God's love is presented as distinct from flawed human affection, characterized by its unchanging, unselfish, and unfailing nature. The sermon contrasts human love, often conditional and self-serving, with God's perfect love, which is demonstrated through Christ's sacrificial death for sinners. It emphasizes that humanity is unworthy of this love, yet God offers it freely, providing eternal life through His Son. The core lesson is that God's love is proven by His actions, particularly the atonement for sins, and the appropriate response is to believe in and return this love.
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My part of this conference consists of some studies in the first epistle of John. That's not St. John, the Gospel, but the letter over near the Book of the Revelation. Tonight I want to talk to you a little bit about some manifestations of God's love, some ways in which God chose His love for us. You can hardly talk about the subject of love without doing a little defining. A great deal that is called love today is nothing more nor less than sex and love.
Please don't be offended by what I say, but you know that what I say is true. that does not deserve to be called love. A great deal of what is called love is nothing more than liking something. We use the word very loosely. We say, I just love hamburgers. Well, of course you don't. Any school teacher can tell you better. You like them. You like them so... enthusiastically that you want a better word, a stronger word, and so you say, I love them. Not only so, but a great deal of what is called love is extremely faulty.
I mean even what may legitimately be called love. Human love is failing. Human love is selfish. I'm not cynical. But even mother love isn't all it's cracked up to me. For the last twenty-one years, my wife and I have been taking in boys and girls who have no home. We take in children who need a home. We take in only needy children. And in most cases, we take in unloved children.
Some of them do have one parent, some even two who love them. But in most cases, the children we get are unloved children, unwanted maybe to begin with, and unloved. Takes a long time to convince some of those children that we love them. Many lovely songs written about the love of mother But don't forget that motherhood is a biological process and does not necessarily mean that there is any real unselfish love for the offspring.
Thank God for good mothers. I had one of them. I had a wonderful mother. She became a Christian while I was still a baby. And she brought me up as a Christian. When my father died, she was both father and mother to us. And I wept uncontrollably when we had to lay her body away. She's gone home to heaven, and I longed for the day when I shall see my mother again. But not all mothers are like that. I've seen mothers sell out their children.
I've seen mothers mislead their children. Human love isn't all it's supposed to be. Human love is very failing. How few people there are who will continue to love when there isn't the response of love. How few people there are who will continue to love when the one they love proves to be unlovely? How many wives still love their husbands when their husbands have proven untrue to them or proven unkind to them?
How many children will stick with their parents when their parents have let them down? But God's love is unchanging, unselfish, unfailing. Read First Corinthians thirteen sometime, find out what real love is like. Or look at the life of the Lord Jesus and find out what real love is like. Love seekers not whole. Love is a great giver. Somebody wrote in the past century, this sounds a little stilted, but think it through.
It's a pretty good saying. Somebody wrote, maybe a hundred years ago, self seeks to be served and thinks itself great. Love serves and is great. Let me say it again. Self seeks to be served and thinks itself great. Love serves and is great. That's God's kind of love. The love of God for us. So I'd like to say, first of all, that we are not worthy of the love of God. And if you feel yourself to be so, you do not know what you're like.
If you ever get one look at yourself as God sees you and as the Bible describes you, you'll never again think that God owed you any love or that there was any reason in yourself why God should love you. We're unlovely because we have sinned. We are unlovely because we hate. Don't tell me there isn't any hate in your heart. You wouldn't have to look very long to find it there. Do you know that the Bible says that the carnal mind, the natural, the natural inclinations, the natural mind of man is enmity against God?
Maybe you don't know that you are an enemy of God, but I'll tell you how you can discover it. Just let God take something away from you and see what you do. just let god take a child out of your home and see how that how that heart rises up and hatred and you say why did god do that for me you're capable of it your heart will question even if you're a christian the old nature within us that evil heart within us questions anything that god does and define God.
A few years ago the Russians put out a cartoon. Quite a little while ago now, it was shortly after the end of the Tsarist regime, when Bolshevism first took over, they had a cartoon of a Russian worker on top of a ladder. At the bottom of the ladder lay two or three thrones thrown over on their side, and the kings were dead and their crowns had rolled away from their heads. He was standing on the top of a ladder shaking his fist into the sky, and the caption was, God is next.
