1 P a g e. Introduction

Transcription

1 Introduction We re continuing our series through First John. This week we re in chapter 4, so if you have a Bible, I want to invite you to go ahead and get that out. If you don t have a Bible with you, you could use your smart phone, your tablet, whatever. If you don t have any of those things with you Wow, I m really surprised! But, if you don t have one of those things with you, then the Scripture will be up on the screen behind me here in just a second, so you can follow along that way as well. We re in chapter 4 of First John. We re talking through the series entitled Overcome, talking about how the Resurrection of Jesus Christ gives us the power that we need to overcome in this world today. It s pretty exciting; we ve been looking at things like how we re able to overcome hypocrisy, division within the Church all sorts of interesting things. This week in chapter 4, John turns his attention to false spirits how we re able to overcome false spirits that sometimes arise in the Church. Now, I ll just tell you what. God has really used this passage this week to basically punch me in the face. I mean, He has just been at work on me all week through this. Whenever I was a kid and went to Sunday School, we sang this song: Beloved, let us love one another, For love comes of God, Everyone who loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He who loveth not (claps 3 times) Did anybody else sing that song? No no one else sang this This is a problem. (Laughter) Okay We can t get this going in a round right now I understand that. I sang this song and the point of this is that I began to realize that sometimes those songs kind of domesticated Scripture in my heart. It was good because I memorized it, but what I began to recognize was that later in my life I had missed the impact that that Scripture intended to have because I had learned it in a child s-play perspective. This week the Lord has demonstrated to me, in great clarity and with mighty power, that this is not just a song for kids. This is Gospel-infused and it will wreck you if you are not careful. I m excited about preaching this passage today. So let s just jump right into it: First John chapter 4: Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already. Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. They are from the world; therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us. Whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error. 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. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world, so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we have 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 also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent His Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus 1 P a g e

2 is the Son of God, God abides in him and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the Day of Judgment, because as He is so also are we in this world. I want to read that phrase again: As He is so also are we in this world. Verse 18: There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because He first loved us. If anyone says, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from Him: Whoever loves God must also love his brother. 1. We Test Spirits. (v. 1) John jumps right into it. He says, There are false spirits within the Church. Now, these false spirits must be tested, is what he declares. He says essentially, There are people within the Church that will give false teaching, and these false teachings, if you are not careful, will lead you astray because they will run contrary to Scripture. They will go against what the Gospel of Jesus Christ is, so we have to test them. So what s he referring to when he says that? Well, if you were to flip back into the Old Testament, go to Deuteronomy 18:22, you would find this: When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the Lord has not spoken Translation: If you listen to someone who says that they are a prophet, but then what they teach does not come to pass guess what? They weren t a prophet. So the end of the verse says this: the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him. So if a prophet speaks but what the prophet speaks does not come to pass, you know that is a false prophet a false spirit. It s not in accordance with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. John says there are false spirits that oftentimes will crop up within the Church. Now, in John s day, the false spirit was the Gnostic spirit. The word Gnostic comes from the Greek word gnosis which is the Greek word for knowledge. It was essentially a teaching that said this: Only things that are spiritual matter in this world. In other words, Jesus Christ cannot be God in the flesh because God cannot be flesh because flesh is not Spirit and therefore flesh is evil. So their argument was, If you believe that Jesus Christ is God Incarnate, you actually have a false theology, because there s no way that God would become flesh because flesh is evil. Therefore, John immediately refutes that claim in 1 John 4:2. This is why he says this: By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God Another way that might be a better way to translate verse 2 would be this: Every spirit that confesses Jesus IS the Christ, come IN the flesh, is from God. What s the point? The point is this: If any spirit confesses that Jesus is not God in the flesh, God completed His redemptive act that He began in the nation of Israel through the cross of Jesus Christ because Jesus was perfectly human, perfectly Divine, perfectly sacrificed, and then perfectly resurrected if someone does not proclaim that or preach that, it is a false spirit. So John says, You have to fight against that. So therefore he moves on a little bit later in and he says this: Now, look; you need to know this Spirit because (verse 4) Little children, you are from God and have overcome them Now, who have they overcome? You have overcome false spirits in the world. Overcome It s the title of our series used by John a few times in this Book. The Greek word there is the Greek word nikao. It s in the past participle form. What does it mean? It means that Jesus has overcome. It s a completed act in the past; it s already done and it s a participle: He continues He continues to overcome. Why does that matter? 2 P a g e

