God, The Greatest Lover of All - Part 1

Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Wednesday, October 13th. God's love toward us is unconditional. Stay with us to understand how you can embrace what He offers and be liberated to love. The greatest gift that God has to offer us is the one that we probably have the most difficulty receiving, because somehow we just have a hard time understanding it.

What am I talking about? I'm talking about God's love for us. And I think there are two primary reasons we have difficulty receiving it. Number one, we don't think we deserve it and we don't.

And secondly, we don't understand it. And for those two primary reasons, we have a very difficult time receiving, accepting God's love for us. And so the reason I think we have difficulty is because we can't quite make His love harmonize with our love. And so we want to be able to feel that God loves us the way we love others. And when we put it in that light, somehow if God loves us like we love others, then I'm not sure God will always love me the way the Bible says He does. So what I want to talk about in this message, I want to talk about God's love for us. And the title of this message is God, the Greatest Lover of All. And I want you to turn, if you will, to 1 John chapter 4. This book is full of love. 1 John, that's Revelation from the back, Jude 3, 2, 1 John.

And I know that most of you know where it is, but every once in a while somebody doesn't know where these small epistles are. 1 John chapter 4. So beginning in verse 16, he says, now look at this, And we have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us.

We believe it, we know it. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in Him. By this, that is, love is perfected with us that we may have confidence in the day of judgment. Because as He is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.

Because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love because He first loved us. If someone says, I love God, and hates his brother, he's a liar. For the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.

And this commandment we have from him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also. Now, all of us are probably at different levels in our understanding of God's love, or even being able to feel it. And if I should ask you this morning, how many of you genuinely believe God loves you? More than likely, most of you could raise your hand and say, I do. But if I should say to you, how many of you as a way of life in your daily life, you feel God loving you?

More than likely, most of you probably would say, well, I know He does, but to ask me if I feel like it, not exactly. And more than likely, the reason you don't feel like it is because, number one, you don't think you deserve it. And so if you don't think you deserve it, then why should you feel something you know you don't deserve? In fact, you don't just think you don't deserve it, you know you don't deserve God's love.

And so therefore, how in the world could you feel it? So what I want to talk about in this message is God's love for us. And I want to talk about two or three things.

Number one, I want to talk about what it's like. What is the love of God like? What's this love that God has for us? And secondly, how does God express this love to you and me? Well, as I think about the kind of love that God has for us, first of all, it is a gift. In James chapter 1, that 17th verse, you recall what he says in this passage. He says that every good and perfect gift is bestowed.

It is a perfect gift. It comes from God the Father from above. And he says there is no variation, no shifting, shadow that is. Whatever God gives us, it isn't a shifting kind of thing.

It isn't something that's changing. God's love for you and me is a gift. That is his caring for us, his kindness toward us, his goodness toward us, all the aspects, everything that is wrapped up of the caring and the comfort and the security and the satisfaction and the meeting of needs, all the things that are wrapped up in love, God's love for you and me is a gift. Therefore, it means since it is a gift, I do not have to do anything to deserve it. Once I begin to deserve something, then what happens is I distort it. Love is a gift. You cannot pay for it. When I say a gift, it has no fine print.

It has no footnotes. When God says he loves us, he loves us as a gift. It is something given that has absolutely nothing to do without deserving it. Secondly, it is perfect. It is the only kind of love that God knows how to express. For example, God is the absolute perfection of everything he is. That is, if God is powerful, it's perfect powerful. If God is beautiful, he's perfectly beautiful. If God is all knowledgeable, it's perfect knowledge. Anything and every single attribute of God is absolutely perfect. That is, it has reached the peak of its perfection.

You cannot improve it to any degree. God's love for you and me is absolutely perfect. And that's the only kind of love that God knows. Now, you and I can't love anybody perfectly. Because we are in the flesh and we all have our desires and we all have our prejudices and we can get covetous about things or whatever.

The flesh is the flesh and it will never change. We can't love anything and anybody perfectly. God has nothing within him, not a single solitary aspect of anything that would keep him from loving to perfection. And the only time you and I are going to be able to love like that is when we get to heaven and we have left these old bodies behind and we have a glorified body and there is absolutely no presence of sin. So there will be no presence of any kind of prejudice on our part or selfishness on our part or self-sin.

Then we can love with our whole heart absolutely perfectly like God loves. That's the way he loves. His love is a gift. It is perfect love. Thirdly, it is everlasting love. And when I think about that, I think about this passage in Jeremiah chapter 31. He says in the third verse, Now what does that mean? To know that God loves me with an everlasting love means that there is nothing that can interfere with his love for me.

