“HEREIN IS LOVE” – Charles Spurgeon

HEREIN IS LOVE

1 John 4:10-11
“Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought, also, to love one another.”

Introduction
The law commands love; indeed, all its precepts are summed up in that one word, “love.” More widely read, it runs thus: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Yet all this amounts only to, “You shall love.” But the law, by reason of our depravity, never produced love. We were commanded to love, but we did no such thing. The spirit that is in us is selfish, and it lusts to envy and to enmity. Why do wars and fights come among us? Come they not from our lusts? Since the Fall, man has become man’s bitterest foe upon the earth, and the world is full of hate, slander, struggles, fighting, wounding, and slaying. All that the law can do is to show the wrong of enmity and threaten punishment, but it cannot supply an unregenerate heart with a fountain of love. Man remains unloving and unlovable until the gospel takes him in hand, and by grace accomplishes that which the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh. Love is winning many hearts to the kingdom of God, and its reign shall extend until love shall rule over the whole earth. And so the kingdom of God shall be set up among men, and God shall dwell among them.

At the present moment, love is the distinguishing mark of the people of God. Jesus said, “By this shall all men know that you are My disciples, if you have love one to another.” And John said, “We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren.” The man whose spirit is selfish has not the spirit of Christ, and “if any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of His.” The man whose spirit is that of envy and contention is evidently no follower of the lowly and loving Jesus, and those who do not follow Jesus are none of His. They that are Christ’s are filled with His love. “Everyone that loves is born of God, and knows God. He that loves not knows not God; for God is Love.” God is the center of the believer’s love. The saints are an inner circle especially beloved, and all mankind are embraced within the circumference of the ring of love. “He that dwells in love dwells in God, and God in Him,” and he alone is a child of God whose spirit is kindly and affectionate, and who seeks, wherever he is, to promote peace and goodwill towards men.

The saints begin with love to God. That must always hold the highest place, for God is the best and noblest being, and we owe Him all our hearts. Then comes, for Jesus’ sake, love to all who are in Christ. There is a peculiarly near and dear relationship existing between one child of God and all the rest. Loving Him that begat, we love all them that are begotten of Him. Should not a child love his brothers with a tender, peculiar affection? This principle of love, once implanted, induces in the heart of the converted man a love towards all mankind. Not that he can take any complacency in the wicked. God Himself cannot do that. His holiness abhors all iniquity. The love desired is not the love of complacency, but the love of benevolence, so that we wish well, and to the utmost of our power, would do well, unto all those that dwell upon the face of the earth. In this holy charity, this unselfish love, be you imitators of God as dear children. Our heavenly Father is kind to the unthankful and to the evil, and so must we be, desiring that even the most abandoned may yet be rescued and made right and good. Love desires to create that which is lovable even in the most unlovable of mankind, and God helping the effort, she succeeds.

I. THE INFINITE SPRING OF LOVE
Our text has two words upon which I would place an emphasis—“not” and “but.” The first is “not.” “Herein is love, not”—“not that we loved God.” Very naturally, many conclude that this means “not that we loved God first.” That is not exactly the truth taught here, but still, it is a weighty truth, and is mentioned in this same chapter in express words—“We love Him because He first loved us” (verse 19). The cause of love in the universe is not that man loved God first. No being in existence could love God before God loved him, for the existence of such a being is due to God’s previous love. His plans of love were all laid and many of them carried out before we were born. And when we were born, we none of us loved God first so as to seek after God before He sought after us, so as to desire reconciliation with God before He desired reconciliation with us. No, whatever may be said about free will as a theory, it is never found as a matter of fact that any man, left to himself, ever woos his God, or pines after friendship with his Maker. If he repents of sin, it is because the Spirit of God has first visited him and shown him his sin. If he desires restoration, it is because he has first of all, been taught to dread the wrath of God and to long for holiness—“No sinner can be beforehand with Thee! Your grace is most sovereign, most rich, and most free.” We inscribe a negative in black capital letters upon the idea that man’s love can ever be prior to the love of God. That is quite out of the question. “Not that we loved God.”