3 Well, if you re like me, you probably wake up some days and you don t really feel like you ve overcome anything. Right? You say, Man I haven t overcome jack. I mean I ve just been a failure this week. Right? You think, I m always tempted to go back to the same old behaviors. I feel like I m trying to live out the Gospel in my workplace, but it s really been kind of a failure. I m really attempting to live out this Gospel of who Jesus is, and it feels like I continue to slip back into patterns that have nothing to do with glorifying who God is. I really don t feel as if I am an overcomer. What is it that John is attempting to explain? He is saying this: You may not feel like it, but it doesn t change the fact that it s true anyway. You have the very Spirit of Jesus Christ. If you go back to the end of chapter 3 you ll see this in verse 24: And by this we know that He abides in us by the Spirit whom He gives us. You have the Spirit of Jesus Christ in you, and that is the Spirit of overcoming. It means that you have overcome in the past because Jesus has already done it, and it means that you will continue to do so in the future. So this is the thing. Within the Church, there are false spirits that run contrary to the Gospel, that run contrary to verse 2 that Jesus is the Christ come into the flesh. You see, anything that attempts to declare that Jesus is NOT ultimate anything that attempts to declare that Jesus is NOT the greatest, the centerpiece, the most important thing anything that runs counter to that at all cannot be true because it goes against the Gospel. We have to test it and over time it will demonstrate its own character, and we will be able to eliminate it from our thought process. Now why does that matter? Friday night I was given the opportunity to give the Commencement Address for Cypress Christian School. I was very honored to do so. I had never given a Commencement Address before, so I thought about, What are the things that graduates need to hear? Now, I couldn t help but notice that most of you did not rearrange your schedules to come hear my Commencement Address on Friday night. (Laughter) So I just thought I would go ahead and give it to you here real quick, in just a couple of sentences. This is what I told the graduates on Friday night: I said, Graduates; you are going to get books this week. People may have already given them to you. They have given you a book probably that is entitled, Oh, The Places You Will Go. I said, Graduates. You will get a book. It might be entitled Chicken Soup For The Graduate Soul. I said, And as you read these books and as you listen to other popular things this week, this will be the message you will hear in various forms and various versions repeatedly. Are you ready? Set goals. Work hard. Never give up. Set goals; work hard; never give up. Set goals work hard never give up. And then I told the graduates this: You should set goals because if you don t know where you re going, you re in trouble. And you should definitely work hard because laziness is bad. And you should definitely never give up because giving up would be very defeating. But then I said this: I said, Graduates, if you only set goals, work hard, and never give up, you will ultimately be a failure because you will turn out probably to be a big jerk. They were kind of like, Whoa! What was that? Why did I do that? Because Set goals, work hard, and never give up left to itself is a message that is false because it is of this age. I said, Here s the thing: You will set goals, work hard, and never give up, but first, before any of those things, you will seek Jesus Christ. You see, if we set goals apart first from seeking Jesus Christ, then we have decided to follow the spirit of the age. If we work hard but we do not seek to work hard because we are working hard at the thing that Jesus has called us to do, we are falling prey to the spirit of the age. If we never give up because we are just a stubborn person but we are not listening to the leadership of the Holy Spirit, we are following the spirit of the age. The truth of the matter is that whether it is a false theology or it s simply sort of the popular wisdom that makes its way into our everyday lives, we must consistently and constantly be on guard in our own hearts to make certain that we are not falling prey to teachings that have not first been filtered through the lens of the Gospel. You have to start with Jesus, and everything else flows out from there. But if I start with Set goals, work hard, and never give up and I don t flow it through the Gospel guess what? I am in trouble! I ve got to start with Jesus Christ. What John 3 P a g e