Absolutely nothing. If it is everlasting, it is continuous. If it is everlasting, it is uninterruptible. Now you and I can love someone and situations and circumstances or disagreements can crop up and we may not feel that love. You may still love them or you may not feel it. Or some people can just quit loving someone. But the one thing about God's love is this. You never have to worry about if God is going to stop loving you.

Now remember this. If your idea about the love of God is that it is something you deserve because of something you have done or doing or will do, then you may question the fact, well, you know, how long is this going to last? Now none of us want to be loved by someone who only loves us when we meet all the requirements or when we please them in every aspect. Nobody can please everybody else in this world.

Nobody can do that. But you see, if I see that God's love for me is based on anything but the fact that it's just his nature to love, then I'm going to say, well, I know he loves me today or now. But listen, when God says, I love you, there are no buts, no ands, no ifs, no wherefores or therefores. It is the nature of God to love.

It is absolutely everlasting and eternal, unceasing, unchanging. You recall in Romans chapter 8 what the Apostle Paul says about that love. He says, verse 35, Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Then he says, In all these things we are overwhelmingly conquerors through him who loved us. Then he says, I'm convinced. Paul says, You want to know what I understand about the love of God?

Here's what I understand. That neither death nor life nor angels, principalities, things present, things to come, height, depth, any other created things shall ever be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. Listen, once God loves you which is forever, you say, When did he start? Before you were ever born, he started. What can I do to improve on it? Nothing.

What can I do to deter it? Not a thing. The love of God is the love of God. It is absolutely eternal and unchanging, has nothing to do with conversation, character, conduct, behavior, nothing. What I want you to see is the love of God comes from him. It does not come from us since it is all from him. It is his very nature being poured out upon us.

You can't do anything to stop it and anything to change it and anything to interrupt it. So what does that mean? Here's what it means. It means that every day you and I walk under the canopy of the love of God.

It doesn't make any difference if you get out of the will of God over here and you're living in sin and being disobedient to God. You know what happens? Most people think, Uh-oh, canopy's down. The canopy's not down because, listen, you didn't put it up.

If you were to put it up by good works, you'd have to keep it up. God is the one who put the canopy up there. That is his love for you and me. It doesn't make any difference. You're going right, wrong, left, right.

It doesn't make any difference. The love of God is the love of God. I want you to see the source of his love is God, not us under any condition. It is eternal and everlasting. Likewise, his love for us is unconditional. Now, we've said that oftentimes because most people, it is human nature to believe that somehow there must be some conditions to the love of God. You mean to tell me that God cares for me, his kindness, his goodness, his security, his meeting my needs, that there's no condition? None. No condition whatsoever. What condition?

What condition could there be? God loves you just the way you are. It doesn't make any difference what's going on in your life. I didn't say that you would enjoy life because he loves you. I didn't say that God was going to overlook sin.

I didn't say that you could live any other way you want to and everything just be fine. I said that God loves you no matter what because it is an unconditional love. It is likewise a sacrificial love. And it's interesting in 1 John, as we said before, every time the word is used and all that many times, every single time it is agape love, sacrificial love. John 3 16 is not for God so loved you in a brotherly fashion.

It has affection for you. But God so loves you sacrificially that he gave his only begotten son Jesus that whosoever believes in him would not perish but have everlasting life. God's love for you and me is a sacrificial.

That is, it cost him something. God saw humanity. He saw you and me because he doesn't save people in mass.

He saw you knows you by name. He saw you in your sinfulness, in your helpless, hopeless, sinful condition and knowing that there was not be one thing in this world you could do to forgive yourself, to make yourself acceptable in the eyes of God. And God decreed and if there had been any other way, he'd have told us and because of his nature and his justice, he's not only loved by justice, in order to remain just and to express his love, he had to send somebody to pay the penalty for your sin in mind. That's what the cross is all about.

The cross is all about one word and that word is substitution. God the Father substituted his Son at the cross to pay for our sins in order that he could express his love to you and me. It is a sacrificial love. So the sacrifice wasn't that God said, oh, I'm just going to love you and meet your needs. No, it's no sacrifice on the part of God to meet our needs.

All he's got to do is speak every single thing you and I would ever need into mine and it would have been done. But to atone for our sin, God sacrificed his only begotten Son. Now listen to this and I repeat this also again because I want you to understand. God the Father paid the greatest price possible for all mighty omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, holy God could possibly pay for your sin in mind and thus to give his only begotten Son.

