Twenty eight minutes from https://twitter.com/WelshRev at https://www.facebook.com/TyrBugail for https://www.facebook.com/Grace.Wales.online , https://welshrev.blogspot.com/and https://yGRWP.com
Studiocam
https://youtu.be/Vh_0Zm6A08c
Transcript
A transcript is available on the web page
Twenty eight minutes from https://twitter.com/WelshRev at https://www.facebook.com/TyrBugail for https://www.facebook.com/Grace.Wales.online , https://welshrev.blogspot.com/and https://yGRWP.com
Studiocam
https://youtu.be/Vh_0Zm6A08c
Transcript
A transcript is available on the web page
• Introduction
‘If your God is real, why can’t I see Him, then?’
It’s a question I used to come across more than I do now, to be honest, but it is still out there and it is still a real question that gets thrown up from time to time.
It tends to be a hostile question … it’s one used usually by people who just want Christians to go away and it tends to be offered with the assumption that it is a ‘check-mate’ question, to which there cannot be any satisfactory answer.
Now, it has built-in problems of a philosophical nature underlying it, in that it assumes that what you can detect with the five senses is all that exists … and we don’t live as if that is true.
But there are things Scripture says to address this which believers will need to be aware of, and that might direct what seem like the minority who are genuine in asking this question to places they might find unexpected answers.
Where would you go to do that?
• What God looks like, v. 10
In the first place, 1 John 4:10 directs our attention to what love looks like.
“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
So, when God DOES show up, it appears that THAT is what you’re looking for.
Oh.
Wait.
Looks like He did!
• Where the question comes from
But before we get there, it seems important to be aware in the first instance that people raising this question raise it out of not knowing in their own hearts and minds any sense of the privilege we have as believers.
That is, the privilege to know, grasp and experience the extreme love of God in Christ … in history and in our present experience.
So let’s notice that v. 10 addresses that immediately …
Here’s how it breaks down … get this:
• See love
THIS is love.
The enemy of souls doesn’t like what happens to his subversive plans for God’s world when human beings become life-changingly aware of the origins, nature and extent of real love.
So you should expect there to are all sorts of distorted imitations getting high profiles out there … fake news to sink souls.
THIS is love:
• Unmerited
“not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins”
The love we experience from God in Christ is 100% utterly unmerited.
Current human experience seems see so very little like that.
“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us …”
That skips over actually spelling out so much that it must entail.
The sort of love John is describing is not responsive to anything positive in its object.
Paul is the one to spell this out in Ephesians 2:1-5:
“As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins,
in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.
All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath.
But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.”
Firstly dead to God … utterly unresponsive … ignoring Him and turned away.
The person who doesn’t acknowledge you in the street.
Looks through you … past you … doesn’t even acknowledge your existence.
More than that:
“following the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.”
Following the pattern of thought and life that has organised itself t live and behave in a way that overthrows and reveals against God’s way for His people in His world.
Furthermore, totally opposed, working with the hostiles: following the ruler of the Kingdom of the Air … the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient … who is that?
Two sides in a huge cosmic conflict … and we were utterly committed to the demonic opposition!
You see, there is no neutral position on the great cosmic gearbox!
You are in drive or you are in reverse … there is no neutral and there is no ‘park’.
We were NOT living in such a way as to be able to look back and say we loved God because we had overthrown His authority, rebelled against His way and were doing so in alliance with the forces of the enemy of souls.
Forget it - there IS no neutral where loving and walking with God is concerned!
And God looked down out of Heaven and saw that, saw US like that, and He LOVED us … you and me.
Not ‘humanity’ … but Simon in his pride, anger, rebellion … slow to love God in response to all His mercies.
• Taking the initiative
Did you spot it there, but when I was in THAT original sinful state … I wasn’t even reaching to Him for help.
Now that doesn’t mean I didn’t feel I needed help.
It doesn’t mean I didn’t try to find help.
Of course there were lots of remedies and potions held out by the ways of this world, by the ruler of the Kingdom of the air … of COURSE there were!
