©2004 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

05/02/04

Being Loved By God Pt. 2

5/2/04 Being Loved by God Pt. 2

Before we return to the study we were involved in last week,

I want to say just a few words about Chuck’s death this past week.

If you have become involved in our fellowship within the past nine months

you are probably unaware of the role Chuck played in our church

because he’d been teaching in China since last fall.

And even if you were here prior to Chuck’s departure

you may not fully appreciate

the kind of impact he had on us as a church,

or on me personally.

He was one of our Elders, of course,

and was since the very beginning.

But on Sunday mornings you would have known him best

as the person who frequently led us in prayer,

as the teacher who took over for me when I was gone,

and as the man who, every Sunday, sat behind me when I taught.

He didn’t tell me until years later,

but when he first joined our fellowship

he did so convinced that what we were attempting to do here

and the approach I was taking to my teaching simply could not really work,

but he was so fascinated by it

that he just wanted to stay around and see what would happen.

It wasn’t long, though,

before Chuck became the fiercest personal alii outside of my family I’ve ever known.

He not only understood perfectly what I was saying,

he had the remarkable ability to sense each week what I was trying to say,

and he knew whether or not I’d succeeded in communicating it,

and if he felt as though I hadn’t gotten it across,

you know what he would do.

As soon as I stopped talking

there would be just a second or two of respectful silence,

and then we’d all hear this voice from behind me.

And in just a few words

he would ask some question

that would force me to clarify what he knew I’d wanted to say

but had failed to do sufficiently.

I know there were more than a few of you here

who could hardly wait each week for me to shut up

so that you could hear what Chuck had to say.

It would be impossible to overstate

Chuck’s impact on our learning process as a church.

I know, of course, that we were just a tiny part

of all that our Lord chose to bring to His people through Chuck,

but it was a huge part for us a church,

and for me personally.

And for me personally

the role he played in my life

had far greater significance than simply in the role of teaching.

In fact it wasn’t even mostly in the role of teaching.

During my first few years in Alaska,

long before this fellowship ever began,

Chuck intimidated me terribly

because he knew everything

and communicated it all so well.

But somewhere along the way

God gave Chuck a heart for me personally,

and from that time on

he did everything within his power

to support me,

to encourage me,

to use his remarkable gifts to strengthen me as his brother.

When he left for China at the end of last summer

and, for the first time in many years,

I had to stand up here without him sitting behind me,

I felt unprotected.

And I have never fully adjusted to the loss.

Chuck had been positioned by God in our community,

and in many of our lives,

in a very real sense

as the Patriarch of this portion of the family of God.

He wasn’t the voice of God, of course,

but for many of us most of the time

he was frequently as close as we’d ever heard,

except, of course, when he drifted into either politics or prophecy.

The Christian world today has lots of teachers,

and preachers,

and highly skilled and educated professionals,

but we have very few fathers,

and even fewer true patriarchs,

men who accurately model for us the Fatherhood of God.

Chuck was our patriarch,

God’s unique gift to us,

and his influence on our lives will impact us for generations to come.

Well, we stopped our study last week

sort of in the middle of a thought,

and I want us to pick it up today where we left off.

I was sharing with you

my surprise at what it really means to be loved by God.

And in the process of that study

I mentioned that the first

and in some respects by far the hardest part of my discovery

was realizing that I had been looking at the central issue in my relationship with God upside down,

seeing it through the eyes of religion,

assuming that the heart of my calling was to find ways of expressing my love to God.

And things did not begin to make sense

until I finally started listening to what my Lord was saying to me,

and in that process discovering

that what He seeks

is not that I try to prove how much I love Him,

but rather that I discover how much He loves me.

It is that discovery that forms the heart of all that the Spirit of God seeks to accomplish within us,

and it is only that discovery

that has the ability

to provide us with an adequate motivation for transforming our lives.

But we saw last week

that our personal discovery of God’s love for us

is in no way easy,

and, in fact, is often a terrifying experience for us.

It’s not easy

because we have no idea what it really means to be loved by our God,

and because we just naturally assume

that His love for us

is in some way directly linked to our performance for Him.

We assume that it is an acceptance granted to us

in exchange for our obedience to Him.

And the discovery of His love

is also a terrifying thing for us

because our spirits sense that,

if it is indeed true

that He loves us just as we are,

if He really truly loves us as individual creations of His,

if it is intensely personal on His part,

then the discovery of that love

will change everything forever.