It is a sacrificial love. And that's why, my friend, listen to me carefully. That's why if you reject the Lord Jesus Christ, listen to me. If you reject the Lord Jesus Christ, I don't want to let Christ visit.

Don't give me this Bible and church business. For you to reject the greatest, most profound act of sacrificial love ever demonstrated to humanity and ever can possibly be demonstrated, for you to reject that and then you wonder why you would die and be separated from God for eternity. It isn't that God stopped loving you. It's just that you have, listen, you have broken the heart of God.

You have rejected the greatest expression possible for all mighty, holy, all loving God to express to you and you turn your back upon that. The sin is the awful, horrible sin of ingratitude of rejecting that kind of love. It is a sacrificial love. That's the quality and that's the kind of love that he loves us with. It is likewise an immeasurable love.

Turn, if you will, to Ephesians chapter 3. In the 17th verse of Ephesians 3, So that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and the length and the height and the depth and to know the love of Christ which surpasses all knowledge. How do you measure the love of God? The only way I even can come close to measuring it is looking at the cross and to think in my heart that that love is so deep, it reaches all the way down to the depths of my heart. It is so broad that it reaches around the world. It is so high that it comes all the way from heaven.

It is so long it can reach the longest point on this universe, no matter where it reaches out there. It is absolutely immeasurable. It knows no limitations. All of us have limitations in our love. Whether we like it or not, we can't love with that immeasurable love. Now we can love with all of our heart and say, You know, I'd do anything in this world for you. God is the only one who can say that and do it without a slightest bit of inhibition in any way because nothing can stop God loving us.

Now, something can stop my loving Him and something can stop and hinder my ability and my capacity to enjoy and receive and experience that love, but nothing can stop Him loving us. It is a love that is absolutely immeasurable and it is a love beyond our understanding. Listen back to Ephesians chapter 3. He says in verse 19, And to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to the fullness of God. Now to him who is able, look at this, to do exceedingly abundantly beyond all that we ask or think according to the power that works within us. That is, God's love is immeasurable. It is inexhaustible.

It is infinite. And because He has all power to do all things, His love knows no measurements. But one last quality that I'll mention and there are many others, and there's no way to exhaust this subject by far, and that is it is available. How available is God's love? For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him would not perish but have everlasting life. Now to make it a little bit more personal, for God so loved you. He loves all of us individually.

His love is such that it reaches everybody, so therefore everyone, everyone lives under the canopy of that love. There's no such thing as, listen to this, there's no such thing as escaping the love of God. You can fight it, you can resist it, and some people do. Some people do not have the capacity to receive love.

They can't. Here's what happens. When people, whatever the situation may be, maybe it's a home they grew up in or maybe it's their circumstance or maybe they've been hurt somehow, somehow they're those people who can't receive love and they put up a barrier.

Here's what happens. The more you try to love them, the more they back away. The sweeter you are to them, the more difficult they become. And the more you give them and the more you try to express love, here's what happens. They feel so uncomfortable with your expressing love, they will become even hostile before they will say yes to your love.

Now they don't understand what's happening inside of them. But it's like they become angry when you try to love them. They resist or they can't accept it. Because on the one hand sometimes their expression is, well if you love me, you must be expecting me to love you in return. Or if you love me, you must be expecting something from me. Or I don't deserve to be loved. I can't be loved.

Look at my life. How could anybody love me? And they reject the love of God. The same way they reject someone else's love. Many people reject the love of God because somehow they just, how could God love me?

How could He love me because He's love? And you see when a person is distorted in their emotions, they can't accept God's love. They can't accept someone else's love. Because they can give you enough reasons that it's absolutely proof that they are undeserving of being loved. You don't have to go through life feeling unloved. And it's one thing to go through life feeling unloved by somebody. But it is a tragedy to go through life feeling unloved by Almighty God.

Well I know He's up there. I know He loves most folks. There's no way for Him to love me. Look at me, therefore, how could He love me?

That's not even the question. Not look at me, how could He love me, but what? Look at Him, how could He love me? If I look at me, I may say, how could He love me? But if I look at Him, yes I can say, yes He loves me.

Because it is the nature of God to love. Thank you for listening to God the Greatest Lover of All. If you'd like to know more about Charles Stanley or InTouch Ministries, stop by InTouch.org. This podcast is a presentation of InTouch Ministries, Atlanta, Georgia.