Thank you for listening to our Emanuel Baptist Church podcast sermon series by Pastor Sean Cole. Emanuel exists to display God's glory, declare God's gospel, and to disciple for God's great commission. If you have any questions about this message or would like more information about our church, you can visit our website at www.ebc-online.org. Now here's Pastor Sean. morning children if you are in kindergarten and below you may leave now to go to our kids worship time the rest of you I want to invite you to open your Bibles to the book of 1st John chapter 4 1st John chapter 4 you know there have been very many famous love stories throughout history that you can think of You have Anthony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, modern day romances like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and Jennifer Aniston and Ben Affleck and J. Lo and people that you probably don't care about, the Kardashians. Justin Bieber. I stopped caring about that stuff a long time ago. Who's dating who? All of these love stories. But you know, most Hollywood romances end in heartbreak. They end in divorce. You know, Elizabeth Taylor, the famous actress, she was married eight times. She had seven husbands, but she was married eight times because she married Richard Burton twice. Cher. has been married twice, but she's been known to have some famous lovers. David Geffen, Gene Simmons, Eric Stoltz, Val Kilmer, Tom Cruise, Warren Beatty. But you know, one of the most enduring romances in all of Hollywood was between Paul Newman and his wife, Joanne Woodward. They met during the filming of the production of a movie called Picnic, and shortly afterwards, they filmed the movie Long Hot Summer in 1958 and got married. And they stayed happily married for 50 years. until he died in 2008. And they were devoted to one another, and the media was always getting Paul Newman to ask the question, how come all these Hollywood starlets are around you? Why have you never had an affair on your wife? After all these years, you've been married for 50 years. And here's what he said, and men, this is a great answer. Okay, he said this. I have steak at home, why should I go out for a hamburger? That's a great answer, men. Remember that. Our culture is obsessed with love. We sing about love all the time. We use the word indiscriminately. I love rock and roll. Put another dime in the jukebox, baby. When a man loves a woman, love is in this club. Let me love you. I wanna love you. Crazy in love. How deep is your love? I could go on and on and on. How many times do we use the word I love pizza? I love skiing. I love my grandkids. I love basketball. I would love for the Broncos to win this afternoon. I love all these things. I love Jesus. You'd think by now we'd figure out what this word means. In the famous words of that great 80s theologian Tina Turner, what's love got to do with it? It's just a secondhand emotion, right? No, it's not. You'd think we'd figure out what it means to love with so many songs and so many movies and so many books about love. And that's what our passage talks about this morning, loving others. You know, one of the keys to understanding your Bible is to distinguish between what the Bible talks about are gospel indicatives and moral imperatives. Let me explain. Gospel Indicatives are those statements of fact about who you are in Christ. They don't call you to do anything, they tell you who you are in Christ. They talk about your identity, what God has done for you to make you a child of God. Those are the Gospel Indicatives, who you are in Christ. But the Bible also has moral imperatives. Words like you ought to do this or you should do this. These are the commands that we are supposed to follow in obedience to Jesus. Another way of expressing this is law and gospel. Law or anything in the Bible that commands us to do something. What must I do? Gospel is what has been done for me in Christ. And so this passage before us has both law and gospel. It has both the moral imperative, but also has the gospel indicative. And it's important that we understand how these two work together if we're ever gonna figure out this whole situation about loving others. So let's read together 1 John chapter four. Verses seven through 12, this is picking up where we left off last week about being discerning because we have the Holy Spirit living inside of us. Let's pick up in verse seven. 1 John 4, verse seven. Beloved, let us love one another. For love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us that God sent his only son into the world that we might live through him. And this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. So right from the start, we do see the moral imperative in this passage of scripture. It's bookended in verse seven and verse 11. Beloved, let us love one another. It's a strong exhortation. Let us love one another. There in verse 11, we ought to love one another. In other words, it's a moral obligation placed upon us as Christians to love one another. And this word that John uses describing love, it's a sacrificial love. It's an unconditional love. It's a selfless love that looks to the good of others. In the original language, it's also in the present tense, which means it's a love that needs to be continual, an ongoing practice of sacrificial love. So John is saying we need to constantly, continually, ongoingly, as a lifestyle, keep on continually loving one another. In other words, it's an obligation placed upon us. Now, I can