Now that's terrible. And that's characterized atheistic Russia. for the last twenty or twenty-five years. But you don't have to go to Russia to find that. You wouldn't shake your fist at God mainly because you'd be afraid to. But you wouldn't shake your fist at God, and yet there is in our hearts that which is unlovely toward God. A few years ago a man wrote a book on how to win friends and influence people. And nobody ever thinks of treating God like that. If you treated any friend, any acquaintance, the way you treat God, you wouldn't expect them to be friendly towards you.
You ignore God. You do your best to leave God out of your thinking. Now don't tell me you don't. You'll do your best to leave God out of your thinking. You'd be most happy if you never had to think about God. You'd be most happy if you never had to meet God. A young soldier, young officer in the army, was telling others about his Savior, and finally one of his fellow officers said to him, I wish you'd keep still about your religion. Well, he said, I haven't said a word about my religion. I was only telling about my friend, the Lord Jesus. Well, they said, we're getting tired, sick and tired of hearing it.
Well, they said, I'm sorry, but You know, when you're happy about something, you want your friends to share. Happy, he said, I'm just as happy as you are. Didn't look at it, but I thought he said, and the young officer said, well, you may be. But there's this difference. I'm happy every time I think about God, and you're only happy when you can forget him. That's the kind of people that God loves. There isn't any reason in us why God should love us. But you know you need to be loved. The first question we ask anyone who wants to join our staff at the Christian Home for Children in Colorado Springs is, do you love boys and girls?
If they can't sincerely answer that with a yes, We don't even discuss any of their other qualifications. They may have a list of degrees as long as you're armed. They may have had experience for the last half a century. But if they do not honestly love boys and girls, we don't want them. Why? Because that's the number one need of every child on the face of God's earth. and you never get over that need. Just last night somebody said to me, I know I'm not worthy, but I love to be loved.
Don't you love to be loved? Don't you feel the need to be loved? Doesn't it do you good to know that someone loves you? Really loves you? Don't you like to be able to count on their love? Huh? Well, there isn't anything that will bring the bloom to the cheek like being in love. It's wonderful to know that God loves us, and the Bible is full of this teaching. God loves us, and God proved that love. Now, just recently, the welfare people in this country wondering what causes a child to be well-adjusted and what causes a child to be ill-adjusted made a survey.
They asked teachers in the various schools to give them the name and address of the best adjusted child they knew. And then they very carefully visited every one of these children and their homes and put out all the information they could get. Then they roamed this information on perforated cards through an IBM machine so that they would have all the data that concerned any particular group correlated and as they ran these through looking for this or that or another indication of why these children are well adjusted they ran it through to find out all who were rich and about half of the cards came up belonged to rich kids and the other half stayed in they were poor kids well we said that isn't a clue When they ran it through again, they thought they'd find out whether they get paddled or don't get paddled.
And about half of them came out that they never did get paddled. And the other half included some that got paddled every morning just to make sure. Well, that isn't the key choice. They didn't find one single thing all through the cards except when they came to this one. There was a question on that card. Do you believe your parents love you? They ran them through that time, and every single card stacked up there in one pile, every child in that group, said, I believe my parents love me.
Now, we need to be loved. We want to know that we are loved. God so loved the world. Now I want to give you just briefly three proofs of that love, and then say a little bit to you about your response. The first one is in first John three, sixteen. You all know John three, sixteen, Saint John. Now look at first John three, sixteen. Hereby perceive we the love of God. We had a little girl in the home one time and a nice old grandpa visited us.
In fact, he stayed with us for quite a while and finally went home to heaven from there. And there was one little girl that he liked very, very much. If he had ever had any grandchildren of his own, I'm sure that's the kind he would have wanted. So he said one day when he was about to leave, now Bonnie, don't forget that you're my little girl. And she looked at him and list out, are you my boyfriend? And he said, well, yes, yes, if you want me to be, I'll be your boyfriend. And the little gold digger said, most people's boyfriend sends them candy.
And when he went away, he sent her a five-pound box of candy and said, share it with the rest of the boys and girls. She wasn't very old, but she knew that when people love you, they'd do something for you. Hereby perceived we the love of God because he laid down his life for us. Greater love has no man than this. But a man lay down his life for his friend. That does happen once in a while, doesn't it? We read about it in the paper.
It does happen occasionally. Somebody actually loves his friend enough that he dies to save his life. But the next verse says, God commended his own love toward us. in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. That's the kind of love God had for us. Hereby, perceivably, the love of God, he laid down his life for us. Now, put that down as number one proof. God proved that he loved you.
