Supernatural Love
2-2-25
If you've been paying any attention at all to the news lately, one word that you've no doubt heard a lot is the word pardon. All of the particulars of what has happened with all of the people pardoned is irrelevant to our topic this morning. But it's interesting because pardon is a key word when it comes to describing and understanding our salvation experience. Pardon is defined as "the excusing of an offense without exacting a penalty." If someone has done something wrong or broken the law there is normally penalties associated with that. When someone is pardoned they no longer have to pay for their wrong doing.
That's what has happened to us. We are guilty before God spiritually because we have broken His law and sinned against Him. The punishment for that sin is eternal separation from God and eternity spent in hell. But God has pardoned all who are believers. Instead of us paying the price for our sins, Jesus paid it for us. God poured out the wrath that we deserved on the perfect, sinless Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ. Isa. 53:5.
Because God has pardoned us from all of our sins, we should be consumed with gratitude to Him. The ultimate expression of our gratitude to God is love. Not only do we need to love God with our heart, mind, soul and strength, we also need to love others as ourselves. Supernatural love is a product of God's work of salvation in our lives and it is what we're going to talk about this morning as we continue our look at the book of 1 Peter. Let's read 1 Peter 1:22-25.
God's supernatural love for us and the kind of supernatural love we need to have for others has certain truths associated with it. One truth concerning love is that it is only truly saved people who demonstrate genuine love. Now I know what you might be thinking. What about the non-Christian husband who oftentimes loves his wife sacrificially? What about the unsaved parents who still love their kids and who sometimes take extraordinary measures to express that love? It is true that even those who don't know the Lord Jesus Christ are still capable of loving others.
But it's not the same type of love. Love from an unsaved heart is different from love that comes from a personal relationship with the Lord. On the outside, the love of Christians and non-Christians may seem to be the same, but on the inside, they're not. Only those of us who are born again believers are truly capable of showing and manifesting Christ-like sacrificial love because it is only believers who have experienced that love themselves in the first place.
The way we love; who we love; how we love all work together to provide evidence of whether or not we are really truly children of God, or if we're really sons of the devil. It's sometimes those who we assume are actually children of God who prove by their lack of love or their misplaced love that they actually aren't believers.
One example of that are the Jewish religious leaders of Jesus' day. You would like to think that someone who knew as much about the OT as those men did would be OK with God. But they weren't. They had love alright, it just wasn't love for God. They loved the appearance of being righteous; they loved appearing godly more than actually loving God. They also loved keeping their man-made commandments. Luke 11:42.
What Jesus is getting at here is that the Jewish religious leaders were very focused on keeping the minute details of the law. They didn't just keep the law God gave them, they were also very focused on keeping all of the additional laws that they had come up with over the years. They thought that love was manifest in adhering closely to their external religious duties. But they did not and they could not keep the law as well as they thought they did. They also did not and could not love God the way He wanted them to. Even though they were very religious, they didn't love because they had not experienced God's love themselves.
It is when we are saved and born again by the Spirit of God that we receive the capacity to demonstrate supernatural love. It is love that unmistakably characterizes true believers. John 13:35. The evidence of our salvation and of our love for God is obedience. Peter says in verse 22 that our obedience to the truth purifies our souls. The word Peter uses here for purifies describes a past action with continuing results in the present. When God saved our souls and forgave our sins, He not only cleansed our past, but He also cleanses our present and our future.
The way Peter words this it seems like the act of purifying is a human work that we do ourselves. But it is not. It is a divine work just like every other aspect of our salvation experience. Obedience is an inherent element of the faith that saves. God gives the ability to have faith and when it is genuinely given by God it will result in believers regularly obeying the truth and manifesting God's love to others. Because we are pardoned, we will manifest supernatural love in our lives.
Another truth associated with supernatural love is that because God enables us to love that way, we are to love all other people both those inside and outside the church. (v. 22b). When we are saved, we become members of Christ's body, which is the church. When we become a part of God's church, God's Spirit gives us the capacity and the ability to love others the way He wants us to love others.
Peter says that our love for the brethren should be sincere. That may be one of those statements that seems rather obvious: of course, true love will be sincere otherwise it wouldn't be real love. Yet, too often we convince ourselves and try to convince others that our love is sincere when deep down it's really just hypocrisy.
It is too easy and it is too natural because of our sinful nature for our love to be hypocritical. The kind of sincere love that God wants us to have and the kind of sincere love that God commands us to have towards others is genuine and authentic. Rom. 12:9. That kind of love goes beyond any earthly limitations; it's goes beyond any earthly considerations; it goes beyond our earthly abilities.
So when we say, "I really can't love that other person the way God wants me to," you are speaking truth. You can't love that way. But God can love that way through you. When we try to put limitations on our ability to love; when we start to make excuses for why we don't love or why we can't love, as if our excuses justify our sinful lack of love, then we're just blatantly ignoring what God wants from our lives.
This is one of those areas where it's good for us to examine our own heart. How much of your love for others, or the love that you outwardly show towards others, is actually sincere? Don't we oftentimes just simply put on a show? Don't we put on our love face for others and fake it because that's what we're supposed to do, especially when we're here at church?