end the sermon right now and say, okay, Christian, you heard John's command. Get busy. Go out and start loving. Find practical ways to love others. Go out there and be a loving church. Ramp up your love. Get radical about love. Go get busy and love others. You better be a good Christian and go love. And if that's all I told you this morning, all you would get from this pulpit is law or the moral imperative. I would tell you this is what you need to do. And then some of you would have two responses. There's two responses to this message. Just go out and start loving. The first response would be, some of you would say, I can do it. I got the list, Pastor Sean's giving me the marching orders, I'm gonna go out there and I'm gonna start loving because I can love. And you'd become very inflated in your pride, you'd become very inflated in your ego, and you could think, you know what, I can go out there and I can begin to love people with this Christ-like love. That's one response some of you would have. The other response that some of you would have would be that you would feel deflated. You would feel discouraged. You would feel guilty before you even walked out these doors because you'd think to yourself, I can't even begin to love. I can't even begin to give myself to others. I can't begin to be sacrificial. So if all you hear from this pulpit is you ought to do these things, That's only law, there's no gospel. But thankfully, John gives us gospel. And gospel is good news. What is the good news of the gospel? You know, we need both. We need law and gospel. We need to know what we're supposed to do, but we also need to know who we are in Christ and why and how we can do it. So let me just stop and ask you a question this morning. Does loving others with a sacrificial Christ type of love, does that come easily? Does that flow naturally from you? No, it doesn't. It's very hard to love others at times, isn't it? Pastor Dustin read this earlier, Ephesians 4, 31 through 32. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you. That's what we're supposed to do, right? Be kind, be tender, be compassionate, be forgiving. We ought to love one another. And yes, we are. It's an obligation placed upon us in this passage of scripture twice. John bookends it, verse seven, beloved, let us love one another. Verse 11, we ought to love one another. So it's a non-negotiable, we've gotta do it. We've gotta love. But here's the answer. John gives us the answer as to how and why we should love others. So here's the main point of this passage. If you could distill this passage down to a sentence, here it is. The power to love others only comes from God's initiative. The power to love, we need to love, but that power to love only comes from God's initiative, not our initiative, not something we can begin to do in our own power. So what John does is he presents for us the gospel in two ways. We know what the command is, love. But what John does is he gives us two things about the gospel, two things about good news. And what he does is he first gives us God's character, who God is. And then secondly, he gives us God's action, what God has done. So for this morning, I wanna explore these two wonderful truths. who God is and what God has done as the power, as the motivation for us to go out and love others with a Christ-like love. So let's look at, first of all, who God is. The first thing we see in this passage of scripture is God's very essence is love. God's very essence is love. Notice verse seven. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God. Love is from God. It doesn't say love is from ourselves. Love is from us. We're not the source of love. We can't even begin to love. Love comes from God. And then we have that famous passage, verse eight. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with this. Anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love. God is love. Now it doesn't say love is God, and it doesn't say God is loving, although that's true. It says God is love. There are three other places in the Bible, in the New Testament, where it says God is dot, dot, dot. Okay, right here, God is love. John 4.24, Jesus says, God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. So God is love, God is spirit. Okay, the writer of Hebrews says this, Hebrews 12.29, for our God is a consuming fire. That's number three. So God is love, God is spirit, God is a consuming fire, and we looked at it a few months ago, back in 1 John 1 verse five, this is the message we have heard from him and proclaimed to you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. So God is love, God is spirit, God is a consuming fire, and God is light, and God is love. Now, we need to be careful here. Because in our culture today, what often happens is people elevate God's love above all the other attributes, and they emphasize love to the neglect of His consuming fire, or His justice, or His power. And they would say that God is love means that God's not going to send anybody to hell, Woody. God would never say that Jesus is the only way of salvation, Woody. God is not that concerned with how I live because after all, God is love and love is love and God is love and God just, He's just this big lovely God that doesn't care about your behavior. He doesn't care about your attitude. He's just love. Yes, God is love. It says it right here. But when we balance these scriptures with the other scriptures, He's also absolutely holy. He's also a consuming fire. He is light in