All sorts of SELF-help solutions when the self was the cause of the problem.
All sorts of deceitful sweet things to tell yourself (‘you’’ve got this’, every day in every way things are getting better and better’, ‘you’re enough’ was one that popped up on a Farming Help post on social media recently) …
All MANNER of sweet lies to tell yourself when following the father of lies was what was causing the trouble!
• Paying the price
He took the initiative to make Himself the One Who is our sacrifice of atonement.
“not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins”
Inherent in the meaning of the word translated atoning sacrifice (ἱλασμός, hilasmos) is the idea of turning away the divine wrath, so that “propitiation” is the closest English equivalent.
Now before anyone instinctively recoils from the idea that God should ever be ‘wrath’ with anyone … let me make absolutely clear firstly that this is a totally Biblical concept and secondly that the only reason we want to recoil from it is that we have a very scant understanding of right and wrong.
We ARE living in a world that tries openly, brazenly to deny that those two actually exist.
Right and wrong DO exist, and you can’t possibly live in society … where norms are required for any form of communal life in society to take place … without a code for your behaviour in that society.
Without that, or where everyone defines his OWN code, life together descends quite quickly into life apart as interpersonal strife erupts and society becomes impossible.
But the trouble with right and wrong existing is that they need to be rightly defined so that life together is better than life in separations hostility, and there needs to be a way to deal with the offence caused by violations … because human behaviour is weak, lawless and driven by rebelliousness.
We can deal another time with why it the code needs to be defined objectively by an absolutely moral being standing outside the human weakness that is going to need regulating, but notice for now that so far as offences are concerned, it is GOD Who has been offended against and John goes straight for the point made about this issue:
God’s love for us is expressed in his sending his Son to be the propitiation (the propitiatory sacrifice) for our sins on the cross.
This is an indirect way for the author to allude to one of the main points of his controversy with the opponents: the significance for believers’ salvation of Jesus’ earthly life and ministry, including especially his sacrificial, physical death on the cross.
The contemporary English “atoning sacrifice” communicates this idea more effectively.
It’s not that He lost His own standards of right and wrong in the forgiveness business.
He was the aggrieved party but He sacrificed Himself so as to be both just and the justifier of those who believe in Him.
As the song goes:
“And on the Cross as Jesus died,
The wrath of God was satisfied … here in the grace of God I stand”
So behold Him there, the Risen Lamb, living now to show us all the price has been fully paid and because of Him now we all can really live again.
• At the point of greatest need
There He hung, nailed to the cross beam by His hands and the upright by His feet, gasping His last … and people still ask ‘what’s that go to do with me?’
You see Him there at the point of deepest human need.
Humanity - and His human nature - lie at its weakest at the point where life is ebbing out.
All our other needs are headed up by this final one.
It’s at that post that what our life has amounted to and the destiny that lies before fall into there very sharpest focus.
And there is Jesus triumphing over our deepest human need and our most pitiful human weakness turning the Cross of Crucifixion into the mercy seat, the altar of our atonement … drawing the sting of death for folks who DON’T look like they love Him much.
In a world when your worst enemy gets all the loud publicity that turns people away from the things we stand most in need of and that our hearts LONG for, that’s where you look to see what God’s like and what He’s there for as we pass the point of our deepest human needs.
You want to see God?
Then you need to dare to a long hard look at what you see there.
• See God
If you want to know what love is … then He shows you.
But more than that, if you want to know what God is, then here’s the place to look.
The world we live in, this world organised in rebellion against God, following the ways of the Enemy of Souls, wants to fill you with its lies-based false narrative.
It wants to tell you that God will bore you, hurt your feelings, make you miserable, cause you psychological harm and make you just as boring as He is (those are the sorts of lies).
And it will tell you all those things to turn you away from the source of what you most deeply, hidden-ly but profoundly feel your need of.
Even the most sin-wrecked soul is desperately seeking to be loved.
Where is that love, do you think, going to come from?