Christ died in your place on the cross. Has anybody ever loved you enough to die for you? Your mother, you say, went down into the valley of death for you? Yes, but of course not by choice. She had no intention of dying. She didn't choose to die. But our blessed Lord came from heaven for that purpose. He chose to die when there was no other way to give you life. He proved his love. Truth number two, verse nine of the fourth chapter. And this was manifested the love of God toward us because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world that we might live through Him.
If you love somebody, you want to do the very best for them. What's the best thing God could give us? Oh, somebody says if God would just let me live a hundred years in Yosemite, well, what would you do when ninety-nine and eleven months are gone? That wouldn't do. Well, you say the best that God could give me would be just to leave me alone. But if God left you alone, you'd come into judgment for your sins. You'll die and be lost forever. God knew the thing you needed more than anything else.
He knew that you needed to have eternal life. You needed to have God's life. What do you mean so? You see, when you have the same kind of life that a person has, When you have the same relationship, when you're brought into the family, when you're brought into the blessings, when you're brought into the inheritance, when you're brought into the home, all of these things mean that you get everything that that family can offer. And when you become a child of God by receiving the Lord Jesus Christ, I'm not now talking about joining a church. We have no church for you to associate with.
We're not going to try to get anybody to join our church. We're only interested in you becoming a child of God by faith in the Lord Jesus. And when you do so, God has given you everything you could possibly need to make you happy. Proof number three, verse ten. Herein is love. Not that we love God, but that he loved us. and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sin. It wouldn't be kind of God to let you live forever in your sins. Why, when Adam and Eve sinned in the garden, if God had allowed them to go on and partake of the tree of life and live forever in that wretched condition, you might see old Adam in this crowd tonight.
I don't know how many thousand years it's been since Adam came here, but just think of he was still alive. He looked worse than some of these gnarled old trees here in Yosemite, I'm sure of that. Just think of he had to go on living in his sinful condition and in his damaged body, old age. Adding year after year and century after century and millennium after millennium, that would be a terrible thing. Think what it would be even to be able to live in heaven if you still had to have those sins upon you.
Oh, think how embarrassed it would be to come into the presence of the holy angels of God. And everybody know that you have sins charged up against you. How we dread to be blamed for anything. And God wants to take all that away. And he does take it away when we put our trust in him. Now, what does God expect you to do about it? Love spurned turns to hate. It's a wicked thing. to trample underfoot true love. I've watched some boys and girls break their mother's heart.
I've watched husbands, indifferent, selfish husbands break their wives' hearts. And I've watched a few wives break their husbands' hearts. I've watched children break their parents' hearts, and I've watched some parents break their children's hearts. It's a terrible thing to treat love lightly. And God loves you more than any human being ever loved you, and what have you ever done about it? What have you ever done about it? Well, what does God expect me to do? Verse sixteen, we have known the love of God.
God expects you to know what he does, what he has done, what he wants to do for you because of his love. Well, how am I going to know that? Only through the Bible. If you got a love letter, would you read it? Even if it came from somebody you weren't particularly interested in, you'd read it. You'd find it irresistible. You couldn't refuse to read a love letter. And yet some of you have never even read the New Testament. You've never even read John's Gospel, which is one of the most loving of all the love letters of God. We have known the love of God.
Secondly, we have believed the love of God. That's in verse sixteen. We have believed the love that God had for us. My wife believed me, that's why she married me twenty-five years ago. I think my children believed me. I think that's why they responded to my love. Sometimes I have a hard time convincing the boys and girls in the children's home that I love them. But when they believe that I love them, then they're almost the same as our own children. I saw one of my girls the other day and in Long Beach, and she had two of her little tads with her, and she told me three times in the little while that we were together how much she appreciated that we loved her and did what we could to care for.
And it took me, I'll say at least, a year to convince that girl that we really cared about her. She was so mad at me the first day she came to the home that she could have cursed me. She didn't want to come there in the first place. But after a while she believed my love. You believe God's love? And what's the third thing? We love Him, verse nineteen says, because He first loved us. If you really believed that God loves you, you would take His Son as your Savior You would say, thank you, Lord Jesus, for dying in my place.
Thank you for loving me so much. And I love you in return. Wouldn't you say, I'd be embarrassed to tell God that I love Him? The First Commandment says, I shall love the Lord thy God, and you've broken that commandment. Now, if you really believe that He loves you, if you really believe that He's proved His love to you, then you would love him in return. God isn't now demanding that you love him before he loves you, but he shows, he proves how much he loves you. And when you believe this, you'll be glad to tell him so, and you'll love him in return.