whom there's no darkness at all. He is a powerful, sovereign God. And so we need to make sure that we define love from God and not the other way around by starting with us. See, we don't define love. God defines love. If we were to define love, how would we define it? Lust, infatuation, sentimental feelings. We need to begin with God. In Exodus 34, 6, how we open up the worship service, one of our famous words from the Old Testament, Exodus 34, six, the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, the Lord, the Lord of God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. Now, if you've been around Emmanuel a long time, you know what that word steadfast love is. And we're gonna say it together, and please don't spit on your neighbor as we do, okay? If you're new to Emmanuel, this just makes us a little weird, okay? So it's a Hebrew word. The Hebrew word is chesed. Can you say that with me? Chesed. There's actually a poster out there that has it on there in the Hebrew. So chesed is one of the strongest words in the Old Testament to describe God's powerful, tenacious, awesome, covenant love for us, the steadfast love of God. And so God in his very nature, if you were to say in the Old Testament, God is chesed, in the New Testament, God is love. And here's something very interesting about God's love. God's love does not grow or shrink or fluctuate the way our love does. God doesn't fall out of love with you. God's love for you doesn't lessen, and God's love for you doesn't even get greater. Now that may sound a little interesting. God's love is unchanging because God himself is unchanging. Now there's an old Dutch theologian named Gerhardus Vos, and he's made an interesting statement. And it takes you a moment to, I'll give you the statement, and make me a moment for your mind to catch up with the statement, okay? Here's what he said. The reason God will never stop loving you is that he never began. What? The reason God will not stop loving you is because He never began. Now what does that mean? That means that God has always loved you in eternity past with a special sovereign type of love. Jeremiah 31.3 I have loved you with an everlasting love. Therefore, I've continued my faithfulness to you. I've loved you with an everlasting love. So when we think of everlasting love, we can think forward into eternity. God will continue to love us forward into eternity, but think about backwards. Before anything even started, God has always loved us. It's the very nature of who he is. So since God is love, and God has eternally existed as the unchanging God. God never gets lonely. God never gets frustrated. He never misses out on anything. God is not lonely up in heaven and that's why he had to create humans because he was lonely and he needed somebody to love. No, that's not what it is. God in his very essence is love. Okay, but that's not all. God is love, that's his essence. But the second thing this passage of scripture tells us is the actions of God. God put his love into action. He did something about it. He didn't just say, I am love. He did something about it. Now, let's explore these actions. And I want us to understand the Trinity. And I wanna think about God's sovereign action. God's sovereignty in this. In verse 10, what does it tell us? In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us. Okay, where does love start? Love starts with God. His sovereign initiative. It doesn't start with us, it starts with him. We are dead in sin and we can never begin to do anything to get us out of our spiritual predicament of being hopeless and helpless. God must always take the initiative first to save us. We never take the initiative. We can never take the initiative towards God because of our sin. He always takes the initiative. Now, three persons of the Trinity, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. This is not a sermon on the Trinity, but just trust me because I wrote a book on it and we're dealing with it in our men's study on Monday mornings. We can talk a lot about the Trinity, but here's the thing. This passage of scripture tells us that the Father has sovereignly taken the initiative doing a specific thing. The Son, the second person of the Trinity, has taken initiative to sovereignly do a specific thing, and the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, has sovereignly taken the initiative to also do a specific thing. So what are these three particular things that each person of the Trinity does in action to show us love? Well, let's start first with the Father. The Father chose us to be saved before the creation of the world. Because God is love, and love is from God, and God first loved us, you can't force God to love you. God's love is never forced, it's never coerced, it's never caused. He chooses to love us. And you may ask the question, this is a profound question, and boys and girls, let me ask you the question, why does God love us? Answer, boys and girls, because he does. Well, that doesn't sound very profound. It's very profound. Do we deserve God's love? No, but God chooses to love us anyway because it's in His very nature to love. Listen to what He says to the nation of Israel in Deuteronomy 7, 7-8. He tells the Israelites, it was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set His love on you and chose you. for you are the fewest of all peoples. But it's because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. Israel, why does God love you? Because God loves you. Israel, do