4 wants you to know is this: You don t have to be afraid of contesting the popular wisdoms. Why? Because you have overcome them. You are victorious over it. You are already the victor. Hey guys I want to tell you something. I didn t post this on social media or anything this week because I didn t want to brag, but I m just going to share with you real quick. Two weeks ago maybe it was about a month ago I got the greatest opportunity. I got to have a one-on-one basketball game with LeBron James. I mean, it was amazing; just me and Bron-Bron. We were there in the gym (Laughter) You know, I just said, Hey let s just play to 21; you ve gotta win by 2. He was like, Alright; let s do this. You know, I m not bragging but I beat him. (Laughter) It was incredible. Now, right now the reason you are laughing is that you know that I am a liar, right? (Laughter) I love basketball. I love to play basketball. LeBron James would cream me if we ever played basketball. Why does that matter? Because you have more faith in the basketball abilities of LeBron James than the Spirit of Jesus Christ to overcome in your own life. You see, this is what happens. It s that the Bible tells you that you can overcome and, in fact, have already overcome the false spirits of the age, but you don t believe it because you trust more in the abilities of humans that the truth of Scripture that the Spirit of Jesus has already won the battle for you. You see, you have the greatest spiritual power on your side, and you re over there kind of going, Ahhh I don t know if we can win. Guess what? You already have! That s the thing. (Clapping) So this is why it matters. There are going to be people when you say, Hey, look; I want to pray about this before I do it, and they re going to say, Man That s weird. Verse 5: They are from the world; therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them. In other words, you can t expect people who don t have the Spirit of Jesus in their life to understand the motive for operating from the perspective of the Gospel. They are never going to understand it. Look at verse 6: We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us. Whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error. Friends We have to start in this place, first and foremost, with the Spirit of Jesus Christ living in us, actively proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus. That is the starting point. Anything else ultimately will be a failure, so we have to begin with the Gospel. That is the true Spirit because it is of Jesus that is, the Holy Spirit. The Gospel gives us the Holy Spirit. 2. To Understand Love. (v. 9) Now, you say, So what does that have to do with me testing these false spirits? I m glad you asked. Verse 9: In this the love of God was made manifest among us Now, what John says is this: You have to test the spirits because you have to get rid of, with great determination and passion, any spirit that is not from Jesus. Only the Gospel Scripture Truth from God. That s what gets to rule your heart and your mind in your life. Okay that s where you start. Then he says Let s actually back up to verse 8: Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. God is love. That phrase has been thrown around and misapplied so many times, we can t even talk about it today. Right? Whenever we say, God is love some middle-school girl thinks, Oh, it s Zach Ephron showing me his abs. No, that is not God is love. Other people are like, Oh, it means that someone does whatever I want. No, that is not God is love. The verse does not say, Love is God. Right? The verse says, God is love. Who gets to define what love is? God. God gets to define what love is because He is the source of truth. So, guess what? He defines it for us in verse 9: In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world, so that we might live through 4 P a g e

5 Him. In this is love, not that we have loved God I want you to look at that phrase In this is love verse 10, not that we have loved God but that He loved us This is what Scripture teaches very clearly: You are so evil; left to your own devices, you don t even have the ability to love God. That s how messed up you are. That s how sinful you are; you are dead in your transgressions. You have zero ability to love God. Nevertheless, God loved you first. He chose to love you. So how does God define love? The cross. This is how He said This is what love is. Jesus God in flesh, came to earth, pursued you, and died on the cross. That is the very definition of what love is. It is God giving His Son for you, for His enemies. This is a really important thing for us to remember on this weekend. I want to talk about this briefly, and I want everybody to listen very carefully to what I m about to say because it could be misunderstood or misconstrued. I want to make certain that you understand what I say. Yesterday, Drew came downstairs and he said, Hey, Dad they are showing every episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the Cartoon Network this weekend because it s Memorial Day weekend. That kind of flew all over me in the moment. I don t know why. I guess I m kind of getting old and crotchety I m not really sure. (Laughter) I looked at Drew and I said, Do you know what Memorial Day is? And he went, I think it has something to do with war. I was like, Oh it is on right now! I mean, I just turned into a straight-up dad in that moment. I sat him down and I was like, Son, your great grandfather stormed beaches. Your other great grandfather was in the North African theater of operations. You know, I was giving the full lecture, and I was just going right into it the total Dad thing. Why do I tell you that? I tell you that to say that I love this holiday that we will celebrate tomorrow because it is very, very important. So that s why I want you to hear what I m about to say and not misunderstand me. One of the dangers in the South and particularly in Texas because we are people who love our Armed Services, is that we have a very great temptation to idolize and elevate those who have served in the Armed Services as high as Jesus Christ. I want to tell you what. That s sinful don t do it. Every year at this time of