Take a second sense—that is, not that any man did love God at all by nature, whether first or second, not that we, any one of us, ever did or ever could have an affection towards God while we remained in our state by nature. Instead of loving God, man is indifferent to God. “No God,” says the fool in his heart, and by nature, we are all such fools. It is the sinner’s wish that there were no God. We are atheistic by nature and if our brain does not yield to atheism, yet, our heart does. We wish that we could sin according to our own will, and that we were in no danger of being called to account for it. God is not in all our thoughts, or if He does enter there, it is as a terror and a dread. No, worse than that, man is at enmity with God by wicked works.

The holiness which God admires, man has no liking for. The sin which God abominates has about it sweetness and fascination for the unrenewed heart, so that man’s ways are contrary to the ways of God. Man is perverse. He cannot walk with God, for they are not agreed. He is all evil and God is all goodness, and therefore, no love to God exists in the natural heart of man. He may say that he loves God, but then it is a god of his own inventing, and not Jehovah, the God of the Bible, the only living and true God. A just God and a Savior, the natural mind cannot endure. The carnal mind is enmity against God, and is not reconciled to God, neither indeed can be. The unregenerate heart is, as to love, a broken cistern which can hold no water. In our natural state, there is none that does good, no, not one. So is there also none that loves God, no, not one.

We come nearer to John’s meaning when we look at this negative as applying to those who do love God. “Not that we loved God”—that is, that our love to God, even when it does exist and even when it influences our lives, is not worthy to be mentioned as a fountain of supply for love. The apostle points us away from it to something far vaster, and then he cries, “Herein is love.” I am looking for “the springs of the sea,” and you point me to a little pool amid the rocks which has been filled by the flowing tide. I am glad to see that pool. How bright! How blue! How like the sea from where it came! But do not point to this as the source of the great water floods, for if you do, I shall smile at your childish ignorance and point you to yonder great rolling main which tosses its waves on high. What is your little pool to the vast Atlantic? Do you point me to the love in the believer’s heart and say, “Herein is love!” You make me smile. I know that there is love in that true heart, but who can mention it in the presence of the great rolling ocean of the love of God, without bottom and without shore?

The word “not” is not only upon my lips, but in my heart as I think of the two things, “NOT that we loved God, but that God loved us.” What poor love ours is at its very best when compared with the love with which God loves us! Let me use another figure. If we had to enlighten the world, a child might point us to a bright mirror reflecting the sun. And he might cry, “Herein is light!” You and I would say, “Poor child, that is but borrowed brightness. The light is not there, but yonder, in the sun.” The love of saints is nothing more than the reflection of the love of God. We have love, but God is love.

II. THE MARVELOUS OUTFLOW OF THAT LOVE
“Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” Beloved, the love of God is seen in creation. He that studies the mechanism of the human frame and of its surroundings will see much of divine kindness there. The love of God is to be seen in providence. He that watches the loving hand of God in daily life will not need to look far before he sees tokens of a Father’s care. But if you want to know when the great deep of God’s love was broken up, and arose in the fullness of its strength to prevail over all, if you would see it revealed in a deluge, like Noah’s flood, you must wait till you see Jesus born at Bethlehem and crucified on Calvary, for His mission to men is the most divine manifestation of love.

Consider every word, “He sent His Son.” God “sent.” Love caused that mission. If there was to be reconciliation between God and man, man ought to have sent to God. The offender ought to be the first to apply for forgiveness. The weaker should apply to the greater for help. The poor man should ask of him who distributes alms. But, “Herein is love,” that God “sent.” He was first to send an embassy of peace. Today “we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be you reconciled to God.” Oh, the wonder of this, that God should not wait till rebellious men had sent to His throne for terms of reconciliation, but should commence negotiations Himself!

Moreover, God sent such a One, He “sent His Son.” If men send an embassy to a great power, they select some great one of their nation to wait upon the potent prince. But if they are dealing with a petty principality, they think a subordinate person quite sufficient for such a business. Admire, then, the true love of the infinitely gracious God, that when He sent an embassy to men, He did not commission an angel or even the brightest spirit before His throne, but He sent His Son—oh, the love of God to men! He sent His equal Son to rebels who would not receive Him, would not hear Him, but spat upon Him, scourged Him, stripped Him, slew Him! Yes, “He spared not His own Son, but freely delivered Him up for us all.”

