Need of the Church

I wanna start this morning by asking you the question, what is our church's greatest need? What is our church's greatest need? What is the church's greatest need? What is the greatest need of the church? Perhaps some of us would say that the thing our church needs the most is great communicators.

Great orators, people who stand above the din and the confusion of a time speaking a sure word of God, from God to people. Still others would say that the greatest need for the church is great scholars and theologians who study the Bible and bear it to life. And still others might feel that the deepest need of the church is for people who've had powerful, influential experiences of God and of His Spirit, who have felt the touch of God on their lives and have moved out to share that touch with others. They would say that this is the greatest need of the church, and those would be fine suggestions. They would be good suggestions. We do need good communicators.

We need people, men and women, as millions sit in their living rooms on their way to hell. In the pub this morning, we need men and women who can speak a clear word to them. We need to communicate the word of life to a dying soul, and yet we also need scholars and theologians, people who designate and dedicate their lives and their minds to the understanding and the explanation of God's will. In a time where rose-coloured fog has taken place over Christian doctrine, we need people to understand Christian truth clearly and to defend and explain the Gospel of Jesus Christ completely. We need them.

But in case we make that theology clear as ice and twice as cold, we need a band of God-intoxicated men and women moved by the love of God Himself, working in lives, moving out to share that work with other people. We need men and women completely intoxicated and in love with the love of God, but that is still not the church's greatest need. The thing that the church of God is called to be, called to have over and over and over again in the Bible, is to be filled with love. It is to be filled with love for one another, love for God, love for God's will, love for the sinner, love for the saint, and love for the self, even. The church's greatest need is and will always be love.

And that is why John the Apostle, once again, as we look at his first letter, writes this entire letter with this theme. If you wanted to know what the theme of John is, put simply, it is a theme around love, and the most central to that theme is what we're going to read this morning. It is the summary of what he's been saying. It is the outflowing of what will happen next. So if you have your Bibles and we'll chuck it up on the screen as well, let's turn to First John four, and we're gonna read from verse seven to 21.

First John four, verse seven. Dear friends, beloved, God's dear children, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed His love among us.

He sent His one and only Son into the world that we might live through Him. This is love. Not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us and His love is made complete in us.

We know that we live in Him and He in us because He has given us His Spirit, and we have seen and testify that the Father has sent His Son to be the saviour of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.

In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like Him. There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love. We love because He first loved us. If anyone says I love God yet hates his brother, he is a liar.

For anyone who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And he has given us this: whoever loves God must also love his brother. As someone who's grown up in a tradition of the Dutch South African upbringing that I had, parents with ancestors from a certain northern region in Holland that I won't mention, known for their stubbornness, I can tell you that by nature, love and tenderness does not come naturally. I testify to you today that any part of any sort of soft-heartedness or kindness or compassion that you may have seen or experienced from me, friend, is a work of God. And I have this one thing, because people that have worked with me for longer than just a little bit, and my elders may agree, may know that it is also an incomplete work.

It is a work that has much more to be done. But the question is, how does a personality or a culture or the sin-racked nature of my self-centredness, how can that be moved to love? How can I be moved and you be moved to sacrifice? How can we be moved to mourn or moved to rejoice with others or feel deep empathy for anyone else but ourselves? Well, the Apostle John gives us three supreme motivators for this that we find in our passage this morning.

And the first one, and probably for me the most powerful one, just personally, is that we love because God's love has moved us. Supreme love, as Christians understand it, true love, genuine love centred on the other and not on the self, is not a human achievement according to the Bible. That love is divine. Love exists in this world because God exists. But love is not simply just another one of God's good gifts to us, like our natural environment, like our physical bodies, like the physical elements of time and space.

Gifts that can be received and experienced in our human experience and yet be confused by other theories, confused by an atheist philosophy, for example, where a world, a nature, an environment, a physical reality that we all live in has somehow come about by accident. These elements are gifts of God, even good gifts, but the giver can be ignored. But love is different. Love is different.

It is special because, in some way, it is a continuous emanation from God, tied up in the very nature of who God is. And that's what we see in verses seven to 11. This is emphatically stated in one of the most quoted and also the most misquoted statements in the whole Bible: verse 10, God is love. God is love. And again, probably one of the most profound yet simple theological statements in the whole Bible, but to say that God is love is to say more than that God is simply loving.

