Treasure Day 5 Live Like You’re Loved: Digging Deeper

1) Is it not possible to love others without being born of God and knowing God? (verse 7)
Student of Scripture, and closely acquainted with the Lord because he followed Him and studied Him all of his life, Andrew Murray, supplies us with a simple, but profound understanding of this concept of loving others in his book, Absolute Surrender. (It’s $4 on amazon. Buy it! Read it!) Murray describes how a sheep is by nature, gentle. A wolf, by nature is ferocious. A sheep would never need training to be gentle, just as a wolf would never need training to quickly sink his teeth into the sheep. They are simply acting out their nature. It would be ridiculous to think the sheep would naturally attack the wolf. Just as ludicrous is the idea that we, on our own, can be just as loving as God without God’s nature within us, teaching and guiding us. When sin first entered the world in the Garden of Eden, it was a love of self over a love for God that flung wide the door for Eve to sin. She wanted the fruit for herself. She no longer wanted to love and honor God. She loved herself. Adam wanted what Eve had. He wanted her experience, and so he loved himself over loving and obeying God. There is only one antidote to loving ourselves, the fullness of a God who has eternally existed as love. Generously, kindly, tenderly, with deep compassion loving one another as Father, Son, and Spirit for eternity. Only this kind of love can overcome the love of self. Which is why God says through John’s pen, “everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.” (verse 7) Only those who have His Spirit of love living and moving within them, as an entirely new nature, can possibly love like God! John follows it up with, “The one who does not love, does not know God, because God IS love.” (verse 8)

2) What is the connection between God’s love being revealed and our “living through Him”? (verse 9)
John penned this verse giving the assumption his audience already firmly grasped the reality that without Christ, we are dead. Christ came so we could live through Him, which builds upon the reality John stated a few verses earlier, “…the one who does not love, remains in death.” Essential to understanding John’s letter is understanding our nature. Without Christ, our nature, what comes naturally, that which we cannot escape, is our sin nature, which always, always leads to death. “The wages of sin is death.” (Romans 6:23) Sin earns death, every time. With our sin nature, we cannot help but earn death. Without a new nature being given, and the old nature itself being put to death (Romans 8:13), it is absolutely impossible to live in love. Unredeemed souls, stuck in their sin nature, can modify their behavior to a certain extent, learning what actions will get best results in their relationships and jobs, but they cannot change their nature, only cover it up. Eventually, the weight of working so hard “to be loving” will either crush them, leave them endlessly empty, or will eventually be uncovered as a skin-deep façade. Christ was revealed to the world by demonstrating true love for us by sacrificing Himself and paying the penalty of death on our behalf. (verse 9) When we embrace this gift of grace, which we could never earn, we are given a new nature, His Love Nature. (2 Corinthians 5:17) He did this so we could be free to walk in love!

3) How does one “come to know and to believe the love God has for us”? (verse 16)
John stated, “we have come to know and to believe the love God has for us”, as a conclusion statement wrapping up a 3-point thesis of, “how we know we remain in Him and He in us”. John began in verse 13 setting out to once and for all put to rest the question, “how can I know for sure I genuinely have a new nature?”. 1) “He has given us of His Spirit” (verse 13) The first mark of a genuinely new nature is the deposit of the Holy Spirit in our hearts as a seal and promise of the forever life with God. (Ephesians 1:13-14) 2) “We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the world’s Savior.” (verse 14) For John, who was a firsthand eyewitness of Jesus, seeing Jesus physically and recognizing He was God in the flesh was a clear reality. He knew Jesus because He had seen Him with his eyes and witnessed His miraculous life, death, and resurrection. However, the recipients of John’s letter didn’t have that benefit. Still, John listed it as a key ingredient for knowing you’ve been made new because you don’t need to physically “see” Jesus in order to witness His work or experience Him. Peter uses Jesus’ own words from John 20:29 when he says, “Though you have not seen Him, you love Him. Though you do not now see Him, you believe in Him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory.” Genuine encounters with Jesus have the potential to radically makes us new. When we take in an encounter with Christ, and it is coupled with testifying about Him, we have John’s second mark of a new nature. John experienced Christ deeply, personally, and intimately and because he was genuinely made new, John couldn’t help but testify about the Savior who had come to rescue the world. 3) “Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God – God remains in Him and he in God.” (verse 15) This isn’t simply confessing that Jesus existed as a historical figure, or was a man who could acted like “a god”, but this is confessing Jesus to be exactly who He claimed to be, God Himself, the exact physical representation on earth of God in Heaven. (Hebrews 1:3, Colossians 1:15)