You see that love and that’s where you see what God’s like … more than that, you start to see where He is.
“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
The Cross is where you see the character of God … in fact where you SEE God in the Lord Jesus Christ taking upon Himself the consequences of the outrageous rebellion of the rebellious, the rebels against Him, and paying their penalty in their place.
I’m saying ‘they’ but can’t that easily shy away from the fact it’s not ‘they’ but ‘me’.
In unmerited favour is where God’s heart has a passion to express Himself.
In fact, it’s not ‘just’ UNmerited but CONTRARY to what was merited.
Imagine the person you most don’t want to love being the one that you pour out your love on, before they know they want it, before they know it come from you, before they’re even ready to consider the possibility because they’re looking THROUGH you.
Where’s this going?
Now the point is you cannot see Him and be utterly unchanged by that.
That’s what Paul discovered when He saw the Lord on the Road to Damascus.
When Paul saw Jesus standing there in His heavenly glorious body, SHINING with the Glory that’s only God’s … all the Biblical theology of the Messiah, the Saviour, came to rest on Jesus in Paul’s eyes.
But it was a VERY different Jesus to the one He was expecting … the real One, with all the rejection-creating lies taken out, and all the glorious truth of God’s grace over Law brought to light.
And Paul the herald of persecuting hate became the passionate, self-sacrificing herald of the Gospel of God’s very Good News.
You CANNOT but be changed by that … and there’s the point that John is bursting to make, as he points out to these believers in the house churches of the greater-Ephesus area that are in danger of being led astray by false teachers whose lives dis-authenticate the things they’re teaching.
They don’t show the signs of the radical transformation Christ’s love brings when it comes home to live in human hearts.
• What the sight does to you, v. 11
If you’ve looked there with real love-longing, it will swap your heart out … a change of heart and deep desires is what follows from that.
1 John 4:11 “Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”
Here’s the second ‘dear friends’ in this passage, highlighting the start of a new sub-section in what John is saying and doing.
God loved us like THAT … and if that means anything at all to us we ought to be LOVING one another.
In the way he did.
Now, I just want to point out that the Greek conjunction καί (kai) introduces the apodosis of the conditional sentence … which I’m sure thrills you right the way down to your cotton socks … but what that means is that the best way to translate this looks like being:
“Dear friends, if God so loved us, THEN we also ought to love one another.”
There is something real outside of us that should have a profound effect on the inside of us producing lived effects and results in the life we live externally … in the big ‘out there’
• The response this should engender
So, I was going to go on to say ‘THIS then is the response Christ’s Cross should engender’ … but I reckon I jumped the gun and gave you already what I had in mind here.
So let’s go straight to what this faith-authenticating love does in the world we live in, and here’s the big outcome that we may not have at first envisaged”
1 John 4:12 “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”
Get this now.
Jesus has lived a perfect human life, died a sin-atoning human death and resurrected Himself to life (raised by God’s power) as the pinnacle demonstration and work of His love for us.
And HOW does He chose to make His love known in the hostile world He is YEARNING to bring back to Himself, to heal, make whole and fill with eternal life?
• The reason it should do so
It comes from OUTSIDE us, affecting what’s inside us and impacting those around us.
• It comes from outside us
When I say ‘it come from outside us’ here, I’m referring to what MOTIVATES us to this unselfish behaviour.
Please notice that this love we’re talking about is something quite exceptional in human behaviour in a fallen world because there is totally nothing in it for me.
It doesn’t come from anything I stand to get out of it … it springs from something that has been done for me.
We have no and should take no credit for it at all.
We don’t do this because we hope to be loved ourselves for it, nor because somebody else is going to see it and give us any esteem for it.
In fact there will be times when people will tell us that we’re quite mad for it!
It’s the same sort of motivational movement that you have in Titus 2:11
“For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people. 12 It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, 13 while we wait for the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, 14 who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.”
Do you see?
It’s not a ‘push-me’ but a ‘pull-you’ … in the sense that the experiential knowledge of the love of God is the mode of attraction to the course of action.