To say that God is love is more than to say that it is one of His characteristics. It means that He is love and loving all the time without end, without beginning. It means that there is no condition to it. It doesn't need a certain mood. It doesn't need an external event to happen to somehow produce it.

God loves not because He finds an object worthy of His love to pour into, but because His very nature is love. That is why more and more atheism, as a philosophy, is stumbling in this theological philosophical debate when it comes down to this issue of love and boiled down into actions a bit more, morality. We can explain away physical existence. We can somehow explain first causes, but we can't explain why our morality is objectively set. Why we love the other.

An atheist or an agnostic that says we just don't have enough information to make that conclusion cannot explain why we will all say that the Holocaust of the Jews was horrendous, was evil, even though it was in the past and it doesn't have a direct impact on me right now in my life right now, even though it happened to a different people group, not of my tribe, not of my family, even though it happened on the other side of the world, because God's love has permeated through every layer of this world right down to a moral code. We know what is good and we know what is evil.

Someone might say, how dare Christians say that their way is the right way? Everyone has a right to judge what is right and good according to their context. And you can ask them, is what is happening in Aleppo, in Syria, in the gassing of civilians, is that right? Is that good? Can we say that in the eyes of their dictator or their army motivating them to do that, is that still right if they think it's right?

We can't. Why are we moral creatures? Because of God's love. The implications for the fact that God is love, however, has a razor-sharp edgedness. God loves because He loves and therefore it destroys any self-centred, man-centred hopes in us as well that we might have.

His love for us then depends not on what we are, but on who He is. And that's why in verses nine and ten, John says this: this is how God showed His love among us. He sent His one and only Son into the world that we might live through Him. This is love. Not that we love God, but that He loved us and that He sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

This is the razor-sharp edge of this truth. By nature, we have no love for God. We were His enemies. John three nineteen says that we, in fact, loved sin instead. Instead of God, we loved sin and we were ruining ourselves by it.

And before we were born again, and some of us can remember this clearest day, for some of us we're not exactly sure before we were born again what that looks like, but before we were born again, made alive again by faith and trust in Jesus Christ, we were ruining ourselves in sin and we see it in the world around us. Today, people are ruining themselves in sin because they don't love God. But God brought out His Son, John says, brought Him out of His bosom, sent Him from Himself into the world to make reconciliation for us, to deal with that self-destruction that is sin. This is love, says the Apostle, as though you could find it nowhere else.

This is it. As if you could search under every rock, as if you could read every book, as if you could experiment with every drug, enter every relationship, look inside every heart, search through the whole world, and John says, this is love. This is it. Friend, here is the depth and the height and the breadth of the immeasurable. Here is love summed up. Here is the climax, the unwavering commitment of God to rescue our souls.

While God's beautiful love can be seen in creation and we can, while we can experience it in our physical bodies and what He has made us to be, what He's made our beautiful children to be, while we can experience and see the humbling providence of God to meet our daily needs, our food and the clothes on our backs, while all these things are love, even God's love, this is the ultimate, the gift of Christ for our redemption.

And this is so sharply contrasted by the reality of what our stinking, weak and failing love looks like towards Him. Verse 10, this is love: not that we love God, but that He loved us. And so the humbling, in fact, the crushingly humiliating truth is this. Apart from God, there can be no love. If we can remember a time before God, we know that there was a hatred of God and a loathing of His goodness.

Apart from God, we don't want to do good. The distance was not on God's side towards us, however. It was our distance towards Him. He loved us and He sent His Son. The gift of Christ, the satisfactory sacrifice for our sins, was all love on God's part. And this is the first motivator that, if you understand this, if this truth sinks down and buries itself in your heart, letting it seep through all the layers of my life, all the faculties of my heart, and yet while it is so deep in me, also always at the surface of my mind, always at hand to remind and to encourage, the love of God in Christ will move you to love.

That is why He can say, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. The second thing we see, the second empowering motivating factor for us to love, is found in verses 12 to 16. Knowing how much we have been loved will move our consciences. It will prick our consciences. It will motivate our minds.

But God doesn't stop there. He knows that that's not where He can stop. He goes further to override our old natures. He goes after the heart. He pours His Spirit, His very self, into our souls.