you deserve God's love? No. As a matter of fact, you're a bunch of scoundrels that keep spitting God, slapping God in the face all the time. You don't deserve God's love. But he chose to love you anyway. Ephesians 1, 4, and 5. Even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him in love, He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ according to the purpose of His will. God chose us, God predestined us, God set His love on us when we did not deserve it. Now there's probably an Italian theologian named Jerome Zankeus that you've never heard of. He was around the 1500s. I'd be surprised if you've ever heard of Jerome Zankeus, but he has a great quote. He said this, for a person can never be said to be really repentant and humble. until he's made to know his salvation is not in any measure whatever on his own strength, machinations, endeavors, free will, or works, but entirely depends upon the free pleasure, purpose, determination, and efficacy of God alone. Our salvation rests in the Father who chose to love us before the foundation of the world. Okay, what about the Son? Well, let's look at the second person of the Trinity. The only begotten Son took God's punishment for us on the cross. Now, we see this in the text. Look at verse nine. In this, the love of God was made manifest. That word manifest means to shine brightly, clearly, so all can see. So God's love is not a mere abstract concept. It was demonstrated at a point in time in history when God sent His only Son. Verse nine, in this the love of God was made manifest among us that God sent his only son into the world that we might live through him. God sent his, and the old translations say only begotten. I don't know why the new translations got away from only begotten. I think your NIV, your ESV, the newer translations say one and only. It's a Greek word called monogenes, and it really means only begotten. So like your old King James, the only begotten son, what does that word mean? Only begotten. Well, it means two things, really. It means that Jesus is unique, one of a kind, the only Son of God. But it also stresses that He is fully God in the flesh. He has always existed as God. He shares divinity with God. It speaks about the fact that Jesus is fully God and fully man. And only Only Jesus, who's fully God and fully man, can be sent to die on the cross for our sins. And John says, the only begotten Son, God sent. John likes to use the word sent. John 3.16, God sent His only begotten Son. Here it says God sent His Son. God sent Jesus on a mission. Paul likes to use a different word. Paul says in Romans 8.32, He who did not spare His Son, but gave Him up for us all. How will He not also with Him graciously give us all things? John the Apostle likes to use the word sent. Paul the Apostle likes to use the word gave. It's the same thing. God sent Jesus to be given on the cross as the ultimate gift for our sins. 2 Corinthians 9, 15. Thanks be to God for his inescribable, inexpressible gift. God the Father sent Jesus the Son to do two things. This passage of scripture tells us. The first thing is that we might live through him. Do you see it there? In verse 9, in this the love of God was made manifest that God sent his only son into the world that we might live through him. We might have eternal life. This is not just like merely existing, but this means we might have true, abundant, true, eternal life through Jesus. John 17.3, this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent. So we can only have life through Jesus. And what does that assume? That if you don't have Jesus in your life, you don't have spiritual life. The Bible says you are spiritually dead without Jesus. Paul says it this way in Ephesians 2, 1 through 3. You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that's now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind. And we were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. We were spiritually dead. We were following Satan. We were dead in our sins. And Jesus made us alive. So the only way that you can live, truly live, is through Christ and His death on the cross, that we might live through Him. Jesus said in John 14, 6, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. The only way you have life is through Jesus, in Jesus. He's the one mediator, He's the only way. 1 Timothy 2, five through six, there's one God and there's one mediator between God and man, the man, Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time. So Jesus has come, he's been sent, he's been given to die on the cross that we might live through him, but the second thing, and this is a word we looked at a few months ago, that he would be the propitiation for our sins. So look there at verse 10. And this is love, not that we've loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. Now that's a big word, propitiation. What that word means is that Jesus died in the place of sinners who deserved God's justice. We deserve the punishment, we deserve the justice, we deserve God's righteous anger to come against us, and so instead of us receiving it, Jesus dies in our place. He takes that wrath, that deserving justice and judgment of God. John 3.36 says this, whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him. If you don't have Jesus, the wrath of God remains on you. Jesus dies in your place. 