It is the love of God shown to us, the grace of God in action towards us, that draws out our hearts in love towards our brothers and that is the way it SHOULD be given that we are recipients of God’s love in such an astonishing way … the implication always being that those who don’t look like that aren’t the real deal and really shouldn’t be people whose ‘new teaching’ you ought to have any time for.
It comes from outside you.
That’s the whole point.
But John develops that to say that this, genuinely embraced, affects what happens inside you.
• It affects what’s inside us
Now the motivation arises outside us, but it impacts what is INSIDE us.
This is not some externally applied behaviour undertaken ‘because we ought to’, or ‘otherwise I’ll look bad’ … or anything of that sort.
No.
Bathing our consciousness in the love and mercy … the sheer unmerited favour of God that we are not just aware of but bathe our thoughts in, meditate and reflect on both actively and in our ‘down-time’ … our ideas, attitudes and responses are CHANGED.
God SO loved us.
To such an extent and in such an inspiring manner.
Grasping that, understanding that, keeping it at the centre but near the surface of your consciousness … even when the details and circumstances of life in a fallen world press in on our attention … it changes what lies inside you.
And as we know, it is out of the overflow of the HEART that the mouth speaks, right?!
• It impacts those around us
“we also ought to love one another.”
The love we’re to be instructed by is not a love that stayed in Heaven and said how much it loved us.
The love we’re formed by - if we’re genuine believers - isn’t sedentary.
It gets up and got after people.
The striking thing here to me though is that John describes the love of Jesus that gets up and goes after unresponsive, unloving, hostile, opposing people.
But the love he asks for is only love for your brother … your church buddies.
Now THAT sort of stark contrast CANNOT go un-noticed in the writing of a subtle author like John here.
He has GOT to be painting up a contrast here.
The opponents of God and truth afflicting those early believe around Ephesus weren’t even loving their ‘friendlies’ in church … but to be Christ-like would be to go so much further, to live there enemy, the hostile, the non-reciprocating person you don’t even want in your congregation - those lost in the ranks of the armies of His enemies.
And brethren, John’s indicating, that is how we should be following OUR Saviour!
If you love the ones who love you … that’s not like Jesus.
He’s the One Who gave His life for us when we hadn’t loved Him but were still signed up and sold out in opposition to Him.
That is authenticating Christian loving.
• Making God seen, v. 12
1 John 4:11 “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”
I have no adequate words to help you let that sink in.
I’ll just try to spray a few into the air here and hope for a miracle …
When people in our day, place and culture say they want to see God, what is lacking is the sight of believers’ love for one another.
We are not even being asked to show self-sacrificial love, or love for outrageous people and the enemy who launch themselves into our faces … let alone the ones who ignore us contemptuously as irrelevant and unworthy-of-them nonentities.
Just love one another and they will see God in your own response to the love you’ve been shown by your sin-atoning Saviour.
My third point here is incredibly short, because it really is as simple as that.
• Conclusion
It is reflecting on the atoning love of Christ that does the internal work in His people that leads us to love one another and in doing so to make His love known to this hostile world … the world he is LONGING to redeem and atone for, by His grace.
When did you last chew over at any length the love of your sin-atoning Saviour?
The Summer book we’re giving this year to seek to get people out of themselves and into a better place is Andrew Wilson’s little book called ‘Incomparable’.
I’ve had it on my Kindle app other variety are available) for some time now and it takes us deeper, in four or five page chunks, into the wonder of the Incomparable character and crusading love of our gracious God.
We’ve only got 100 of them, we started on Wednesday and I’ve given three already, and when you all join in claiming one and giving them away I’m joyful to say I think they should all be out there soon.
It is GREAT to get people to think on our God.
We really need to take doing this sort of thing seriously.
And in addition, John is telling us what empowers these words … aside of the regenerating grace of God when He calls a sinner to follow Him.
He says it is crucial they see God Himself … at WORK in the love we have for one another.