishment. God never dodges telling us that there will be trials and testing and chastisement for those who are His true Children, (Hebrews 12:5-8; Revelation 3:19; Job 5:17-19 ).
We in our time and especially in our society have invented or conjured up a ‘see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil kind of religion. We refuse to see or judge sin in our own lives or in the lives of those who call themselves Christian brothers and sisters: We will not allow anyone else to judge any sin in their lives or the lives of anyone else: and they will not tolerate sermons that not only preach against sin, but insist that the preaching is not applied to the congregation. It is almost as if there is no sin in the world as long as you have your name on the church roles. This new and novel religion that exists is one that desires the love of the world and the worldly and we do everything we know how to do to ingratiate ourselves to the world. We invite the worldly into our midst, without any discerning marks of having even come close to Christ. It is interesting, that once when I was hearing Peter Marshall’s son speak, that he told of his experience as a youth who went forward at an altar call and was immediately accepted into fellowship without any questions about his understanding. On the way home with His Mother (His Father who was the Senate Chaplain for years, had died), and he made the remark to his mother that it had been easier for him to join the church than it had for him to join the Boy Scouts. It seems in our day that we desire the peace and tranquility that is outward more than that peace that passes understanding which is inward as a result of our having been saved, (Philippians 4:4-7).
It seems that the major thrust of our churches today is to gain the love of the world. We never confront their sin and we live to be just like them (the worldly). That is the signal event of a people who have lost their way and are moving away from God. Jesus Christ who was and is God in the flesh, says to us in John 15:18-25; John 17:14-16; James 4:4, that we are not to love the world or the worldly; but rather expect the world to hate us. We have called men of letters rather than men that God has marked and called out to preach the good news. That is not meant to accuse those who are preaching the truth and following the Christ of the Bible of being wrong but it is pointed at millions who preach anything other than to do the will of God and not all that they preach is based in the Word of God, the Bible. The only way that men who are not ‘God called preachers’ have filled many pulpits in our day is that the congregation does not have enough knowledge of God to know what is of God and what is not of God. God does not call men to preach most of the sermons that I hear today.
God calls men who love God and are man enough to be concerned that everyone knows the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Why would God call a man who will not let his yea be yea and his nay be nay. God’s preachers do not omit, deny, or sweeten anything that God has said. God does not call men who will stand and tell a congregation that God loves everybody and Jesus loves everybody, or that Jesus died for everyone, when God has said that is not so. If you know your Bible you know for sure, that God plainly says that it is only those who love Him enough to keep His commandments that He and the Father love (John 14:15, 21-24).We must wake up and realize that preaching is critical, yes even crucial. It is more important than edicts from the government and people who do not know God but who worships their idol (the god they make up in their mind). We dare not change one jot or one tittle of the word in order to make God more acceptable to sinners, the Bible was given to make sinners acceptable to God. Let’s go back to the Word of God and the God of the Word,
Until next time,
may God bless and keep you
This is Bro. Bob