Note further, not only the grandeur of the ambassador, but the tenderness of the relationship existing between him and the offended God. “He sent His Son.” The previous verse says, “His only-begotten Son.” We cannot speak of God except after the manner of men, for God in all His glory is incomprehensible. But speaking after the manner of men, what must it have cost Jehovah to take His only Son from His bosom to die? Christ is the Father’s self, in essence they are one, there is but one God. We do not understand the mystery of the Trinity in unity, but we believe it. It was God Himself who came here in the person of His dear Son. He underwent all, for we are “the flock of God which He has purchased with His own blood.”

Remember Abraham with the knife unsheathed, and wonder as you see him obey the voice which says, “Take now your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and offer him for a sacrifice.” Remember yet again that the Lord actually did what Abraham in obedience, willed to do. He gave up His Son! “It pleased the Father to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief.” Christ’s death was in fact God in human form suffering for human sin. God incarnate bleeding because of our transgressions. Are we not now carried away with the streams of love?

III. THE CONSEQUENT OUTFLOW OF LOVE FROM US
“Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.” Our love then to one another is simply God’s love to us, flowing into us, and flowing out again. That is all it is. “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us,” and then we love others. You have seen a noble fountain in a continental city adorning a public square. Look how the water leaps into the air, and then it falls into a circular basin which fills and pours out its fullness into another lower down, and this again floods a third. Hear the merry splash as the waters fall in showers and cataracts from basin to basin! If you stand at the lower basin and look upon it and say, “Herein is water,” that is true, and will be true of the next higher one and so forth. But if you would express the truth as to where the water really is, you may have to look far away, perhaps upon a mountain’s side, for there is a vast reservoir from which pipes are laid to bring these waters and force them to their height that they may descend so beautifully.

Thus the love we have to our fellow creatures drops from us like the descending silvery waterfall from the full basin, but the first source of it is the immeasurable love of God which is hidden away in His very essence, which never changes and never can be diminished. “Herein is love.” If you and I desire to love our fellow Christians and to love the fallen race of man, we must be joined on to the aqueduct which conducts love from this eternal source, or else we shall soon fail in love.

Observe, brethren, then, that as the love of God is the source of all true love in us, so a sense of that love stimulates us. Whenever you feel that you love God, you overflow with love to all God’s people. I am sure you do. It is when you get to doubt the love of God that you grow hard and cold. But when you are fired with the love of a dying Savior who gave Himself for you, you feel as if you loved every beggar in the street, and you long to bring every harlot to Christ’s dear feet, you cannot help it. Man, if Christ baptizes your heart into His love, you will be covered with it and filled with it. Your love will respect the same persons as God’s love does, and for the same reasons. God loves men. So will you. God loves them when there is no good in them, and you will love them in the same way.

Sometimes the wickedness of men kindles in the heart of a true Christian a stronger affection for them. The deeper down they are, the more they need a Savior. Did not our Moravian brethren feel, when they went out as missionaries, that they would prefer to go first to the most barbarous tribes? For they said, “The more degraded they are the more they need a Savior.” And should not the missionary spirit make believers feel, if men are sunk until they are as low as brutes, and as savage as devils, that this is the stronger reason for our being eager to bring them to Christ?

I hope that abominable spirit which used to come in among Christian people has been kicked away to its father the devil, where it ought to be. I mean the spirit which despises the poor and the fallen. When I have heard people say, “What is the good of looking after such riff-raff?” I have been saddened. The church of God feels that the souls of the meanest are precious—that to save the most foul, the most ignorant, the most degraded, the most brutalized man or woman that ever lived, is an objective worthy of the effort of the whole church, since God thought it worthy of the death of Jesus Christ that He might bring sinners dead in sin to Himself.

Brothers and sisters, we will not have grasped the truth unless we feel that our love to men must be practical, because God’s love to us was so. His love did not lie pent up like the waters in the secret caverns of the earth, but it welled up like the waters in the days of Noah, when we read that the fountains of the deep were broken up. In the gift of the Lord Jesus we behold the reality of divine love. When we see the poor, we must not say, “Be you warmed, be you filled, I am sorry for you.” But we must let our love relieve them from our funds. If we see the ignorant, we must not say, “Dear me, the church is neglecting the masses. The church must wake up.” But we must bestir ourselves and struggle ourselves, to warn sinners. If there are any near you who are degraded, do not say, “I wish somebody would go after them.” No, go after them yourself. We have each one a mission; let that mission be fulfilled.

Charles Spurgeon