Love -

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Love

Text: John 13:31-35

Christianity is a kingdom of people, a body of believers, and a holy nation. Your individual relationship to God matters far more to you than the big picture of Christianity as it is built on Jesus Christ matters to the Father. (The wood value illustration.)

What’s become very clear about sacrificial love is that it is a fundamental principle in a biblical worldview. Selfish, proud people cannot be Christians.

Love is foundational

The underlying principle on which all the law and the prophets are built.
We love because he first loved.
If he loved then we also ought to love.

Love is measured by what it gives

Measurement – No greater love than a man lay down his life for his friends (John 15:12-17)
Blood of animals could never satisfy the Father b/c while these creatures were innocent, they were unwilling versus innocent and willing death in Christ.
Not my will, but thine be done.
Let this mind be in you according to Philippians 2.

Love leads to new life

Except a seed fall in the ground and die… save his life will lose it…
If you give up your ambitions, there has to be someone else’s ambitions you adopt. This is why you would have to lose your life to gain life.
Peter would equate this with a spiritual rebirth of new life (1 Peter 1:22-23) not found in you. Because it can’t be in yourself; that self dies and yields to a higher calling.
You have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit unto true love of the brethren, make sure you love one another with a pure heart fervently: 23 Being born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which lives and abides forever. 24 For all flesh is as grass…the grass withers and the flower fades away: 25 But the word of the Lord endures forever. And this is the word which by the gospel is preached unto you.

Love is evangelism

A new commandment I give you, That you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. 35 By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love one to another.
Why is love evangelism? Earlier, Jesus said when he is lifted up he would draw all men to himself. When he is lifted up in sacrificial giving his life on the cross, all people would be drawn to this. So this love the Lord commands is like the light that draws the moths to the light.
No wonder we’ve come up with so many schemes of evangelism b/c of the sorry state of Christianity in America. A church on every corner, not because we’re proclaiming the goodness of God, but because we can’t get along and everyone else is a heretic that’s not like us.

Love is the commandment

Love one another
…by love serve one another.
1 John 3:23 And this is his commandment, That we should believe on the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one another, as he gave us commandment… 4:7, 11-12 Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. … 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. 12 No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us