God is love, and so we would expect His children to walk in what?
In love. God's people bear His reflection. Since love has God as its source, those who show that love give evidence that they are the children of God. Their life and their love is derived from Him. So, if you are a Christian, if you've repented of your sins and received the salvation God graciously and lovingly offers, how are you doing at demonstrating God's love to the watching world?
How well would your co-workers say you're doing? And what about your friends, your spouse, your children? Well, today on Grace to You, John MacArthur looks at what it takes to follow Christ's example of self-sacrificing love. It's part of a study simply titled, The Love of God.
John is going to cover quite a few passages today, so if you're able, grab your Bible and follow along now as he begins the message. We went deep and high and far and wide in our discussion of God's love, and we tried to wrap our arms around the height, the depth, the length, and breadth of the love that passes knowledge. And when we got our arms as wide as we could get them and we were finally left in silence, unable to unscrew the unscrewdable, we weren't done because there needed to be one other discussion, and that is the one for this morning on how do we respond to that love. What is required of us? We can't just put that great understanding of the love of God out there and walk away from it.
It has immense and it has specific and clear implications for us. What is the appropriate response to being so greatly loved by God as He loves us? What is the proper reaction for believers to having received this surpassing love, this perfect love? And the answer is very, very clear in Scripture. Our response is to manifest to manifest that same love to others.
That's it in one statement. Our response is to manifest that same love to others. How God has loved us is precisely how we are to love.
And this, then, is really the capstone of everything. In Ephesians, chapter 5, let me just read you very briefly what Paul says at the beginning of the chapter. Just listen. Therefore, be imitators of God and walk in love. You are God's beloved children. Imitate Him.
How? By walking in love. That's our response to God's love, is to walk in that same kind of love. But I want to take you to Matthew, chapter 5, for a moment because I think this responsibility, this duty, this implication of God's love is so crystal clear in Matthew 5.
Verse 43, and I'll read down to verse 48. You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. Now Jesus is simply saying common knowledge, or if you want to use the contemporary parlance, conventional wisdom says that you are to love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
In other words, they were not a lot unlike our society today. They wanted to give room for hate. They thought it was not only reasonable and acceptable, but it was even religious to hate people who gave you trouble. Conventional wisdom said, Love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Why? Verse 45, In order that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.
Why? He loves His enemies. The question is, does God love the world? Yes. Does He love those who hate Him? Yes. He loves His enemies and it is on that premise that we are commanded to love our enemies.
There it is. We are to love the ungodly just like God loves the ungodly. And how does He love them? Through common grace. Verse 45, He causes His Son to rise on the evil and the good. He sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. There is a love which demonstrates itself commonly to everybody regardless of their spiritual condition, or whether they are God's own beloved or not. There's nothing commendable about just loving the people that are in your group.
If you love, verse 46 says, those who love you, what reward have you? I mean, that's not noble. Even tax collectors do that. Tax collectors are, in the New Testament, synonymous with the scum of the earth, not because of their profession itself, but because they were Jews who sold out to exorbitant, illegal taxation on the part of Rome. And so they were seen as traitors of their own people. Verse 47, if you greet your brothers only, what do you do more than others?
How different is that? Everybody does that. Even the pagans do the same. You need to love as God loves. And He says it this way in verse 48. You're to be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect. Nothing more demonstrates the perfection of God than the fact that He loves those who hate Him. Nothing more demonstrates the perfection of God more than that He loves the enemies who set their life against Him. And you are to be perfect as your Father is perfect.
You see, that verse, Matthew 5 48, is in the context of loving people who hate you. So how are we to...how are we to respond to God's love? We're to mimic it. We're to imitate it.
We're to copy it. Ephesians 5, he used the word mimetes from which we get mimic. We are to reproduce the same kind of love and that starts with loving the ungodly the way God loves them. And we shared with you God loves the world in unlimited sense. God loves all sinners and it manifests itself in common grace or goodness, kindness. And secondly, in compassion, pity, tenderheartedness, sympathy.
Thirdly, warning, warning about judgment, warning about hell. Fourthly, calling them to repentance or giving them an invitation to believe the gospel. That's how we are to love, just the way God loves His enemies. We are to treat them with kindness and tenderness and sympathy and pity. We are to warn them and we are to give them the gospel.
