I have a subject tonight of immense
importance to your soul and mine, but a subject about which I have more difficulty speaking than
I can ever convey to you. what this book teaches about
prayer. But you have heard me say very
little about prayer from this pulpit because I know so very
little about it. And I know what this book teaches
about our subject this evening. But you have heard me deal with
the subject very, very rarely. for that very same reason, because
I know so very little about it. But this subject is a statement
that is true concerning all who know God. I just caught your eye, honey.
If you know God, it's true of you. And if I know God, it's
true of me. This is the place where all God's
saints rally together. Many things on this earth, in
this tabernacle of clay, divide God's people. They shouldn't,
but they do. Many things do. Churches of various
Order that had been established because of conflicts and divisions. God's people many times on this
earth are divided. But this one thing unites us
all. First John chapter four, verse
19. First John chapter four, verse
19. Here's my subject. We love him. We love him. I have no objections at all to
you and others singing this publicly. I have difficulty singing it.
But it is a song I often sing privately. My Jesus, I love Thee. I know Thou art mine. For Thee, all the fathers of
sin, I resign. My gracious Redeemer, my Savior
art Thou. If ever I love thee, if ever
I love thee. It's been a while now since first
he revealed himself in me. If ever I love thee, my Jesus,
tis now. We love him because he first
loved us. This distinguishes God's elect
from all the people of this world. All who are born of God, love
God. All who are renewed by the spirit
of God, love the divine spirit. All who are redeemed by the precious
blood of Christ, love the Lord Jesus Christ, our Redeemer. Wherever
there is true heart faith in Christ, There is a sincere, genuine
heart love for the Son of God. We love Him. John Gill rightly observed, the
larger the discoveries and application of the love of God be, the more
does love to Him increase and abound. and nothing more animates
and inflames our love to God than the consideration of the
earliness of his love to us. In other words, the more we know
of God's love, the more we know of his love toward us, the more
we are moved to love him and the more our love for him grows. Now in this text of scripture,
John has been talking to us in 18 verses preceding this about
God's love for us. God's love for us. God's love
for us. And then he says to us, perfect
love cast out all fear. There's no fear in love. And
then it comes this 19th verse. And he says, we love him because
he first loved us. Because God loved us, now we
love him. Because God revealed his love
in us, now we love him. Because God has made known his
love to us, we love him. And everyone who knows that God
loves him, loves God. Everybody in the world talks
about God loving them. Everyone who knows God's love
for him loves God. All believers love Christ. The source and cause of our love
is his love for us. Now, let me divide this message
into five parts. I will try to be brief, but I
want to be clear, and I hope I have your attention. for the
next few minutes. First, here is an acknowledgment
of love. We love him. That's a true statement. But we don't make the statement
presumptuously or self-righteously. But in honesty, we do confess
we love him. Still, we have nothing to boast
of. no ground of glory in ourselves. The question is put to us, who
maketh thee to differ from another? And what hast thou that thou
didst not receive? And Paul answers for us all when
he says, by the grace of God, I am what I am. We who love Christ
gladly, gladly, gladly acknowledge we love him because He first
loved us. The love we have for Christ does
not arise from within ourselves. We don't love him because of
any superior qualities in ourselves, anything that we possess in ourselves,
but our love for Christ arises from and is caused by God's free
grace and love for us in Christ Jesus. This is what John teaches
us here. God loved us before we loved
him. And because he loved us, now
we love him. His love revealed in us causes
us to love him. The love of God for us precedes
our love for Christ. He first loved us. Be certain
you understand that. Many errors have arisen because
of ignorance on this one point. God loved us first. The Lord
hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee
with an everlasting love. God's love for us is eternal. Eternal. We can't even begin
to imagine thinking in terms of eternity. But God loves us
eternally. There is no beginning of God's
love for us. God loves us in the whole of
his being from everlasting to everlasting. God loved us before
we had any being except in his son. He loved us when we had
no desire to be loved of him. Loving us, he loved the people.
