Such Great Love #1

There is nothing in you that caused it. There is nothing in you that can alter his disposition of love to you. There is nothing that you can do to diminish his love for you. It means that if he loved us once, he will love us forever because he never changes. To what can you compare God's love for us?

Can words even capture it? The Word of God describes the breadth, length, height, and depth of his love, but even those don't capture all the dimensions included. On this edition of The Truth Pulpit, Pastor Don Green will lead us to at least a greater appreciation of such great love. Hi, I'm Bill Wright, and Don, why is an understanding of God's love so important to Christians?

Well, Bill, I guess I would answer the question this way. Understanding the love of God builds settled trust into our hearts. He loves us, and that means that he will keep us when we are in Christ. He will never cast us away, the book of Hebrews says. And so understanding his abiding love for his people puts us in a place of rest and confidence that the God who saved us will keep us all the way until the end until we're with him in heaven.

Thanks, Don, and friend, have your Bible open and ready as we join our teacher now, teaching God's people God's Word in The Truth Pulpit. Now, when we talk about the love of God, and if you like to put titles on your notes, I've titled this message, Such Great Love. Such Great Love. When we consider the great love of God, we have to continually remind ourselves that this is not the sentimental love that we find displayed for us in silly movies of different kinds and of different value. The great love of God is an eternal love that gives us our ultimate reason to live. It is an eternal love that gives us our ultimate reason to live. It is the one constant in life that will never change.

Family comes and goes, children come and go, prosperity comes and goes, health comes and goes, life comes and goes. The love of God in our Lord Jesus Christ is the one constant upon which we can rely knowing that it will never leave us nor betray us. And this must be central to our thinking about the nature of God and central to our nature about our approach to life. Turn to the book of Ephesians where we will find contained in that one book five distinct aspects of the love of God that will strengthen our reverence for Him, our reciprocal love for Him, and our confidence about His plans for us as we go forward in life and one day cross the river to be with Him in heaven, speaking to those who are believers in Christ. Let's look first of all at the first aspect of love, God's love for us that we see in the book of Ephesians, and it's this. Point number one is that God's love is eternal. God's love is eternal, by which we mean that it transcends time. God's eternal love for us had no beginning and it will have no end.

Look at Ephesians chapter one verse three where the Apostle Paul opens with this thunderclap of praise to God and he says in verses three through five, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world that we would be holy and blameless before Him. And here it is, in love, He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself according to the kind intention of His will to the praise of the glory of His grace which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. Notice that this electing love of God was set upon us before the foundation of the world, before creation, before Genesis 1-1, God in eternity past, before time itself began, determined that He would love us and take interest in our well-being.

This transcends time. This is before the foundation of the world that He predestined us in such love. And so it is an eternal love. Charles Spurgeon says this in contrasting the eternal love of God with the nature of human love, he said, and I quote, you can trace the beginning of human affection, you can easily find the beginning of your love to Christ, but His love to us is a stream whose source is hidden in eternity.

End quote. Now, beloved, that has a lot of implications. Let me just draw one out very briefly that is a great encouragement, especially for those of you with sensitive, tender consciences that mourn over your sin in a way that Jesus spoke about in Matthew 5. Beloved, the timeless nature of the love of Christ for your soul means this. It does not rise and fall with your obedience or with your sin.

You may feel comparatively better or worse about yourself in response to your progress in sanctification, but understand that that is a perception in your mind that does not reflect on the eternal, unchanging nature of the love of God for your soul. His love could not change because He Himself does not change. And if you have entered into the realm of His love through faith in Jesus Christ, He loves you with an abiding, unchanging love that is rooted before time began, that was established before you had done anything good or bad. And so He loved you before time began, and that means that His love will transcend anything that occurs in time or in life to you. Now, we need to understand that in our minds because we are so prone to interpret the love of God through the circumstances that we find ourselves at any given time, right? We think that way. At least we're tempted to think that way before our minds are transformed by the renewing work of the Holy Spirit applying the Word of God to change our thinking. The most common way to interpret the love of God is by what's happening in my life now.

Are my circumstances favorable? He's showing His love to me. Has adversity hit? Uh-oh. You see, there should never be that uh-oh in your mind when you're reflecting on the love of God, because His love is eternal. It is unchanging. It is established.

It is permanent. It cannot vary any more than the nature of God itself and the essence of God can change. And so His love is eternal, and that means that you can rest in it. Now, secondly, as you read on in this passage in Ephesians, you can see that God's love is sovereign. God's love is sovereign, and we kind of use verses 4 and 5 as a hinge point for these two points here in Ephesians 1.

Look at verse 4 with me again. He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love, He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself.

And notice in context what comes next. He loved us. He predestined us.