That's to demonstrate, as verse 45 says, that we are the sons of our Father who is in heaven. You see, we started out by saying the first proposition in this series was God's love to the world is unlimited in extent. That is, He loves the world. John 3, 16, God so loved the world. Titus 3, 4 speaks of His love for mankind. And as I said, it is demonstrated in common grace, compassion, warnings and a gospel call.
It was His love for the world that motivated Him to send His Son to be the Savior of the world, as Scripture calls Him. And so we are to love the world in the same way that God loves them. That is to say, we are to love them with kindness. That's why Galatians 6, 10 says, do good to all men, especially those of the household of faith, but do good to all men.
Or 1 Corinthians 16, 14 says, let all that you do be done in love. Love them with kindness. Love them with goodness.
Help to make the sun shine on them a little bit in the rainfall. Bring a little joy into their life. Treat them with courtesy and tenderness. Then we remember that the Lord loved also in a way that made Him speak about judgment.
Our tenderness cannot mitigate against a warning. We are to love the world and warn them. We are to say to them that God has commanded all men everywhere to repent. Acts 17, 30, and He has appointed a day in which you will judge the world by that man whom He has ordained, whom He raised from the dead, even the Lord Jesus Christ. We are to warn them and warn them and warn them about impending doom and judgment and hell.
And then as Mark 16, 15 says, we're to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. So just like God loves in those same four ways we are to love, we're to reproduce His love in the world with kindness and compassion and warnings and invitations to believe. Secondly, the second great proposition we said was that God's love to the world is limited in degree.
It is unlimited in extent, but it is limited in degree. God does not love the world the way He loves His own. He loves the world in a temporary way. He loves them in a limited way. He doesn't love them like He loves the elect.
He doesn't love them like He loves those He has designed to save. He loves His own. It says in John 13, 1, He loves His own unto perfection.
He loves His own ice, tell us, to the max, to the end, to the limit, forever. And we saw that God loves His own, that is believers, those who belong to Him with a lavish, forgiving, generous, merciful, gracious, inseparable, unbreakable, unconquerable, unwavering, unfading, sanctifying, cleansing, purifying, nourishing, cherishing love. And He loves them as much as He has a capacity to love because He loves them unto perfection, to the max, to the end, totally. And that's how we're to love them.
That's how we're to love the brothers. We're to love them the same way He loves us. In John 13, in that upper room the night of Jesus' betrayal, He demonstrated His love and an example of how the disciples were to love by washing their feet. And you remember they had come in from a day on the dusty roads and their feet would have been dirty, significantly dirty, and it was accustomed to have the most menial slave available to do the foot washing because it was the dirtiest and lowest task on the responsibility chart. But Jesus, who was King of Kings and Lord of Lords, stooped and did it. And in John 13, 12, it says He washed their feet and then putting back on His garment, He reclined at the table again and He said to them, Do you know what I've done to you? You call Me teacher and you call Me Lord and you're right, for so I am. And you're wondering in your minds, Why is the Lord doing this? Why is the teacher doing this?
Why is the Master doing this? And He said, If I then the Lord, the Master, the teacher, washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet for I've given you an example that you should do as I did to you. Truly, truly I say to you, a slave is not greater than his Master, neither is one who is sent greater than the one who sent Him.
I'm telling you, if I did it, you need to do it. And then down in verse 34, a new commandment I give you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. There is that lavish, unselfish, humble, sacrificial bowing of the knee to do the dirty task that benefits a brother or a sister. That's how we're to love. It is a magnanimous love. It is a far-reaching love.
It is a lavish love. It is a love, as 1 John 3.16 and 17 says, it is a love that opens up our feelings of compassion toward one another. We are to love other believers to perfection. We have a love for the world, but it's not to the extent that we love the brotherhood. We love the brotherhood like God does, to perfection, to the max, to the limit, with a limitless, unbounded love. Peter says, Love one another with an actinase love. It's the word fervent.
Actinase is used of the stretching of a muscle to its absolute limit. We are to love believers to perfection. That's how we are perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect.
To understand that, let's turn to 1 John chapter 4, and this is the text the Lord really laid on my heart, 1 John chapter 4. And here we are given a tremendous call to perfect love. If we are to be perfect as our Father in heaven is perfect, then we have to manifest love, for love is that perfection of God. And if we are to be God-like, we have to love like God loves, with a perfect love.
