Tag Archives: love

Sunday – November 16, 2014 1st John 4 verses 12 to 16 “The Assurance of Abiding”

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Sunday – November 16, 2014 – Read the Word on Worship

1st John 4 verses 12 to 16 from Sunrise Community Church on Vimeo.

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1 John 4:12-14
“No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world.”

Almost every Christian at some time has struggled with assurance of salvation. Perhaps you heard some godless university professor rail against the Christian faith, or you heard about a book or movie, and it caused you to doubt the truth of Christianity. Then the enemy hit you with the thought, “How could you be a genuine Christian and have these thoughts?” Or, it may have been during a time of severe trial, where God did not seem to be answering your prayers. The difficulties in your life multiplied without relief. You cried out to God, but He seemed to be on vacation. You just couldn’t make sense out of what was happening to you. Then, you began to doubt both the Christian faith and whether you were really a Christian at all.

The enemy has many such ways to shake our assurance of salvation. In the case of John’s first readers, false teachers were spreading heresy among the churches. They had left to form new churches, and many had followed them. When your friends join a new group with new teachings, it can cause you to question whether what you believe is really true. So the apostle John writes to his little children to give them assurance that they were truly abiding in Christ.

We’ve seen throughout 1 John, the issue is not perfection, but rather, direction. The important questions are, “What do you do when your faith wavers? Do you come before the Lord in confession, asking Him to strengthen your faith? What do you do when selfishness dominates your life, rather than God’s love? Do you grieve over your hardness of heart and ask God to fill you with His Spirit and to produce the fruit of His Spirit in you? Fruit is not an instant product. It takes time and cultivation. Faith and love take time to grow.

John wants you to know that if these qualities are growing in you, you can be assured that God abides in you and you in Him. If you do not see faith and love growing in your life, then do as Isaiah (55:6-7) directs: “Seek the Lord while He may be found. Call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts; and let him return to the Lord, and He will have compassion on him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.”

 

Sunday – November 9, 2014 1st John 4 verses 7 to 11 “Why Love is Required”

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Sunday – November 9, 2014 – Read the Word on Worship

1st John 4 verses 7 to 11 from Sunrise Community Church on Vimeo.

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1 John 4:7-9
“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.”

You may identify with the early believers. John has already emphasized the importance of love in 2:7-11 and hit it again in 3:11-18. We may be prone to say, “Okay, brother, we’ve got that one down now. Let’s move on to something else.” But John not only repeats the imperative to love one another but also he hits it longer and harder than at any other point in the book. He wants to make sure that we understand that love is not an optional virtue for the believer. It is to be the distinguishing mark of the church in the world. John goes so far as to say that if you do not love others, you do not know God! So we all need to examine our own lives by this supreme standard.

While love is the inevitable result of being born of God, it is not the automatic result. John tells us, “Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” The implication is the life of God imparted to us in the new birth manifests itself in love for others. If we are children of the One whose very nature is love, then we will be like our Father. But at the same time, John writes, “Beloved, if God so loves us, we also ought to love one another.” Love is not automatic nor effortless! We always have room for growth in love.

Love is not opposed to truth. John has just spent six verses warning us (4:1), “do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.” He did not say: “Let’s just set aside those points of doctrine where we disagree and come together where we do agree, loving those who differ on these matters.” Because these men denied essential truth about Jesus Christ, John calls them false prophets, whose teaching is the spirit of antichrist. Love does not mean that we set aside the truth for the sake of unity.

We must exercise wise discernment here. Some doctrinal differences are not essential to the gospel, and we need to love brothers who differ with us on these matters. Some of these doctrines are important for how we live the Christian life, and so we may vigorously debate them among ourselves. But we must always remember that we are debating as brothers in Christ. If we divide from one another over every minor point of doctrine, we fall into the errors of “fighting fundamentalism.” At the heart of that sort of cantankerous behavior is a spirit of pride, where I assert that everyone must agree with me on every minor issue. At the same time, some issues fall into a gray zone, where salvation may not be at stake, but to embrace a particular view will have momentous consequences. We should not accuse those who differ with us of not being saved, unless they also deny the essentials of the gospel.

Sunday – October 26, 2014 1st John 3:19-24 “Blessed Assurance”

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Sunday – October 26, 2014 – Read the Word on Worship

1st John 3 verses 19 to 24 from Sunrise Community Church on Vimeo.

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1 John 3:19-22
“We will know by this that we are of the truth, and will assure our heart before Him in whatever our heart condemns us; for God is greater than our heart and knows all things. Beloved, if our heart does not condemn us, we have confidence before God; and whatever we ask we receive from Him, because we keep His commandments and do the things that are pleasing in His sight.”

Every child has a basic need to feel assured of his parents’ love. It should be obvious that if parents verbally or physically abuse a child, that child will not feel loved by his parents. Eventually, he will distance himself from them through withdrawal or rebellion. So even when a child disobeys and must be disciplined; it is important for parents to affirm their love for him. Assurance of love is essential for close relationships.

The same is true spiritually. Even though the heavenly Father disciplines us for our good, that we might share His holiness, He does it out of love. He wants us, as His children, to be assured of His great love for us. John begins chapter 3 by exclaiming (3:1), “See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are.” God wants His children to feel His arms of love around them, even when they go through difficult trials.

The enemy of our souls knows that we will not feel close to God if we doubt our standing before Him as beloved children. So he accuses us in an attempt to drive a wedge between us and God. In addition, at times our conscience condemns us as we compare ourselves with the holy standards of God’s Word. We know that we should love others, but in our hearts, we struggle with anger or bitterness or hatred toward those who have wronged us. We know that we should pray for God to bless this difficult person with His salvation, but inwardly, we’d rather see him punished. When we have those thoughts, either our guilty conscience or the enemy comes in and says, “A true Christian can’t have thoughts like that! You’re not even saved!”