Look at the end of verse 5 with me. According to the kind intention of His will. God loves us because it was His will to love us.

He determined to do that before time began. That means that His love for us was not influenced by anything within us. He did not love in response to anything that we did or anything that we offered to Him. He did not love in response to our faith. He loved us rooted in an eternal love that is rooted in His own free and sovereign will. His love for you was an uninfluenced decision that He Himself made.

That's humbling. You say, well then that means that His love for me is totally and absolutely undeserved. He loves me because He loves me. That's right.

That's right. You say, well then why did He love me then? And you see you're asking the same question and missing what the answer is. Why did He love me then? Well, beloved, what Scripture is teaching you is that God loves you because it was His kind will to love you. It was His intention. He freely did that. It was something that He determined in eternity past to do. It was never rooted in anything about you.

There was nothing in you that caused it. There is nothing in you that can alter His disposition of love to you. There is nothing that you can do to diminish His love for you. His love is free.

It is sovereign. And, beloved, that means this. It means that if He loved us once, He will love us forever because He never changes. Again, quoting from Spurgeon, he said, The Lord loves you, Christian, not because of anything that you are doing or being or saying or thinking.

He loves you because His great heart is full of love and it runneth over to you. Now, what we need to see from that then is that while this utterly humbles us because we realize that we're on the receiving end of the most wonderful thing in the universe and we had no deserving of it, there wasn't anything that prompted it in us. In a Romans 9 kind of way, He chose Jacob over Esau before they had even come out of the womb. It was eternal, electing love that was His decision, sovereign in His choice. Now, at one level, when we think through this, it's very humbling to recognize and the carnal mind balks against that, rejects it because we want something that we can take credit for.

We want something to say that distinguishes us from others who are not in the love of God at the present time. But that's such an utterly wrong and carnal way to think. It is far better for God's love to be free and sovereign and uninfluenced by anything in you because that means that His love is stable, that His love is permanent, that it is unchanging, that it is unmutable. If it was rooted in something about you, at the very least it could rise and fall depending upon the particular kind of day that you're having.

No, it's not like that. What this means is that the highest, greatest, infinite, most assured concern for your well-being is unwavering in the heart and mind of God in His disposition toward you. And you say, well, what if I stray into sin? What if I stumble into sin?

Well, you know what? He loves you so much and His love doesn't change in such a way that He will simply discipline you like any good father would discipline his son when he strays into disobedience. But the discipline and the sorrow and the consequences that come are not an indication that His love has turned to anger.

It's simply the love of discipline to correct you so that you will not stray into that which would harm you and dishonor the one who saved you. His love is eternal. His love is sovereign.

It is independent of us. It is rooted in Him, not in you. In other words, the love of God finds its expression from the overflowing eternal essence of God and the eternal nature of who He is rather on the changeable nature of who you are.

Isn't that far better? Isn't that far better that it would be rooted in Him, not in you? The only way that someone could object to that is that they have no sense of the reality of their own fickleness, of their own sinfulness. And so we rejoice in the fact that God's love is not rooted in who we are. It's rooted in who He is because that means it is secure and it is secure forever once we are in Christ. Well, there's a third thing that Ephesians says about the nature of the love of God as you just go through the text. And we can say this. Our third point is this, is that God's love is great. It is great.

How great is it? Well, let's understand the condition in which we found ourselves when God saved us. Ephesians 2, verse 1. Ephesians 2, verse 1. These first three verses giving us further indication that the love of God could never have been rooted in anything that we were or anything that we did because everything about us called for an opposite reaction from God than being on the receiving end of such great sovereign love.

Ephesians 2, verse 1. You were dead in your trespasses and sins. You were dead. You ever been around a corpse?

Nothing too lovely about it, is there? The cold, unresponsive nature of a corpse. This was us spiritually. Cold, unresponsive, dead to any stimulus in the spiritual realm from God. Verse 2. You were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Dead in sin, dominated by the devil, and in verse 3, doomed to suffer the wrath of God.

Look at verse 3 with me. Among them, we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath even as the rest. An utterly deplorable, judgment-worthy condition is you and me in our time of life before Christ came to save us. There was nothing in you that deserved the love of God, quite to the contrary. You were a child of wrath, rightfully so because of your rebellion against God, against his word, your indifference to his love, your contempt for Christ, your abounding in the lusts of the flesh, everything about your life being an indication that you had no love for God in your heart, no true love for God.

Proud, boastful perhaps of your self-righteousness. Oh, the sin of man can manifest itself in a lot of different ways, can't it? The arrogant, academic, proud of his achievements in the letters after his name, but socially sophisticated, just as much a child of wrath and deserving the wrath of God as the drunk in the gutter, the promiscuous man, the promiscuous woman, all simply manifesting in different ways the reality of the same condition of heart, dead in trespasses and sins, dominated by the devil, living in the lusts of the flesh and a child of wrath, even as the rest.