Perfect, meaning again, to the max, to the end, complete, thorough, whole, carried out to the full, permanent, supreme, all of that. And John is writing here to believers, calling them to this kind of love. Verse 12, at the end of the verse, he talks about his love being perfected in us. Verse 17, by this love is perfected with us. Verse 18, at the end of the verse, perfected in love. John is not writing about some small component of love or some diminished amount of love or some lesser degree of love. He is writing about perfect love so that we can be like our Father, perfect. We are to love supremely.
We are to love to the max. That's John's theme in verses 7 to 21. I want you to look at it with me, and we're going to go through it just briefly. It starts in verse 7.
Here's the opening statement that sets it all in motion. Beloved, let us love one another. Yes, we learn from Matthew 5 that we are to love our enemies, we are to love the world, as we said, with common grace, compassion, judgment and warnings and gospel invitations. But we are also to love the brotherhood. And this love here is commanded of us, beloved. And again, he emphasizes we are the loved, that's why he calls us beloved, and so we are to love one another. We are to demonstrate the perfect love that will make us the perfect children of our perfect heavenly Father. So verse 7 gives the exhortation, let us love one another.
Then there are six reasons why we are to obey it, six reasons. And they do overlap. John overlaps himself all the time. In fact, if you read the gospel of John, you have the feeling you're going in circles. I should say, if you read the epistle of John, you have the feeling you're going in circles.
He cycles back through the same things, interweaving, overlapping and rehearsing. But you will see here six reasons why the believer manifests self-sacrificing love that is like his father's love to him. Reason number one, because love is the essence of God, because love is the essence of God. In other words, if we are going to say we are the children of God, as Ephesians 5 puts it, then we better walk in love because that's the character of God. Look at it, verse 7, let us love one another.
Why? For love is from God. That's why love is from God. And we who are God's children will reproduce His nature. Clement of Alexander long ago wrote something that some might think borders on blasphemy, but this is what he said, the true Christian practices being God.
Do you think like that? When you come to the moments and days and issues of your life, do you say to yourself, I want to do what God would do? I want to think like God would think and say what God would say and feel what God would feel and do what God would do.
I want to play God in the best sense of the word. So back to verse 7, love one another for love is from God and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God and the one who doesn't love doesn't know God for God is love. And so we would expect His children to walk in what?
In love. God's people bear His reflection. Everyone who habitually loves gives evidence of being born of God. Since love has God as its source, those who show that love give evidence that they are the children of God.
Their life and their love is derived from Him. You know, there were people in the church, the assembly to which John wrote this epistle, who were being influenced by mystical teaching that later became known as Gnosticism. And that mystical teaching said that we've elevated ourselves to the higher planes of human consciousness in which we have come to know God. And they looked down on humble Christians, demeaning, denigrating them, looking them as if they were low life, as if they were wallowing around in the muck of earth and these people by virtue of their transcendence, by virtue of their mystical experiences had ascended from the mud and were floating in the clouds of the true knowledge of God. That's why they were called Gnostics from the word Gnosis.
They were the people who thought they were in the know. And to them, John writes these words, the one who goes around saying he knows God but does not demonstrate love for the brothers is not one who knows God because God is love and whoever is born of God and knows God loves like God loves. So he says, first of all, we love because it is the very essence of God's nature to love and we who belong to God will share that nature. Is God really love?
Yes. You look at that little phrase at the end of verse 8, God is love. And as we've been going through the series, somebody might say, I question that. Look at the world around us. You say history has this long tail of man's inhumanity to man. History is one long massacre. Spain had its Inquisition. Britain, its Atlantic slave trade. Germany had its gas chambers.
Russia, its Siberian labor camps. The United States, its own abuses. The world is still swept by fear and lust and greed and it seems to me, escalating racial tension and hatred. Nature too seems as twisted if not more twisted in our time than ever. Babies are born depraved.
They inherit diseases and tendencies toward all kinds of trouble. Ours is a world of praying animals, parasites, viruses, deadly bacteria. And when you read the Bible, you certainly don't read about utopia. You open your Bible and you find tyranny, cruelty, mutilation, people having their eyes gouged out, their hands lopped off. God opens the ground and swallows them up and the Bible is full of the stories of deceit and licentiousness and wickedness and immorality and homosexuality and war. And not only war, but war that God starts. And Assyria, one of the most pagan, wretched, ungodly, cruel nations in the history of the world is called the rod of God's anger. And then you read God is love.