year, I get some sort of forward from someone that essentially features this sort of wording something like this: There are only two people who have ever given their life for you The American soldier and Jesus Christ. Let me tell you what: Let me tell you the difference between what happened on the battlefield and what happened on the cross. Soldiers have one job and that is to kill their enemy, and I m very grateful for the fact that we have had Armed Services that have done their job to the best of their ability so that we can be provided the freedom to worship so that I can utter this next sentence. But Jesus Christ died FOR His enemies not to destroy them. That is the difference between what a soldier does and what Christ does. Soldiers go to kill their enemies. Jesus Christ dies to reconcile, to have a relationship with, and to save His enemies. Please do not mishear me. I have the highest regard for those who have served and have the highest regard for those who have given their lives, but we must not confuse the two because they are not the same, and to do so is idolatry. We must be very careful to guard our hearts against that because we have to understand that love ultimate love is defined by the cross and the cross is this: The One who freely gave His life for His enemies and, by the way, that s YOU guys that s me. I have to be reminded of the fact that a Man died for me, and He didn t pick up a weapon to fight back. He laid His life down freely so that He might have a relationship with me. That is ultimate love. The reason that we need to understand this and focus on this is because we sometimes convince ourselves that we understand love because we believe that we have something within us that is able to love. No. Scripture is explicit on this point in chapter 4. You do not have the ability to love until first God has loved you through Jesus Christ on the cross. That s what gave you the ability to love. He redeemed you through the cross, and He saved you through the cross, and that is then what saved you and redeemed you to the point that anything good could ever happen within you. Scripture testifies to this over and over. There is no one who is good; no, not one. But through the cross then we re transformed. We now have the ability to love. 5 P a g e

6 I ll be honest with you guys. I m disappointed all the time in my ability to love. I wish I was better at it. You would think that the cross would motivate me and change me. I m seeking that sanctification. I am pursuing it with everything that I have, but I can very openly declare, I am not there yet. Let me explain how I know that. Thursday night, I get into bed and turn the light off. It was totally dark and I can feel the mattress in the bed shaking just a little bit. Now, for those of you who are not married, let me tell you what that means. That means your wife is crying and the lights are out. So, the translation is, You did something really, really dumb (Laughter) and you were so dumb, you didn t even know that you should have apologized for it before you went to bed; that s how dumb you are. So I m like, Man these are the best kinds of discussions to have when you are really exhausted and you have all your emotional baggage just out there. Then you get to really tell one another what you re thinking in the middle of the night. The reason that I share that with you is that I woke up the next morning and, you know, I had gone through all the range of emotions. I had gone through first feeling attacked and very defensive to then recognizing that I had been in the wrong but not wanting to admit that I was wrong because I am a prideful man, and then going to the place when finally on Friday morning in the kitchen I said to my wife, You know what I recognize? I recognize in my life that I have an idol and this is my idol. I just shared with her what that was; it was an insecurity in my life. I said, What s happening is that the discussion that we re having is bringing that out into the open, and it s making me feel very vulnerable and exposed. What I need to do is to find my worth and my righteousness in Christ and the cross, but instead I am trying to find it in my own ability and my own performance. I just laid that out for her right there. Now, the good news is that ten years ago, I never could have said that; so God is growing me. The bad news is that I had to throw a fit like a baby first. Why do I share that with you? Because I recognized in that moment, it was like God said, I did this for you just so you could see how bad you are at loving people. You can t even love one person that you re married to. You need Me to love so desperately, but you re not even capable of that. This is why you are so bankrupt, you are so corrupt that you need the cross of Jesus Christ to redeem you and give you the ability to love. It s only because of Him being the propitiation for our sins that we are able to do this, which is why verse 11 is like C4 explosive strapped to your chest: Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. Ephesians chapter 5: Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the Church. How did Christ love the Church? Oh He died for it. That s right because God defined love as the cross. Husbands, are you loving your wife? You re like, Man, I felt pretty good about it until you used that whole cross analogy (Laughter) I m not feeling so good about it now. Right. You see, this is the thing. The Bible defines love as the cross of Jesus Christ. That is love. Then John drops a hand grenade in our lap and he says, Beloved (the Church) love one another like God has loved you in Jesus Christ. You say, Well, I can t do that. Exactly. You can only love like that when the grace of God has so overwhelmed and so