He loved the people from whom he knew he would get no love
in return, except he created. Loving us, he loved the people
whom he knew would live all their lives in utter hatred of God,
except he take the hatred away. Loving us he loved the people
from everlasting whom he knew Would laugh and dance and throw
a party as his son died on the cursed tree by their hands And
yet he loved us from everlasting Therefore with loving-kindness
have I drawn thee God's love for us is entirely free and his
love is distinct from His love is particular. His love is a
love for a special people, a people whom he chose as his own. God does not love everyone. He's angry with the wicked every
day. He has in this world among the
sons of Adam vessels of mercy and vessels of wrath. Vessels
of mercy are full prepared for glory and vessels of wrath Fitted
for destruction and the objects of God's love are those vessels
of mercy chosen in Christ before the world began back in the early
mid 90s somewhere in there the Southern Baptist Convention had
one of their evangelism campaigns and slogans like they come up
with every year by which the souls of thousands were damned
The slogan went like this, good news America, God loves you. Now let me tell you something
about that. If God loves me, then he's not angry with me.
If God loves me, he will not allow anything bad to happen
to me. If God loves me, I have nothing
to fear from him. If God loves me, he will never
send me to hell. If God loves me, I have no reason
to repent. If God loves everybody, everybody's
going to heaven or God's just a joke. One of the two. That just isn't so. God loves
his people distinctly and peculiarly with everlasting love. Pastor,
don't you think we ought to Tell sinners God loves them. I'd like
to declare that. Yes, sir. God loves sinners. He loves his people as the fallen
sons of Adam in his son. He loves sinners and has mercy
upon sinners and is gracious to sinners. But no sinner ever
has any reason to even remotely entertain the possibility of
a thought that God loves him unless that sinner believes on
his son. There is no knowledge of the
love of God apart from the revelation of God's love in Christ given
to faith. It becomes most obvious that
God's love for us precedes our love for him when we consider
all that his love has done for us. There was a time when I couldn't
see God's love anywhere in anything. I heard people talk about it,
but I couldn't see it. I heard people sing about it,
but I couldn't see it in anything, anywhere. But now looking back through the eyes of faith in
the experience of grace, I see his love everywhere and in everything. everywhere and in everything.
Oh, how we rejoice in God's free electing love. How we delight
in precious redeeming love, the love of God that sent his son
into the world, made his son to be sin for us, caused his
son to be made a curse for us, that we might be made righteous
and free from the curse forever. God in love sacrificed his darling
son and God in love laid down his
life for me. Oh, amazing love, amazing love. We delight, we delight in God's
preventing or prevenient love, love by which God ordered all
the affairs of providence for us before ever we came to know
him in his grace. God's love for me, I now understand,
set the time and place of my birth. God's love for me, I now
understand, placed me in the house and family in which I was
raised. God's love for me I now understand
set me in all the circumstances and environment of my youth and
childhood. God's love set the bounds of
my habitation. It was the love of God that drew
the circle in which I would walk. It was the love of God that ordered
my steps. The love of God that ordered
everything concerning me. God's love for me. Is that love
by which He directed every step of my life into the arms of His
Son. Surely, goodness and mercy have
pursued me all the days of my life. And God graciously brings
that to pass for every one of His own. God has a set time. A set time, beyond which not
one of His chosen shall go. A set time. And not one person
will step one second beyond that set time that God has ordained
when He will reveal His Son in you. There's a set time. When God will conquer his elect
by his omnipotent grace There is a set time when God will give
life to dead sinners chosen of God and redeemed by his son Turn
to Ezekiel chapter 16 and let me show you one more time Ezekiel
chapter 16 I'm sorry chapter 20 Ezekiel chapter 20 Ezekiel
16 this is called the time of love And what's what God says
to his covenant people here in Ezekiel 16 or 20 and verse 35
I Will bring you into the wilderness
of the people. Oh When the time of mercy comes
God's going to isolate you. God's going to isolate you. You
may be in a crowd of thousands of people, elbow to elbow. Can't hardly breathe so many
people around you, but you're going to be totally alone. Totally
alone. Alone with God. I'll bring you
into the wilderness of the people and there will I plead with you
face to face. Like as I pleaded with your fathers
in the wilderness of the land of Egypt, so will I plead with
you, saith the Lord. Now watch this. And I will cause
you to pass under the rod. A shepherd brings a sheep into
the fold and he causes them to pass under the rod as they come
into the gate of the sheepfold and he numbers them. He just
lightly taps them on the shoulder as they come to and counts the
sheep. Just counts the sheep. I'm reminded of it every time
I get on an airplane. And we're getting ready to take off. Every
time, just as soon as they shut the door, the stewardess goes
through a third time. She's already gone through twice.