It will change the way we hear everything He has said to us.

It will change the way we see and interpret

everything He does in our lives.

As long as, in our minds, God remains

the emotionally distant moral judge of the universe,

doing His best to prod us on to improved performance,

while maintaining a frustrated and conditional approval of us,

we can keep Him at arm’s length away from us.

But once we allow ourselves

to climb up into His lap,

and place our heads on His shoulder,

and wrap our arms around His neck,

and feel His arms of love around us,

holding us,

the discovery of that love changes everything forever.

We looked at several passages last week

in which Paul made it clear

that the crucial ingredient in this whole process of life with the King

is our discovery of the length,

and breadth,

and height,

and depth of the love of Christ for us.

In the one passage from the final verses of Ephesians 3

Paul stated simply

that it is that discovery

and only that discovery

that will ever enable us “...to be filled up to all the fulness of God.”

And now today,

as we return to this study,

I would like to take us to several other statements in Scripture

that will help move us ahead here,

and also reveal to us

the relationship between our practical performance

and our discovery of His love.

The first statement is found In I John 4:19 where John says simply,

We love him, because he first loved us.

And before I go any farther with these statements,

I need to warn us

that the human religious spirit

will attempt to take these statements

and turn them into commands.

This is especially true with the second one we’ll look at,

but it happens even with this one.

Rather than taking it as the simple statement it is,

designed to reveal to us how the human spirit enters into a deep love union with God,

the mind of religion will reshape what is being said

into a call to religious duty,

telling us that “we SHOULD love him, because he first loved us.”

And once that attitude takes root within us,

we find ourselves thinking and saying to one another things like,

“If your really understood how much He loves you,

you would respond to Him by showing your love to Him in response.”

And then, from there,

we fling open the doorway to endless religious manipulation,

defining and refining an endless list of things we should do

in order to show God how much we love Him.

And I’ll tell you right now,

if we are going to make any progress in this whole thing,

it is crucial for us that we see the difference between this phrase as a statement

and as a command.

Maybe this will help.

Last week I attempted to illustrate our discovery of the love of God

with a recent experience I’ve had with one of my grandnephews.

I shared with you my attempts

to build a friendship with him

by spending time with him,

getting involved with projects together that we both enjoyed doing.

Then I mentioned that point in my relationship with him

where he walked into the room,

saw me watching him,

and then crawled up into my lap,

put his head on my shoulder,

wrapped his arms around my neck,

and let me hug him.

OK, now I want you to imagine what would have happened

if, at that point when my young friend entered the room,

before he had really worked through his own discovery of my love for him,

some well-meaning adult would have come over to him and said,

“Now listen! Uncle Larry loves you very much,

and I think you should show him how much you love him

by going over to him and giving him a great big hug!”

Can you see how destructive that would have been

to my young friend’s discovery of my love for him

and of his heart response to that love?

By turning that hug into a duty,

into an obligation he was required to fulfill,

it would have been far more difficult

for his little heart to hear and respond to my love for him.

That is what religion does

to the human spirit’s ongoing discovery

of the true nature of the love of God for us,

and our ability to then respond to that love.

It keeps the human spirit under a rigid framework of religious duties,

duties that we must perform in order to “show God how much we love Him”,

and in so doing

makes it far more difficult for our spirits to hear and respond to His love.

Prior to my involvement with PBF

I spent most of my time in church structures

where the congregations met at least three times a week,

Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday evening.

I can remember having pastors tell the congregation that,

“If you love the pastor you’ll be there Sunday morning,

if you love the church you’ll be there Sunday night,

but if you love the Lord you’ll be there on Wednesday.”

And so we frantically attempt to appease our God

by showing Him over and over again how much we “love” Him,

and in the process make it virtually impossible for our spirits

to really hear and respond to His love for us.

That is why religion is such an incredibly powerful tool

in Satan’s attack on the child of God.

As long as he can keep us focused on proving our love to God,

as long as he keeps our minds filled

with all of those things that we owe Him,

we’ll never hear what His Spirit is trying so hard to communicate to us,

“My child,

My precious one,

My beloved - I love you,

just as you are,

just for who you are,

not because of anything you’ve done,

but simply because My heart delights in you,

and treasures you,

and rejoices in My friendship with you.”