transformed you that it overflows out of you. Why does John want us to love one another like that? Verse 12: No one has ever seen God No one has ever seen what s he getting at? Nobody out there has ever seen God face-to-face, so the second half of this verse matters: if we love one another, God abides in us and His love is perfected in us. What is his point? God s plan to show His character to the world guess what? It s in the way that we love one another. So this is what he says: You are bankrupt you are corrupt and you have nothing in you that is good. Nevertheless, I saved you while you were still enemies of Me, through the cross of Jesus Christ, and in doing so extended grace. That gives you the ability to understand love and to now love one another. So love one another in the same way that Jesus loved you, and when you do that it will show the world Who I am. 6 P a g e

7 The Church of Jesus Christ, when living the love of Christ perfectly, is a proclamation of the Gospel because it is a proclamation of the cross because it is people loving one another as they were intended and created to love. This is radical stuff because we say, I can barely even make it to work without hating someone, how are you telling me I m going to do this? This is why it becomes essential for us to cast out false spirits and to center our thought patterns and our life solely upon the cross of Jesus Christ because the cross gets to define the way that I relate with the people that are within the Body. We must be willing to love one another, and that means we must be willing to give of ourselves, for one another, to demonstrate love. I am supposed to love you in such a way that it is a radical giving of myself. I am supposed to love you in the Church in such a way that I would be willing to die for you. If that sounds a little crazy to you, good because that s the way it sounded to the Church whenever John wrote it as well. So, he uses a very intentional word to describe this sort of love. He uses the word perfected. The word perfected comes from the Greek word telos which literally means goal or end. He says, This is how love is perfected. This is how love reaches its goal. The way that love is perfected, the way that love reaches its goal is that it is modeled after Jesus so that it demonstrates His character. Verse 17: By this is love perfected (reaches its goal) with us, so that we may have confidence for the Day of Judgment, because as He is so also are we in this world. So this is what John is saying: Jesus was in this world. What did He do when He was in this world? He gave His life. He loved the world so much He gave His life for His enemies. Right? Crazy! Crazy stuff. That s what He did. Then he says, And Your love is perfected with us (when you love one another in this way) Verse 17, last clause: because as He is so also are we in this world. So you live in the world, knowing that they hate you, that they despise you, that they think you re foolish because you pray, because you elevate Scripture you don t think that Scripture is just some good advice. You actually think it is straight from God; it is God s Word to you. You live and you act on that; you worship God. You order your heart rightly around what God declares, and they will think that you are crazy because of that. Now will they kill you for it? I don t know maybe. Will they ostracise you for it? Quite possibly. Is there a chance that you will be made fun of because of it? Probably. But why does that matter? It matters because we are living out perfect love within the world when we center on the cross. You see, John takes it and he says, You need to love one another in the church, and then he just takes it up another notch and he says, And you need to do the same thing out there in the world to the people that hate you. So he doesn t just want you to love your brothers and sisters who are family. Hey, look it s hard enough to love the people that we re supposed to love, right? He says, Now I want you to go out there and find the people that hate you, and the way that Jesus was in the world, that s the way that you re going to be in the world too. 3. To Cast Out Fear. (v. 18) This is then what he says because he can kind of sense that you re like, I don t want to do that. That doesn t seem like a real good strategy for living. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. John uses the word punishment which is only used one other time in the New Testament, Matthew 25:48, the parable of the sheep and the goats. At the end of that parable in Matthew 25, Jesus says this: Those who are righteous are taken away to Eternal Life, and those who are not are cast away to eternal punishment. The word punishment there in 1 John chapter 4 has to do with pain that will come upon you eschatologically end-of-times sort of stuff, right? That s what this is about. He says, We don t have to fear punishment because we have perfect love. So, two applications: First of all, we don t fear punishment why? Because 7 P a g e