She goes through a third time. And she's going down the road
doing this. She's got a piece of paper. You know what she's doing? She's checking to be sure everybody
that's supposed to be on that plane is on that plane. And that
nobody that's on that plane is not supposed to be on that plane.
That's what the shepherd does when he brings his sheep into
the fold. He brings them under the rod. taps them on the shoulder. There
they are. 99. Ah, there's the 100th one. That's the one I'm
looking for. Watch this now. And I will bring you into the
bond of the covenant. And I will purge out from among
you the rebels and them that transgress against me. And I
will bring them forth out of the country where they sojourned.
And they shall not enter into the land of Israel. And you When
I bring you under the rod into the bond of the covenant, you
shall know that I am the Lord. Children of God, never forget,
never allow your memory to lightly pass by that which God has done
for you in his marvelous grace and the years of your rebellion
when he loved you. though you knew nothing of His
love. He protected us. He provided
us. He ordered our steps. He held
us and would not let us go. Having loved His own, He would
not allow us to perish. Though we lived with our fists
shoved in God's face, though we lived running as rapidly as
we could to hell, He would not let the ransomed sinner die. It can't happen. It can't happen. God shall, at his appointed time
of mercy, save each of his own. Now, understand this too. Not only did God's love for us
precede our love for him, it is his love for us that caused
our love for him. Love in God for us has created
love in us for God. We love him, John says, because
he first loved us. Lindsey reminded me tonight of
John 10, 26. Our Lord said to the Pharisees,
you believe not because you're not of my sheep. The multitudes
of the damned in hell are in hell because they're not of his
sheep. And we'll never be in hell because
he first loved us. We love him because he first
loved us. Love for God must be planted
in the heart by God himself. And that love planted in the
heart by God must be sustained in the heart by God. Whatever
we are, We are now, by the grace of God, as a direct result of
God's love for us. You were dead in trespasses and
in sins, wherein in time past you walked at the course of this
world, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind,
and were by nature children of wrath, even as others. But God,
who is rich in mercy, for his great grace, wherein he loved
us, hath called you, quickened you, regenerated you, called
you to live by his grace. It was love in God that sent
a preacher to tell us about his mercy. And it was love in God
that sent his spirit to quicken us and call us in the adoption
of his grace, in the experience of his grace, in the adoption
of sons. Now, this love of God, this everlasting, eternal love
of God that causes the believer, causes the redeemed, saved sinner
to love him is immutable love. It never changes. God's love
for us is not a passion. It is not an emotion. It's the
commitment, the unalterable, eternal commitment, the immutable,
eternal commitment of God's very being to our everlasting welfare. People talk about love so lightly it's
hard for us to grasp any reality concerning it, even when we have
experienced it in our own husbands or wives or sons or daughters,
mothers or fathers. Hard for us to grasp it because
our love at best is so fickle, so much emotion. so shifting,
so changing, at best, at best, not God's love. Love may indeed
involve passion and emotion. I grant that it does. I would
hate to think of love as just a stoic thing, without passion,
without fire, without emotion. But love is much more than that.
Love is commitment. Commitment. Commitment. A man loves a woman, he commits
his life to her. Committed to her. For better
or for worse. In sickness and in health. in
the good that brightens your days, and in the bad that darkens
your ways. Love is committed. It's committed. It doesn't depend
on the other person. It doesn't depend on its object.
