It Works Both Ways (Elevation)

1 John 4:5-12

Loving each other because God loved us.

7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 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.

Have you been in a relationship that’s not reciprocal? In any relationships there’s typically one initiator.

1. Be-loved

• John 19:26. John called himself the disciple that Jesus loved. In KJSV, he started 1 John 4:5 with ‘Beloved’.

• When we tell people it’s usually be better, be holy, be pure. But what about be loved?

• Are we poor at receiving love? That’s why when we are called to give it, we come out short. We can’t give what didn’t get. “The reason why He gave it to me was because He needed it later”.

• The first thing we must realize about love is where it comes from. It comes from God. God never asks you to give love that you’ve never got.

• If you have somebody difficult in your life that you find difficult to love, the solution is to ask God. Cause if He does it with you…

• Be loved by God unconditionally. Some of us it’s difficult cause we’ve never been loved like this by people that we can see. So it’s difficult to understand how a God we can’t see can love us with a love that no one can take away. “God show me how to be loved by You.”

• God showed His love by what He sent (v9). The proof that there is change on the inside is what we see on the outside. When we get this kind of love, it starts to show. Starts in our hearts but manifests in our hands. We don’t just sing about our love but it starts to show.

• Leverage - use (something) to maximum advantage. Do we think that God is looking for leverage to use against us?

• God had all the leverage, it was called the Law. The perfect requirement that we couldn’t measure up to. For some of us this might be our view of religion and God, we want to use the leverage of the law to change us. The leverage of what we ought to be, that produces guilt which results in short term change. But the law is not enough leverage for lasting change. ‘The law was powerless to do it’

• Analogy of child in accident and parent driving to emergency room. Every sign otw was a speed limit. How much attention do you pay to the numbers of the speed limit? Those numbers mean nothing to you because someone that you love is in trouble. In the moment, any parent would break the law for the sake of love. God broke the law for love.

• I didn’t want to learn it when I didn’t love it. (how can we get to learn about a God that we don’t love. How can we love a God that we can’t see?)

2) God showed His love by sending Jesus

• The cross was the ultimate that proved His love once and for all. If He didn’t give me a job when i asked for it, he still loves me cause he showed it at the cross.

• When Jesus was carrying His cross, He carried the horizontal beam. The whole cross was too heavy for the criminals to make it.

• God has already done the vertical part by the death of Jesus Christ. Anyone who believes and comes to God can be saved. Humanity was made right with human on the cross.

• Jesus makes the connection another way. “Until you love one another, the cross is not complete”. People can’t see God, but they see us. (v12). Without our love for one another the love of God is only vertical, but it takes the horizontal to make up the cross. WHen jesus turned to his mother he was telling them he is taking care of the vertical and he wants them to take care of the horizontal.

• What comes down (vertical), must go out (horizontal). Love of God coming down to humanity and then going out to the world. The leverage of the cross, of love opened a tomb and made dead things come alive. When God does the vertical and the church does the horizontal.

• Some of us are really poor at the receiving, we’re just giving out. Some of us don’t give out.