1 John – Mt Freedom Baptist Church

In this series of messages, we have examined God’s love. We found that God is love by His very nature. God manifested His love in the world when Jesus – God the Son – was embodied in the flesh of the man Jesus of Nazareth. God’s Spirit fills the heart of every believer with His love in the hour we first believe. On the evening He was betrayed to be crucified, Jesus demonstrated the sacrificial love we are to offer people when He washed His disciples feet, then He gave them (and us) a “new” commandment, that we are to love one another just as He has loved us, saying that all people would recognize by our love that we are His disciples.

This message is the first in a series entitled “God Is Love.” These messages will explore the nature of God’s love and our proper response to Him.

John the apostle gave us succinct definition of God’s nature when he wrote in 1 John 4:8. “…God is love.” Love is not just an aspect of God’s character. Love is the very essence of His being. Nor is God’s love an emotion, an attraction, or a response to a loved one being “lovable” in the way people ordinarily think of love. God’s love is all encompassing, unconditional, and eternally unchanging. God revealed to Moses the characteristics of His love in Exodus 34:6 – “…“The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness…”

God’s love is unexplainable because our limited human capacity for love can’t truly understand God’s boundless love. People fall in and out of love, but God’s love never changes and lasts forever. We give our love to another most often based on the character and behavior of our loved one. If our feelings about them change, we stop loving them. But God loves us regardless of who we are or how we act, and He will always love us just because we are the ones He loves. God extends His love to everyone, and Jesus demonstrated His love for us by sacrificing His own life on the cross in our place. Perhaps the apostle John said it best when he wrote in 1 John 4:8 simply “…God is love.”

As we celebrate Fathers Day, it is helpful to look at how Jesus modeled His own relationship with His father during His ministry on Earth. The defining characteristic of that relationship is connection. Jesus was in continual communication with His Father as He accomplished the mission on Earth that He was given by God the Father. Then, by dying on the cross in our place, Jesus made the way for us to enter into that same kind of relationship with God.

Our salvation is a three-fold process. We are justified (our eternal life is secured) by God’s saving grace through Jesus’ death on the cross in our faith in His resurrection. This begins the second phase in which we are being perfected into the very image of our Savior Jesus through God’s sanctifying grace.

Now that we understand the Christian life is not lived on a playground but is instead carried out on a battleground where attacks from the enemy are ever present, we can now begin investigating what it takes to defend ourselves. What does it take? The full armor of God! Paul, in Ephesians 6 informs us about the armor we GET to put on each day.

The intent for this message is to remind you of a gift from God that is a gift that keeps on giving. It’s the single greatest gift you can receive and when applied daily is the single most impactful gift you’ll ever receive. Of course I’m referring to God’s gracious gift of The Gospel.

What do we mean when we refer to salvation, or to being saved? It means you have been rescued from the inevitable results of living in your sin. It means death is not permanent. It means, because of Jesus and His work on the cross of sacrifice, in the tomb of victory, and through the hope of a heavenly future, you do not have to go to hell.

Are you ready and willing to commit and put in the necessary work required to become a daily worshiper of King Jesus? This message is designed to help us grow in our knowledge and our prayer life, with the hopes of becoming the Christian who worships God in “spirit and truth”.

By His sacrifice of His own life on the cross in our place, Jesus has redeemed us out of slavery to sin and the curse of death that sin brings with it. But our justification by the shed blood of Jesus is just the beginning of the process of sanctification through which God is perfecting us into the image of Jesus to make us ready for the culmination of His redemption of us unto eternal life. As we pass through His sanctification we will experience times of great triumph, but we will also go through periods of spiritual drought and outright rebellion against God – possibly even falling back into those same sins out of which Jesus first rescued us. In such times, our great enemy will attack us with lies – even causing us to question our salvation in Christ. But Jesus our Redeemer also stands ready in such times to be our great Restorer – bringing us back into fellowship and continuing His process of sanctification within our hearts by the power of His indwelling Spirit striving against the weaknesses of our fleshly selves.

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