It's committed. It's committed. Now that love
shows itself in many different ways, but love is commitment. Will you hear me, children of
God? The God of glory in all the fullness of the Trinity of
his holy persons is committed to you and to me. Utterly, totally committed to
our souls. Sometimes he manifests his love
more fully than at other times, but his love is always the same.
Sometimes he hides his face from us, but his love is still the
same. Sometimes he rebukes us and chastens
us, but his love never changes. Sometimes the Lord God appears
to be angry with us, but his love never changes. He says,
for a small moment in a little wrath have I forsaken thee. so
that that time when God hides his face, he appears angry, he
appears to be wrathful, but he is dealing with his children
in mercy and love even when he appears to be angry. God's love
never changes. He will never cease his own to
cherish. Health and wealth and friends
all forsake me. but God never will. My soul will soon depart from
this body, but nothing will ever separate me from the love of
God, which is in Christ Jesus the Lord. His love for me will
endure forever, and he will see to it that my love for him does
as well. John Gill again put it this way,
having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them to
the end, to the end of their lives, to the end of time, to
all eternity. Oh, pastor, how can I know that
love? Look, yonder, to Calvary. Behold the Lamb of God dying
for sinners. If you can see Him, you'll know
that love. If you can look to Him, you will
know that love. And until you do, you never can. Here's the second thing. This is an affirmation of love.
We love him. One of the hymn writers, seizing
on our Lord's questions to Peter, wrote this. Hark, my soul, it
is the Lord. Tis thy Savior, hear his word. Jesus speaks and speaks to thee.
Say, poor sinner, lovest thou me? Lord, it is my chief complaint
that my love is weak and faint. Yet I love thee and adore. Oh, for grace to love thee more. Don, Don, Lovest thou me more
than these? Yea, Lord, thou knowest all things. Thou knowest that I love thee. It is Lindsay, I believe it really
is true. It matters not to me that I convince
you that I love him. That doesn't matter. That doesn't
matter. Lindsay Campbell's easy enough
to fool, and you are too, and I am too. But here I stand. before God my Savior who knows
what you can never know. The only person in this world
who knows me better than that lady sitting there is the one
talking to you. And my life very much speaks
otherwise than what I'm saying. But this I say to my God who
knows all things, thou knowest that I love thee and that is
peace to my soul. That affirmation is contrary to all that's in
me by nature. That affirmation is contrary
to all that is in my flesh. That affirmation is contrary
to much that I say and do. You see, this man who speaks
to you about God's people loving God is a man like you, full of sin, full of corruption, full of evil,
full of iniquity. My heart sometimes I shouldn't
say sometimes. Let me be honest to you and honest
to God. My heart, most of the time, is
as cold as an Arctic freeze and as hard as the hardest steel. I wish it weren't so, but that's
just fact. That's just fact. And yet there
is in me a new man created by the grace of God that loves God entirely and everything about
him. We love him because he first
loved us. Because he has saved us by his
grace the psalmist said I will love the Lord my strength The
Lord is my rock and my fortress My deliverer my God my strength
in whom I trust He said I love the Lord because he heard my
voice and my supplications This We affirm we love him And loving
Him, we object to nothing about Him. We object to nothing about Him.