8 we re under the cross, and because we re under the cross, there will come a Day of Judgment, and I don t have to be afraid of that. Right? Because I ve been received as righteous under the blood of Jesus. But secondly I have a friend who is a mentor. He is an older pastor. I have no idea why he invested in me. He pastors a mega-church. He s about 20 years older than me, and for some reason, whenever I was a staff member at a church, he decided that he would invest in me. He started telling me about crazy stories that he was doing. Let me tell you one of the things that he did. This blows my mind. This guy his name is Bob. He had the opportunity to go into Afghanistan. While he was in Afghanistan, he had the opportunity to go and to preach the Gospel to Taliban members. The way that he could do that was he had to get into a jeep with guys who had AK47s and RPGs. He had to go across the desert, and the only thing that they had was a satellite phone. They had to go across the desert for hours and hours with no one else around. He couldn t bring anyone with him until they got to a walled compound, and he went in and he sat down and he told people in this compound about Jesus. He was just telling me this story; my mouth is agape. How in the world would you ever do this? You know, he was sitting down with people that we see on the news, and if we saw them coming we would run. Right? He s telling them about the love of Christ. I asked him (as a young man), How were you able to do that? He said, I m not afraid anymore. Do you want to know why I m not afraid? I m not afraid anymore because I ve got the love of Jesus in me. I don t fear them because I love them. I was just blown away at this because, to me, these guys were the epitome of evil, and he is declaring that he wants to share the Gospel with them. It just floored me and I realized in that moment that God was doing a lot of work in my heart. This verse is what does it: Perfect love casts out fear. Most of us will probably not end up in a walled compound in Afghanistan preaching the Gospel to the Taliban I recognize that. But do you know what? I bet that every person in this room has somebody that they are afraid of. If there s somebody that you re afraid of then what are you afraid of? You re afraid of punishment fear of the body. You re afraid that they can hurt you. You re afraid that they can fire you. You re afraid that they can slander your reputation, and because you are afraid of them, you do not fully and completely love them. You do not love them because you have yet to come to grips with the fact that you were at one time the Taliban with regard to Jesus Christ. You were the enemy and yet He sought you and bought you. Now, those whom you had formerly declared as enemies, those who you had formerly declared are beyond the reaches of God s grace, those who you are fearful of because they can bring punishment upon you now, perfect love casts out all fear. Church, would we be so possessed with the love of Jesus Christ that we would love even those who yesterday we declared we were afraid of. Would we go to them and say, We want you to know who Jesus is because we love you. Most of the time we are afraid of people because we don t know them, and we don t know them because we don t love them. You have to love people before you can ever begin to get to know them. I tell you what. God has been working in me on this a whole lot. I m growing in this in a lot of areas. I can t tell you that I fully and completely understand it and know it, but I do want to declare this: I am praying and asking that God would waken in our church a desire to no longer be afraid of people within our city, our community, our families, our workplace, but we would instead love them so passionately that we could not help but tell them about Jesus Christ because the love of God, perfected in us through the cross, casts out fear and it s gone it s been overcome. It s no longer here and now we don t have to be afraid anymore. I don t know about you, but I don t want to be afraid. Right? Now you say, That sounds a little nuts. Yeah, you re right; it does sound a little nuts, but I don t want to be afraid anymore, and I know you don t either. So what casts out fear? Perfect love and perfect love only comes from one place: the cross of Jesus Christ. Let s become so enthralled and so in love with what God is doing in Jesus on the 8 P a g e

9 cross that we cannot help but love every person whom God places in our path, and may we, in doing so, understand that any spirit that tells me that I cannot love this person is a false spirit. Any spirit that tells me, You can achieve things on your own apart from Christ, is a false spirit. Any spirit that attempts to tell me that anything is supreme or ultimate, apart from Jesus, is false. Therefore, I center in on the Gospel, the saving power that God, in my evil and in my brokenness, dug down and pursued me and saved me and in that showed me love so that now I might model it to my brothers and sisters in Christ and then carry it into the world. No longer am I afraid of them. Amen? Amen. Let s pray. God, thank you for Your goodness and, God, thank you for Your Word. Lord, I pray this, very simply, that we would no longer be afraid. God, I pray that You would cast out fear from us because we love those whom we formerly declared and believed to be enemies. God, would we begin to so richly and so passionately believe that there is no them there is only one group of people, one category, those who are loved by God and those who need to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ, preach to them over and over. Father, could we see all people as needed recipients of the Gospel of Jesus, and may we passionately declare that we love them because You first loved us. God, may we go to them in love and in grace, and God may we never ever believe that we are capable of love apart from the Gospel. Change us, apply it, bring it to bear on our hearts Lord so that we might say Yes to You. God, we don t want to be a fearful church. We want to be a church that knows that Jesus Christ has overcome and then walk in that truth. So, Father, I pray for the people that are here today who have yet to say Yes to you, I pray that You would bring them home. Father, for those that are here that have been running in fear, God, I pray that You would cast out fear by perfecting the love of Jesus in their hearts. I pray this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen. 9 P a g e