All of which is to say

that, when John says,

“We love him, because he first loved us...”,

he is not giving us a command,

he is simply making a statement.

He is telling us that the one thing that creates within the human spirit

a true love for God

is our discovery of the reality of His love for us.

The human spirit is by design a responder.

It responds to whatever authority it sees itself being under.

Do you remember that illustration we return to frequently

given by Paul in the first few verses of the 7^th chapter of Romans?

He compares the Christian’s relationship with God

to a woman who is married,

whose husband dies,

and who is then remarried to a very different type of man.

We enter this world with our spirits “married” to the moral law of God.

That law demands from us absolute perfection,

telling us what we must do,

and then condemning us when we fall short.

Our spirits respond to the law

by hating it and fighting against it,

yet we are never able to get out from under it’s inflexible demands.

Then we come to Christ,

and Paul tells us in that passage,

ROM 7:4 “Therefore, my brethren, you also were made to die to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might be joined to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God.”

When we come to Christ

the law is removed from our life

as the supreme authority over our spirits.

It forever loses its power to condemn us,

to bring judgment against us,

because all of our sin,

all of those places where we have fallen short of its demands,

all of them have been transferred to the account of Christ,

nailed to His cross,

and our debt has been paid in full forever.

And (ROM 7:6) ... now we have been released from the Law, having died to that by which we were bound, so that we serve in newness of the Spirit and not in oldness of the letter.

And if we understand correctly what has happened,

as our spirits begin to understand what our God is saying to us,

we discover for the first time the reality of His love for us,

and our spirits just naturally respond

by our loving Him in return.

And “We love him, because he first loved us...”

It’s not that we should love Him because He first loved us,

but that we really do.

Which means, of course,

that the first step in this process

is our spirits discovering the reality of the God’s love for us,

which is where we were last week

with Paul’s prayer that we would be able to comprehend

the breadth and length, and height, and depth of the love of Christ for us

so that we can then be filled up to all the fullness of God.

And then I want to put this together

with one additional statement made by our Lord

to His disciples

in the final hours preceding His crucifixion.

It’s found in John 14:15 where the Lord says,

“If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.”

And here again I need to emphasis

that this is not a commandment,

it is a simple statement of fact.

When our spirits have finally entered into a true love union with our Lord,

our natural response is to do what He asks of us.

John rephrased this same idea in his first Epistle when he said,

1JO 5:3 For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not burdensome.

To paraphrase just a bit,

John is saying that in those areas of our life

where we have seen the love of God for us,

our spirits just naturally respond to that love

by our loving Him in return

and expressing that love through our trusting what He has said to us.

And his commandments are in no way a burden to us.

In fact, they become the doorways to true freedom in life.

I had several excellent questions come up following our time together last week,

one of which was, “What about all of those statements in Scripture

about the way we act,

the way we should behave?

Where do they fit into this whole discovering the love of God thing?”

And the answer is clearly stated in this single statement of our Lord,

“If you love Me, you will keep My commandments...”,

and then powerfully illustrated for us

in each of the New Testament Epistles.

In nearly every one of the those open letters written to the local churches

we see exactly the same pattern.

We see the writer spending the first half of the letter

filling us with the knowledge of God’s love for us

and how He has expressed that love to us

by transforming our lives through Jesus Christ,

and then, and only then does the author move on to the practical explanation

of how this will impact our lives

once we have truly understood His love for us.

EPH 1:3 ¶ 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,

EPH 1:4 just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love

EPH 1:5 He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will,

EPH 1:6 to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.

EPH 1:7 In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace,

EPH 1:8 which He lavished upon us...,

and on and on and on.

And then, three chapters later,

after flooding us with the magnitude of all that our God has poured out on us through Christ,

flooding us with the affirmation of the depth of His love for us,

then and only then does the writer say,

EPH 4:1 I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, entreat you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called...

Religion forever attempts to read the Word of God backwards,

beginning with the catechism of all that we should do for God,

and then wonders why no one ever seems to change.

God begins by lifting us up into His lap,

wrapping His arms around us,

holding us close to Himself,

and then saying over and over and over again

until we finally hear and believe what He’s saying,

“I love! My child I love you! My precious one, I love you!”

We need one more week on this

because I have found at least four major barriers

to our being able to hear and believe the love of God in our lives,

and I want to share those four with you next week.