The first anchor for assurance is always faith in the person and work of Jesus Christ. If your trust is in Christ, God has promised you eternal life and He has promised never to allow you to be snatched out of His hand. A man once told D. L. Moody that he was worried because he didn’t feel saved. Moody asked, “Was Noah safe in the ark?” “Certainly he was,” the man replied. “Well, what made him safe, his feeling or the ark?” The point is, if you’re in Christ, it’s not your feelings that save you from God’s judgment. It’s Christ who saves! Faith puts you on the ark! Make sure you’re on board!

Sunday – October 19, 2014 1st John 3:11-18 “Love or Hate – One or the Other”

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Sunday – October 19, 2014 – Read the Word on Worship

1st John 3 verses 11 to 18 from Sunrise Community Church on Vimeo.

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1 John 3:11-12
“For this is the message which you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another; not as Cain, who was of the evil one and slew his brother. And for what reason did he slay him? Because his deeds were evil, and his brother’s were righteous.”

If loving others were only as easy as giving a hug to someone you don’t like, we all could excel in love. Just hug them and move on. But, love is a bit more difficult than that. It requires continual effort, because at the heart of loving others is putting the other person ahead of yourself, and that is always a huge battle. For this reason, the New Testament as a whole and the apostle John in this letter never tire of exhorting us to love one another.

John had seen the love of Christ demonstrated that night in the Upper Room, when Jesus took the basin of water and washed the disciples’ feet. He then heard Jesus say in John 13:34-35, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” Then John saw the supreme demonstration of Christ’s love when He willingly went to the cross and died for our sins. And so the “son of thunder” became known as the “apostle of love.” John has already reminded his little children of this old-new commandment of Jesus.  He will yet devote the major part of Chapter 4 (verses 7-21) to this same theme. In fact, six times in 1 John and 2 John, he refers directly to the command by Jesus  that we love one another.

If we get weary of hearing over and over about the need to love one another, we should remember that John wrote under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who knows our hearts. We need to examine ourselves constantly because our default mode is to revert to selfishness, not to love. In our text, John again gets out his black and white paint and does not mix them into shades of gray. He wants to expose the errors of the heretics in the plainest of terms.

John says, “This is the message which you have heard from the beginning.” He means, from the beginning of your Christian life you were taught to love one another. It’s a basic truth that you should start to learn and practice from the first day of your Christian experience. God’s love flowing through us to one another should so mark the church that it draws a sharp contrast between us and the world.

Sunday – February 10, 2013

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February 10, 2013 – Read the Word on Worship

Friendly Fire from Sunrise Community Church on Vimeo.

Let us be very clear: our love for God is a response to God’s love for us. So when did Christians decide our love would be like tithing? As long as I love 10% of the time, I must be in God’s good graces. We are overwhelmed by God’s infinite grace that does not save us by fractions, but still sadly surprised that God is not satisfied with a mere fraction of ourselves. The command given to Israel is the command given to the Christian: give your entire life to the personal God who first loved us by sending His Son as an offering for our sin.
The sum of what Jesus is saying is our love for God needs to be all of who we are: heart, soul, mind and strength. Not some fraction of ourselves, a tithe of who we are to somehow horde the rest of ourselves to squander as we see fit on ourselves. We sing about how the world will know we are Christians by our love, but love of God is how we are known by God. “But if anyone loves God, he is known by Him.”
Join us this Sunday as we see Jesus give His commentary on the greatest commandments in the Scripture as we see “Friendly Fire” in Mark 12 verses 28 to 37

Word On Worship – February 10, 2013 Download / Print

Mark 12:29-32
“Jesus answered, “The foremost is, ‘HEAR, O ISRAEL! THE LORD OUR GOD IS ONE LORD; AND YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND, AND WITH ALL YOUR STRENGTH. The second is this, ‘YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

Let us be very clear: our love for God is a response to God’s love for us. So when did Christians decide our love would be like tithing? Some may reason: As long as I love 10% of the time, I must be in God’s good graces? Yet we are overwhelmed by God’s infinite grace that does not save us by fractions, but we are still sadly surprised that God is not satisfied with a mere fraction of ourselves. The command given to Israel is the command given to every Christian: give your entire life to the personal God who first loved us by sending His Son as an offering for our sin.

The heart is more than just our bodily pumping station. The heart is where our decisions are made, plans are evaluated and the calculations of our lives are weighed in the balance. We may agree with something in our mind and speak about it with our lips, but that is not where the decision is made. It is in the heart, not the mind, where we decide for or against God and expose our true loyalties. The people perceived the scribes to be models of those who loved God, but Jesus examined their hearts to unveil the object of their true love: themselves.

Our soul is the vitality and motivating power of our lives. Together, with the heart, the soul determines how we will conduct ourselves in our daily walk. To love God with all of our soul will focus our energy on pursuing God’s purposes no matter the response from those around us as we are consumed to proclaim the gospel and fight the good fight. The mind is what directs our opinions and judgments. Our love for God must be more than an emotional response, but a demonstration to all that we “know why” instead of trying to impress others with our “know how.” Our strength is all that we possess while we walk this earth. Yes, it is the physical demonstration of love by what we do, but it is also the leverage for the work of love that our possession can do. The widow who gives her last mite provides the best example of this love.

The sum of what Jesus is saying is our love for God needs to be every part of our being: heart, soul, mind and strength. We are not to offer God only a tithe of ourselves we are while we somehow horde and squander the rest on our own shallow purposes. We sing about how the world will know we are Christians by our love, but love of God is how we are known by God. “But if anyone loves God, he is known by Him.” (1 Corinthians 8:3)