That's who we were. You ever want an autobiography written about you? Understand that your life prior to Christ, the autobiography's already been written. It's found in the first three verses of Ephesians 2. Scripture pulls no punches in telling us the truth about who we were. Now, that just sets the context for us to marvel all the more as we consider point number three, God's love is great. His love is vast.

It is immeasurable. Because look at this in verse four. But God, but God, Martin Lloyd-Jones famously preached an entire sermon on those two words. But God, being rich in mercy, because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved. It was when you were like verses one through three that the Holy Spirit came to you, opened your mind to understand the gospel of Christ, and the Father put his hand upon you, drew you to saving faith in his Son, and said, henceforth and forevermore you will be mine. I will act and I will deliver you from your dead and sinful condition.

And going back to what we said, the definition of love was and is is that this is a manifestation of the great way, the vast, immeasurable way that God sought for and secured your well-being and your interests in your salvation. You were utterly undeserving of this. You were hostile to God. And scripture says, in great love he came to you and he saved you. He regenerated you, which is what it's referring to when it says he made us alive together with Christ. God acted on you to bring you to life. You didn't cause your own resurrection. You didn't cause your own spiritual birth. It was a gift from God, and it is a gift that expresses how great his love is because it was given to you in such a condition as that. You see, it's not just that you were neutral.

It's that you were hostile. And in your hostility, God loved you like that. Such stupendous love, beloved, is great. Such stupendous, marvelous, profound love is beyond our ability to understand it. It's great love. It's awesome love. It's hard to find adjectives that haven't been corrupted by dumbing them down in the English language, isn't it?

You know, what a great hamburger, what a great game. But when we talk about the greatness of the love of God, we're not talking about it in such superficial ways. We're talking about that which is truly awe-inspiring and produces great reverence and gratitude in a human heart that was previously dead in trespasses and sins. We could say this about the greatness of the love of God. Its greatness is measured in part by how contrary it is to human expectations. By human standards, by human reasoning, this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. By the way that everything in life is conducted on a human level, this should not and could not happen. Since when do deserving objects of wrath become the undeserving objects of such great, eternal, sovereign, divine love? This is utterly contrary to human reason.

This turns every expectation on its head. You punch me, I'll punch you back. God says you punched me, I'll save you. I'll rescue you from your deadness in trespasses and sins. You blaspheme my name, I'll write your name on the wounds of Christ and draw you to myself.

You're hostile toward me, I want to reconcile with you. This is the nature of the love of God. It's great, it's vast, boundless, immeasurable, which flows right into our fourth point, remembering that we're consciously realizing that we are treating in a few minutes things which could be the subjects of books, and we're simply trying to plant seeds that will sprout up in your heart and that you will come back to again and again and you will pluck the future fruit and eat from it and be refreshed by it as your mind goes back and contemplates the great love of God, the great love of Christ for your soul. Fourthly, we see from the book of Ephesians that God's love is infinite. God's love is infinite. His love for us as His children cannot be exhausted. It cannot be fully understood.

It certainly cannot be fully explained. Look at chapter three. We'll start at verse 14 just for fun. Chapter three, verse 14. Paul, having expounded on so many aspects of the greatness of the love of God, the reality of salvation by grace through faith alone in Christ alone for the glory of God alone, he turns to prayer in verse 14. And he says, for this reason I bow my knees before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name that He would grant you. See, he's asking God to give his reader something according to the riches of His glory to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man. God, I pray that your Spirit would work in the hearts of these people who are reading these words. And as he was writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, he was expressing the very mind and desire of God for those of his children who would come and read this passage in the future. It's clear from scripture that God's love cannot really be compared to any other. His love is the only perfect love because He alone is perfect. Pastor Don Green will conclude his message, Such Great Love, next time on The Truth Pulpit, so be sure to join us then.

Right now, though, Don's back in studio with some closing thoughts. Well, hello, my friend. I want to thank you for listening to The Truth Pulpit. Thank you for being a student of God's Word.

You are the reason that we do these things. We want to bring God's Word to you in a way that makes it alive and applicable to you and brings you into a deeper knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. You know, if you've benefited from this broadcast, we just ask you to do a simple thing. Go to our web page or go to our Facebook page. Look us up on Facebook and just drop us a little note, just a word that would let us know that you've appreciated today's broadcast or the other aspects of our ministry. We would love to hear from you. Thank you for listening to The Truth Pulpit. We are grateful to Christ for you. Thanks, Don. And friend, we hope you'll visit thetruthpulpit.com. I'm Bill Wright, and we'll see you next time as we teach God's people God's Word on The Truth Pulpit.