2 Corinthians 5.21, for our sake he made him to be sin, who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. You see, if we were left to ourselves and our spiritual deadness, We would never in a million years want to love God or have the power to love God or the power to save ourselves, the power to get ourselves out of our sin. We could never do this in a million years. I've said it many times. We were hopeless, we were helpless, we were hell bound. We needed Jesus to come and die on the cross for our sins as a substitute that we might have life through him and the forgiveness of sins. And so when it says God is love, it's not a mere abstraction. It's demonstrated in concrete action, so much so that God sacrificed His one and only Son so that we might have life, the greatest expression of love. So we've seen the Father. The Father sovereignly set His love upon you before the foundation of the world in sovereign election. Number two, Jesus the Son was sent to die on the cross for your sins that you might live through Him. But you see the third person of the Trinity, you may say, Pastor Sean, I don't see the Holy Spirit. Well, let's take a look deeper. And let's look at the third aspect, the third person of the Trinity. Third, the Holy Spirit caused us to be born again to new spiritual life. The Holy Spirit's been all through 1 John. We looked at it last week, you have the Holy Spirit, you have the spirit of truth. But look at verse seven, although it doesn't explicitly say Holy Spirit, look at verse seven. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God. Or born again of God. Now let's just ask the question, which person of the Trinity causes us to be born again? The Holy Spirit. And Jesus tells us that when he's talking to Nicodemus in John three, he's talking about the wind, John three, six through eight. That which is born of flesh is flesh, that which is born of spirit is spirit. Do not marvel at I said to you, you must be born again. The wind blows where it wishes and you hear it sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who's born of the spirit. Being born again means the Holy Spirit comes and blows like the wind, and you know what the wind's like in northeastern Colorado, right? Can you control it? Do you like it? You can't control the wind, but you sure know when the wind has come because you can see the blowing. The Holy Spirit, like the wind, comes, invade your heart joyfully, and gives you brand new life. He causes you to be born of God. So when John there says everyone who's been born of God loves, that means the Holy Spirit's caused you to be born again. The Holy Spirit's the one that does that. Paul says in Titus 3, four through six, When the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior. Now look at verse 12. No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us. God's love is perfected in us. Okay, how does God perfect his love in us? Well, God showed his love by, number one, choosing us before the foundation of the world. He showed his love by sending Jesus to die on the cross and rise again, but his love is perfected because he gives us the Holy Spirit to abide in us. No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. The Holy Spirit lives in us. And then you see that there, verse 13, we'll look at this next week, but go on, just look. By this we know that we abide in him, and he in us because he's given us his spirit. How is God's love perfected in us? How do we know we've been born again? He's given us the spirit to live in us. And that word has given us a spirit. It's in a tense in the original language that means this. The Holy Spirit was given to you when you first got saved, and he continues to be given to you, and he will always be given to you, and he will never leave you. That's how God's love is perfected in you. He gives you the Holy Spirit to live inside of you. So this passage clearly teaches the doctrine of the Trinity. You see the Father doing a very specific thing, setting his love upon us. And you corroborate that with the rest of the scriptures, it's in a sovereign election before the foundation of the world. The son does something very specific. Jesus was sent on a mission. God gave his one and only son to die on the cross so we might live through him, we might have our sins forgiven, we might have God's justice paid for on the cross through Christ. And number three, we've been born again. The Holy Spirit has caused us to be born again and the Holy Spirit lives inside of us. And as a result of that, And may I say that new identity in the Trinity, we have two things we didn't have before. We have a desire to love, and we have the ability to love. One thing you didn't have before you were Christians, you did not have the desire to love others, and you did not have the ability. And what God does in salvation is he gives you both the desire and the ability where you can say, I want to. At the same time, you can say, I can do because of the spirit living in me. But he gives a warning there in verse eight, as John often does. Verse eight, anyone who does not love does not know God. That's pretty strong. If you're not practicing this constant, sacrificial, unconditional love for others, then it probably means you don't know God. So just think about it this way. If you're a loveless, grumpy, bitter, angry person, and that defines who you are, I'm not saying you're not a Christian, but you may need to examine yourself. You may look at your heart and say, where's my heart? If you're a loveless Christian, you don't resemble your Father. Because God loved with action, we too should love with action. And you and I cannot love others