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1 John 4:10
This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
1. Love Comes From God
1 John 4:7-8
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
Love comes from God, because God is the source of love.
God, being love, sets a perfect standard for what love is and should be.
God being the source of love means that love is both transcendent and eternal.
Transcendent — goes beyond us.
We desire to have an everlasting love because love's true source is everlasting.
John 17:5
And now, Father, glorify me in Your own presence with the glory I had with You before the world existed.
With — Proximity, Relationship, Shared life and delight.
John 17:24
Father... You loved me before the creation of the world.
The historic Christian confession of the trinity is this: There is one God and that one God eternally exists as three persons: Father, Son, and Spirit.
From eternity past God has existed as a community of love.
Only a triune God can be love in His eternal essence.
He created people so that the relationship He already enjoyed could overflow into creation.
Inside you, there is an appetite for love that only the eternal love of God can satisfy.
If You Want To Know Love... You Have To Know God.
If love is who God eternally is, then the closer you get to Him, the more clearly you see what love actually is.
We Don't Get To Define Love.
Then love isn't something we shape to our taste.
2. Love Makes You Vulnerable
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
— C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
When you love someone, you tie yourself to that person.
The story of Christmas is the story of God choosing to become vulnerable and breakable.
Christmas is God saying, "I will not love you from a distance, I will step into your condition no matter what it costs me."
3. Love Always Comes At A Cost.
To love someone, especially to love someone who's broken, it costs you a little more.
1 John 4:10
This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Romans 5:8
God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
God loved us in our brokenness, saved us from our brokenness, and it cost Him everything.
We are all debtors to divine justice, but Christ has paid the debt of our sins. There is nothing left for us but to receive what He has done.
— John Wesley
Romans 3:23
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
Romans 6:23
For the wages of sin is death...
The God who owed nothing paid everything.
Romans 6:23
...but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.