He fuses His nature with ours. Verse 12: no one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us and His love is made complete in us. We know that we live in Him and He in us because He has given us His Spirit. Not only, friends, will our hearts and our minds be moved by the love of God in Christ, but your hearts will be moved and changed by the loving God Himself in you. If you ever feel guilty that you aren't loving enough, friends, let me start by saying this: it's not an indication that you are lost.

Not necessarily. It is not an indication that you aren't a child of God. In fact, it may be and probably is the opposite, because it shows that your old nature is being chipped away at. It shows that you are being overwhelmed and overhauled by God's Spirit inside of you. That prick of the conscience in you is a sign of the process in you. So don't fight it.

Please don't fight it. Let it take its course, and then don't despair, either. The God of love, friends, the God of love is in us. And so the truth is, you will love. You will love.

You are empowered by God's very nature living in you, given to you when you became a believer. The moment you actually believed the Gospel, the moment you actually placed your trust and said, here I am, empty-handed but alive in Your hand, the Holy Spirit entered your life in that moment and started working on you. And because He is working on you, it means that this work is not complete.

Because He is working in you, it means the work is not complete. Because there is work to do, it means the job isn't finished. And so He'll keep reminding you, and He'll keep prodding you, and He'll keep challenging you, and He'll keep sending sermons and messages like this towards you. Let Him do His job. An old analogy for the work of the Holy Spirit, I think maybe even started from the Puritans several hundred years ago, is this image.

Think of a glove. Not that we use gloves very much these days, maybe if you are a tradie, think of a glove. Think of how it looks on the hand. Now, as a Christian, you are not the hand. You are the glove. The glove cannot do anything by itself.

It is just a floppy piece of material. But when the hand fills it, the glove can start doing a lot of things. It is not the glove, but the hand in the glove that acts. It is the Holy Spirit in us who does the work. I like that.

Write that down. Think about that. But like most analogies, it has its limits. It is imperfect and it starts to fail a little bit, which leads us to our third point. Because God is living in us, it means His love is in us as well.

But unlike the hand and the glove analogy, the work of the Spirit is actually making our natures more like God day by day. In other words, the hand is starting to give life to the glove. In some powerful, mysterious way, the glove is now going to be able to live and move and be with its own power, with its own energy. Its nature is changing. And so we love because God's plan to transform us will happen.

It will be complete. It will be perfected. Verses 17 to 21 says, it talks a lot about progress. Have a look. Love is being made complete, it says.

In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment. Verse 18: there is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, shoes it out, gets it out of the house. There is progress and process happening here. Our NIV translation of verse 17 says that love is being made complete, which is a good translation of this word. The Greek word, if you have an ESV or another translation, it will be translated as perfect, which is closer to the Greek, probably, but not closer to the meaning or the intent.

The Greek word is perfect, but this is confusing because our understanding of the word perfect means something that is flawless, means something that is without any shortcomings. Rather, the idea with this word perfection is to reach its full development. It is to reach its intended goal. In other words, to become mature. John Piper paraphrases the verses like this: in your love for each other, in your love for each other, God's love is put into action, and so it reaches its appointed goal in you.

Your love does not remain at this imperfect stage of mere talk, of mere thought, but it reaches the stage of action. And so when John the Apostle talks about love being perfected in us, to the point where it leads to confidence, it has this end goal in mind: the final day that Christ returns. Judgment day. And our life is this journey towards that moment where God will say, well done. The work that was started in you has been carried to completion.

It will reach its intended goal in us. God's love itself will work to develop our love and will bring it to completion. It is therefore not a question whether a Christian will love or not. It is not a question whether you will love or not. No matter what your background is, what your personality is, how Dutch you are, a Christian will love.

A Christian will love. And if a Christian is failing now, if they really are a Christian, that is not a problem, because they will love. And they will grow in this love, John says, more and more and more as they grow in understanding God's grace, as they are filled with His Spirit, as they practice and practice and practice in the wide array of situations and circumstances God shoves us into sometimes. You will learn to love. And John says right up until that very last day, the day of judgment when Christ returns to establish His kingdom once and for all.