One of the outstanding characteristics of God's church; one of the outstanding characteristics of our relationship with our brothers and sisters in Christ is love. If we love the way God wants, then there will be unity in the church. God wants us to be unified; we need to be unified. God uses the loving unity of believers to attract a lost world to Himself. He uses our love for one another to awaken the lost world to its need for salvation. So when the world sees us not loving like we should; when they see us lacking unity in our midst, it turns them off from the gospel message. Because we are pardoned, we will exhibit supernatural love for all other people.
It's also true that supernatural love in our lives should make us to be Jesus freaks. Or as Peter puts it at the end of verse 22, we need to fervently love one another. (v. 22c). One of the key Greek words used in the NT for love is agape. Agape love is love of the will. It is not emotional love; it is not determined by the beauty or the desirability of the object. It is an expression of the noble intentions of the one who loves. It is God-like sacrificial love.
Fervently is a term which means to stretch to the furthest limit of a muscle's capacity. Therefore, we use the term to mean to go all out; to reach the furthest extent of something. God wants believer's love to stretch way out past what we think is our ability to love so that it makes a different in the lives of others.
If we fervently love others like a Jesus freak, it will be manifest through forgiveness. That's really what separates genuine godly love from the love of unbelievers: the willingness and ability to forgive. We can only truly forgive because we've been forgiven by God. Even for those of us in God's family, forgiveness can be a real challenge. Let's face it, humanly speaking, we don't want to forgive. We like to hold onto our hurts and our grudges. If it's so hard for us as believers to forgive, it's even harder, maybe even impossible for the lost to truly forgive.
But for us as God's children, He has graciously and mercifully forgiven our sins. Because of that we are able to offer forgiveness to others as the extreme example of love. Keep in mind, forgiveness isn't an emotion or a feeling; it is a decision and a commitment. We determine and we declare that we forgive others for what they've done to us. In the end, over time, we will also eventually come around to actually feeling forgiving as well.
This type of agape, Christ-like sacrificial love doesn't derive from some external, legalistic requirement. On the contrary, Peter told his readers that this love is an attitude compelled from within, from the heart. Love is a fruit of the indwelling Holy Spirit in our lives. Paul told the Galatians that if they lived by that Spirit, they would see His fruit in their lives. Gal. 5:16, 22-25. Because we are pardoned, we will live like Jesus freaks.
The last truth associated with supernatural love is that if we don't love with God's love then we're not saved. (vv. 23-25). We are to love one another to the fullest extent possible because that is consistent with the new life we are given in and through Christ. 1 John 5:12.
It's almost as if Peter was expecting his readers to ask why they should love. His answer was that they should be expected to love that way because they were loved that way. Because they were loved that way, they were now born again. Being born again, God's love was in them and they needed to show that love to the world by loving Him and others.
Elsewhere, the Apostle Paul describes our salvation as a new birth. Rom. 6:3-4. Paul here is not speaking of water baptism because water baptism has nothing to do with our salvation experience. Paul is speaking of spiritual transformation in Christ Jesus which is symbolized by water baptism. Immersion into Christ means believers are placed into His death. We die to our old life and we share new life in Christ. The new birth entails a complete, radical, decisive transformation that has to be described in the extreme terms of death and new birth.
Seed represents the source of life. Everything that comes to life in the created order begins with a seed that is a sovereign creation of God. But even then, it all eventually dies.
However, someone born again of God's Spirit gains eternal life. That's because He uses the imperishable seed of the Word of God. James 1:18.
Whether something is as common as grass or as uniquely lovely as a flower, it eventually dies. Human life is brief in this world. People pass away like dry grass under a withering wind. In their graves the poor and those of no influence are equal to the rich and influential. In Christ, however, whether people are common or uncommon, they will never deteriorate or die spiritually. Instead, they are like the Word of the Lord which endures forever.
Though believers possess new life in Jesus Christ and even though we therefore have the capacity to love in a godly manner, the presence of sin in our unredeemed flesh causes us to fail to love as we should. But we are commanded to love. We are called to manifest an undying love for fellow believers that is consistent with the new life we have in Jesus Christ. That is possible by the power of the gospel word which is itself imperishable. Because we are pardoned, we will love with God's supernatural love.
This is our church. God has brought us all together here in this specific place to be part of His Kingdom work in Baxter Springs. So we need to love. Christian love is the love of grace, the love of compassion. We may find it hard to love some people but that doesn't mean we shouldn't show them God-like love. One of the words for love in the Bible means brotherly love; another word means godlike sacrificial love. We show brotherly love because we're brothers and sisters in Christ and have likenesses. We show agape love because we belong to God and therefore can overlook differences. That's why we are able to manifest forgiveness towards others because the agape love of God is in our hearts and enables us to be reconciled to one another and unified just like God wants us to be.
If you're at odds with anyone here, make it right. Do what you have to do to be as reconciled as you can be with anyone and everyone who is part of this congregation. There is no good, godly reason to refuse to forgive or to not ask for forgiveness.
Now is the time; today is the day. As our singer and musician come now, we invite you to understand and to manifest in your life the supernatural love of God that He has poured out on you. If there are any decisions or professions that need to be made this morning regarding anything God is doing in your life, we invite you to come now as we stand and sing.
Prayer.