You see, we understand truly that Christ is lovely. Christ
is very lovely. Christ is most lovely. Christ is always lovely. Christ is altogether lovely. We love Him in the totality of
His being. everything he says in his word,
everything he does with his hand, every work he performs according
to his will, in judgment and in mercy. We recognize that he
does right and we love him. We wouldn't have God alter anything
about himself or his will or his purpose in any detail. We
love him. We love Christ Jesus our Lord
in Recognizing that in Him is the fullness of all grace and
glory. And we make that affirmation
plain there. That means we're committed to
Him. Committed to Him. Committed to Him who loved us
because He is utterly committed to us. Committed to him who loved
us and gave himself for us and we are committed to him in that
we give ourselves to him That's what love does That's what love
does We've all been through wedding
ceremonies here hear what said you've been through them yourself
when you were married and there's a betrothal It's a two-way betrothal. It is a man giving himself to a woman unreservedly. Everything. Everything. It is a woman giving
herself unreservedly to a man. And this is what God says concerning
his people. He said, you shall be witnesses
unto me. Know what that word witness is,
Mark? If you would write it out in
English letters, this is the word. Martyrs. Martyrs. You mean Brother Dodd, some of
God's people die for him? No, no, no. All of them do. All of them do. They are martyrs
to him. What's a martyr? A martyr is
a person who willingly lays down his life in a cause more worthwhile
than his life. He willingly lays down his life
for something of greater value than his life. He willingly lays
down his life because Christ Jesus has conquered his heart. The love of Christ constrains
us. Love is active. Dormant love is no love
at all. Love is like fire. It has to
break out. It's volcanic. It's just got
to erupt. is always active and is known
by its deeds. Loving Christ, we devote ourselves
to Him. We devote ourselves to Him. Now,
look at this. Arguments with regard to love.
If indeed we love Him, Love Him above all people and all things. Our love to Him governs our lives. This governs our lives. I take sides with women who get
upset because their husband's got to have time with the boys.
And I take sides with men who get upset because their wives
got to have time with the girls. 44 years ago, 44 years ago, I
vowed before God and men that my life would be ruled and governed
and motivated by my love to that woman. She has every right to
expect it. And she made the same commitment,
the same vow. And I have every right to expect
it. I'm thankful. I can't tell you
how thankful I am, how she dotes on me and devotes herself to
me. That's what she swore she would do, isn't it? Is that what
you said you'd do? Would you marry that man? Let
me utterly devote myself to her. And yet, there is one to whom
I hope, I believe. Yes, I am more devoted than to
her. One who has a prior claim on
my heart and on my life and on my time and on my property. And there is one who has a prior
claim on her heart and her time and her property and her talents. And that one is Christ Jesus,
our Lord, who loved us and gave himself for us. The love of Christ
constrains us. The love of Christ constrains
us. To live not for ourselves, but
for Him who loved us and gave Himself for us. Any question about that? Any
question about that? That's just as obvious as the
nose on your face, isn't it? If we say we love Him because
He first loved us. Let me give you some assurances
of love. I'll read them to you. You don't
have to look at passages. Here are seven things God assures
to all who love him. He says, I love them that love
me. We are told plainly that those
who love Christ are blessed of God in him. Grace be with all
them that love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity. Those who love God are known
of God, known of God, approved of by God, known of God, under
God's care. I don't know a better way to
state things like this than from personal illustration, but when
Faith was a little girl, she was a little girl. It doesn't
work now. She's 42 years old now, but when she was a little
girl, all it took for her to be comfortable in any situation
was for me to assure her, honey, it's all right. Daddy knows.
That means Daddy's going to take care of it. That means you don't
have to fret your pretty head about anything. I'll take care
of it. Will you hear me? God knows them that love him.
And you don't have to fret your head about anything. If any man
loved God, the same is known of God. And those who love him,
this is what he says, the Lord preserveth them that love him. And those who are the objects
of God's love are the objects of his special care and providence.
All things work together for good to who? to them that love
God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. Those
who love Christ shall shine as the sun in righteousness in the
kingdom of God. Listen to this. You can look
at it later in Judges 5. So let all thine enemies perish,
O Lord, but let them that love thee be as the sun when it goeth
forth in his might. And one more thing, those who
love Christ shall inherit all things. He told us in Proverbs
8. He who possesses all things makes
us heirs of all things and we shall inherit all things. And yet our love Aren't you ashamed of it, Bob? I'm ashamed of it. I'm ashamed
to call it love because of coldness, and indifference, and selfishness, and sin, and
vileness. There's so much prevails in my
life. What do you do? Go, child of
God, and set up your residence at the foot of Mount Calvary
and set your heart on Him who suffered for you as He suffered
that you may live forever with Him. Amen.