sacrificially until we rest in the security of how Jesus loved us first in the cross. When you look at the cross and you see what Jesus did there, that's the only motivation. that empowers you to love others because of how he first loved you. Let's think about the love of God for a moment. Do you and I deserve God's love? No. Was God obligated to give us love? Anytime you say God's obligated to do something, you take grace right out the window. Grace ceases to be grace if it's something that God is obligated to do. God doesn't have to do it. Now let's think about other people. Do other people deserve our love? Oh yeah! We may think that all the time, don't we? What happens if the person that you're called to love is unlovable? What if they're a jerk? What if they're weird? What if it's uncomfortable? What if they don't measure up to your standard of what it means to be a good person? What if God had that attitude towards us? Hey, you gotta measure up if I'm gonna love you. You gotta stop having problems if I'm gonna love you. You gotta get your act together before I love you. Stop being so sinful and then I'll love you. If God had that attitude, would we ever be loved? No, because we can never measure up. Here's the bottom line. We imitate our Father and surely truly belong to Him. when we love others, not just with words, not just with platitudes, but with action, the way that the Father, Son, Spirit have loved us. What if God said, I love you from heaven, and he sent us a Hallmark card? Signed God. Well, that's cool, God, I'm glad you can write your name on a Hallmark card, it's probably a cool Hallmark card, and it came from heaven, that's neat. I love you, and that's all God did. Would that get us out of our sin? Would that do anything? Would that change us? No. God said more than I love you with the hallmark card from heaven. He sent his one and only son to die in our place and then sent the Holy Spirit to live inside of us. So the power to love others comes only from God's sovereign initiative. Here's something you need to think about this week. The more you enjoy God's love for you, the more that love will overflow to others. The more you enjoy God's love for you, the more that joy will overflow to others. The more we begin to understand that God is not obligated to love us, to choose us, but he did so anyway, the more that love will show itself to others. The more we rest in the finished work of Christ and the cross and what he has done to sacrifice himself for us, the more that type of love will show itself to others and sacrifice for others. The more we rely upon the power of the Holy Spirit in us who caused us to be born again, the more that love will pour out to others. Would you never ever get over God's abounding love for you in Christ? Never get over it. If you get over God's love for you, something is wrong in your heart. We should never get over it. When you stop and you truly think about the fact that the God of the universe that created all things chose me, loved me, sent his only son for me, and sent the Holy Spirit to live in me, it should stop us dead in our tracks and say, I cannot fathom this type of love, but that is the only motivation, that is the only source, that is the only power I'm gonna have to live for him and love others. You and I can't love others in our own power. You and I can't love others in our own strength. That power to love only comes from God's sovereign initiative. And the more you think about God's love for you, the more that will be a motivation to love others with Christ-like love. So now as your pastor, I can say, go out and love. Go out and find practical ways to love. Go be a Christ-like person of love. But if I started there, you would leave this place hopeless. But because I gave you the gospel and told you that the Father, Son, and Spirit have sovereignly done these things to give you the power, now you can go out in His power and do it with joy, with an attitude of encouragement, because you know that there's a power behind it that comes only from God. So as you leave this place and you love others, let's all keep our eyes fixed on who? Jesus. Let me ask you to bow your heads this morning. Father in heaven, we know it's very difficult at times to love others. We are impatient people. We are selfish people. We are very tied to our devices. We look at our phones, we look at our tablets, we look at our schedules, and a lot of times, Lord, it's amazing how self-centered we truly are. But you've called us here in this passage to love others with a consistent, with a constant Christ-like love. And we can't even begin to do that unless we understand the power that you give us to be able to do that. So Father in heaven, thank you for choosing us, for loving us. for setting that eternal love upon us before the ages. Jesus, thank you for coming and dying on the cross, taking God's justice in our place, and Holy Spirit, thank you that you continually live in us, and God's love is perfected because you are in our hearts, giving us the power, minute by minute, to love. So thank you that we have everything that we need to walk out of this place and to love others. Help us to do it in our, not in our own strength and our own power, but in the power of the gospel and the power of Christ. And we always have our eyes fixed on you, Jesus, as the ultimate example of what it means to love. Help us to love others as you first loved us. And we ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Pastor Dustin.