And he says that while many may dread that day, while there may be so much fear associated with the punishment of that time, while many people will cower and cry on that day, the Christian will have full confidence. Why? Surprisingly, John says, based on this knowledge, because we have loved. We will have confidence because we have loved. We will have confidence that we loved our neighbour deeply, that we loved God's people deeply, that we loved one another with sacrifice and empathy and kindness and patience.

We will have confidence that Christ will welcome us into His kingdom because in our love, we have realised God's love and His life in us. Like blood running through our veins, God's love and His life is in us. That is why in the earlier chapter, in chapter three fourteen, John puts it this way so succinctly: we know that we have passed from death to life if we love one another. I don't think we can finish this morning, however, by talking broadly about love.

Like I said, this is one theme that comes across so often in the Bible. We can't talk broadly about love, although this is good and it helps us to think clearly about this and to just pray and speak to our own hearts about this. But we cannot, I think, move on from here without looking at the reality of what love looks like, what love is in our life. And so I can't think of any better picture of what true divine God-like love is than Paul's definition, or description rather, of it in First Corinthians 13.

And so I'd like to, if we can, and I know we're pushing on, I want us to quickly read that. First Corinthians 13, verse four. And friends, I encourage you over and over again, when we get to the point of love in God's Word, when we are encouraged to love our brother, our sister, our neighbour, the stranger down the road, come to this, read every word, and think: what aspect of love is at play here in my life? Paul, the Apostle, writes: this is love. Love is patient.

Love is kind. Love does not envy. It does not boast. It is not proud. It is not rude.

It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

The Bible defines love. Do you notice? By describing love. There are some things in the dictionary that it just cannot capture. There are some things that we need to see in order to understand.

You can't define music with a dictionary. A dictionary definition will say that music is a series of tones formed into a cohesive whole. But that's not music, is it? It is so much more, and it's the same with love. We can't define love according to the dictionary, but the Bible defines it according to what it does.

The Apostle Paul points out that Godly love is more than an emotion. We know that there are many different kinds of love. In fact, the Bible has four different words for love. Love is multifaceted because it is a complex thing, and we know this. There is a love of a mother for her child.

There's a love of two people said to be in love. There is a love we have for a friend. And while these are powerful emotions and powerful experiences, the love Paul talks about here is something deeper still, and this love is primarily not an emotion. The love he speaks about here is primarily an act of the will. It is a set of the mind.

It is something that puts another person's interest before my own and seeks another person's highest good. And because it is not an emotion but an act of the will, because it is an act of the will and not an emotion, it is strong and consistent and enduring. This is the love that is patient. This is the love that is kind, that does not delight in evil but rejoices with sometimes even the hard truth. This is the love that is not fickle and easily angered.

This is a love that never gives up. Friend, Christian brother, sister, this is what you are called to. This is what you are challenged to align your life with. This is what you are bound to. The reason we love and can love.

However, in the extraordinary way, in the way that makes you think how on earth can I do this, the way we can do this is because we have a Saviour who has loved us like that first. His love that was patient with us and kind. His love that was not self-seeking. His love that was not easily angered, His love that always protects, always trusts, always hopes and always perseveres.

This is the love that saved our souls and will now drive us to loving the souls of the other. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we implore You and ask You with humble minds and hearts that You will continue the work that You have started in us. Father, I thank You for the love that is in my brothers and my sisters here. Lord, I thank You for the vacuuming of this church that gets done during the week, because that is love.

I thank You, Lord, for the midnight wake-ups to feed a baby, to look after a child, because that is love. I thank You for a brother who has moved to tears as he prays, because that is love. Lord, give us the grace to be able to see and evaluate the work that You have already done in us: the compassion and the empathy, the commitment, the patience, the kindness that is already at work in us. Help us to see it, to rest and to acknowledge the work that You have already done in us, and to praise You for that.

But Father, also help us. When You challenge us, when You shove us into new circumstances, will You place the unlovable in front of us, challenge in front of us, help us to love then as well. And Lord, in asking this help, we also say we will, because we have been moved and motivated by Your love for us, so supremely shown in Jesus. And we thank You, Lord, again so sincerely, so earnestly, for what You have done for us. It is something we can never repay.

It is something we know in and of ourselves we do not deserve, and yet it is true and yet it is ours. Thank You, Lord, for that. In Jesus' name, amen.