Easy answers can't possibly be right. You must realize that we are children, that we are fools, that we are self-conceited, stiff-necked rebels who will get everything wrong unless we are willing to give up telling God what He has to do and what He has to be like. And we stand firmly in Romans 9 and we hear Paul say, Who are you, O man, to answer God?
Close your mouth. God is love because it says He is. But His love is never unmixed or untouched by His other attributes. But God is love. And in spite of how it might look, He wants this world to know He's love.
And He puts it on display through His children. We who are His children will manifest His perfect love. That's why we're to walk in love. So we are the offspring of God, and His essence is love. So let's love one another. This is Grace to You with John MacArthur.
Thanks for being with us. John is a pastor, conference speaker, and chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary in the Los Angeles area. His current study is an in-depth look at the love of God. Well, friend, wherever and however you're hearing this program, know that people from all sorts of life situations are being strengthened by this same teaching. And John, you have some letter excerpts in front of you, and they help paint the picture of the breadth of ministry that Grace to You is having.
So share these with us. Yeah, you know, Phil, this is always a great joy for me, because this is the fruit of the labor. This is the delight of finding out what the Word of God has done in people's lives.
And I would just encourage, before I share these excerpts, all of you to write us. Let us know what the Lord is doing in your life through this ministry. Thank you for trusting us with your support, your prayers, your gifts. Thank you for carrying us on your heart and bringing us before the Lord. God is answering your prayers. The Lord is doing some things that are only possible by His power around the world. We're committed to continue to be faithful, so we have even more letters like the following ones, but let me share them with you.
Here's an email from Alberto in Florida. Your ministry is like an appetizer that prepares my palate for a great feast in the Word. I use your content in preparation for leading our men's group at church and teaching our young boys and girls at a Christian private school. Wow. Wonderful. Thank you, Alberto.
This note comes from Mikkel in Sweden. I have been listening to your sermons from Grace to You for about five months. I'm just astounded.
I have been listening three to six hours a day. Your sermons of God's Word changed my life in a way I never could imagine. I thank you from all of my heart.
Well, thank you, Mikkel. God bless you. And then from Robert, who had this to say about our series on the Beatitudes, which aired a few months ago. Robert says, In all my 81 years, never have I heard anything that has opened my understanding of the Sermon on the Mount more than this series has. I'm going to order your four-volume commentary on Matthew, making disciples of Jesus Christ as my heart's desire for the remaining time I have on earth. God bless you, Robert. 81 years and desiring to know more and serve the Lord with your whole heart.
And then a final note from Nick. I'm a towboat captain on the Mississippi River. Not long ago, a new deckhand sent me a link to the Grace to You app. Since then, I've been listening to your sermons every day while at the helm of the boat. I ordered copies of the MacArthur Study Bible from my wife, our four little ones, and myself. We use them to dig deep into the Word of God.
I have also been giving the Gospel to my mother, who is a Jehovah's Witness, and to my father, who feels that he's committed so many sins, God will not forgive him. Thank you for your commitment to sound theology and helping me see Scripture so much clearer. I'm praying for you all.
Wow. Thank you, Captain Nick, down on the Mississippi River. And thank you for praying for Grace to You. Yes, friend, thank you for your prayers, your letters, and of course your financial giving. We are able to connect with people like Alberto, Mikhail, Robert, and Nick with verse-by-verse teaching because of the support of friends like you.
So let us know you're standing with us when you get in touch today. You can mail your tax-deductible gift to Grace to You, Box 4000, Panorama City, California, 91412. You can also make a donation at our website, gty.org. Just click the donate button at the upper right.
That's gty.org. And for personalized help, you can call us weekdays from 730 to 4 o'clock Pacific Time at 800-55-GRACE. And if you have questions about a particular section of the New Testament, here's a reminder about the MacArthur New Testament commentary series. This is a 34-volume work that covers the entire New Testament, delivering a detailed explanation of every verse. And you can order the whole set all at once and get a discount on each volume, or you can order an individual commentary to meet your current study needs. To purchase either one volume or the entire MacArthur New Testament commentary series, call 800-55-GRACE or visit gty.org. Our toll-free number again, 800-55-GRACE, and the website gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace to You staff, I'm Phil Johnson, encouraging you to be here tomorrow when John looks at God's amazing love for his Son and for you. Don't miss the next half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Wednesday's Grace to You.
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