As we wrap up “Follow Me,” Pastor Tim takes into 1 John 4:9-12 to consider what it looks like to follow Jesus into brotherly affection and love.
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor uses the analogy of a home renovation show to describe how God sees us. How does this metaphor help you understand God’s love, and what are its limitations in describing our relationship with God?
The sermon emphasizes that we should see our worth in what God has done rather than in our own deeds. How does this truth challenge the way you typically evaluate yourself—and others?
Why do you think it is often easier to accept that God is restoring us than to believe He is at work in those who annoy, oppose, or have mistreated us?
Daylen McLee’s story illustrates showing love to someone from a group that has mistreated you. What are examples in your own community where Christians are called to show this kind of radical love across lines of division?
The sermon warns against tearing others down as a way of feeling better about ourselves. How do you recognize when you’re falling into that trap, and what helps you redirect your focus to God’s love for both you and others?
The following study questions and transcript are AI generated and may contain errors.
Good evening! Happy Labor Day and welcome to Steadfast. I am so glad to be with you again tonight as we dig into God’s Word, as we think about who He is, as we conclude our series, Follow Me.
Over these past weeks we’ve been thinking about what it looks like to answer that call from Jesus, what it looks like to follow Him. As we’ve thought about that, we’ve seen how the virtues that Peter lists in 2 Peter chapter 1 are essentially the characteristics of Jesus that we start to show as we follow Him, as the Spirit works in us. It’s no coincidence that we end on love, because as we look to Jesus’ love, we see both the centerpiece of God’s character, His love for us, His love that exemplifies everything that can possibly be about love, and also the most challenging part of the call to follow Jesus, to love those around us, and to love God.
So let’s go ahead and come before our God and ask Him for His strength and His encouragement tonight, and then we’ll dig into tonight’s text. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for being with us tonight, and thank you for loving us, even when we’re not very loving. Lord, you know that we struggle to love. We struggle to be faithful and to love you. We struggle to love those around us, and yet you love us. That’s the good news we find in Scripture, that you love us enough to save us, enough to save us and to call us your own. As we go through tonight’s Scripture, as we contemplate it and how it applies to us, Lord, would you remind us of this truth, that you love us. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
As we come to the end of that list I described, the one that we’ve been thinking about over these past weeks, 2 Peter chapter 1, we’re in verse 7. If you think about that, I can’t help but think as Peter reaches the end of that list, he thinks back to the whole scope of his experience with Jesus, his time with Jesus during Jesus’ earthly ministry, what it was like from that first moment that Jesus looked to him and said, “Follow me,” until those moments before Jesus ascended into heaven, when he restored Peter after Peter’s betrayal. And as Peter reflected on this and remembered this, there’s no way he could have done that without coming to the conclusion that the most amazing part of everything he experienced was Jesus’ love for him.
So he ends this list with love, as he’s conveying what it means to follow Jesus. He ends with two kinds of love: brotherly love, love for those around us—maybe translated in your Bible as brotherly affection—and then simply love.
To find out more about what these words are referring to, we’re going to turn to 1 John chapter 4 tonight. We’re going to start at verse 9. Let’s go ahead and look there right now.
John writes, “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 loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
John and Peter saw so many of the same things; they were in Jesus’ inner circle. And both of them speak boldly about the sort of love that God shows. And as Peter reflects here on what it means to follow Jesus, he knows that this call to love is a call that starts and ends with God’s love for us. If we understand where we are, and John points to this very clearly in this passage that we just read, we understand that we aren’t bringing anything to the table. John says clearly it’s not about us loving God, it’s that God loved us first.
That’s how we know that God is with us. It’s not about checking off a certain amount of love, achieving a certain level of love for God, and then God shows up and says, “Now I know that you love me and I’m here.”
And what did he do before we’re even born with everything that we’re going to do that’s displeasing to God ahead of us? Everything that God knew that we would do that was unfaithful to him. What did he do? He sent Jesus to the cross. He sent his Son—that God Himself would dwell on this earth to live, to suffer, to die for us—that the Son might be the propitiation, the sacrifice to atone for everything we do, to make right before the Father everything that we would make wrong.
And so we know from the get-go, right from the very beginning of where we are tonight, that we’re coming from a very bad place. We’re not coming from achieving mostly what God wanted. We’re coming from being completely and utterly worthless in the eyes of anyone as holy as God—or at least that’s the way it should be, it would seem. Except that God doesn’t see it that way. He loves us. God’s love isn’t because we’re perfect. God’s love is because he is perfect.
And so when he looks at us, he’s not looking at us and seeing if we measure up. When the Father looks at us, he doesn’t see us. He sees the accomplishments of Jesus for our behalf and looks at us like that.
In a way, it makes me think of if you’ve ever watched one of those HGTV home repair shows, and you have one of those really visionary repair and decorating teams, and they bring a home buyer to a house that is just utterly dilapidated. It’s just falling apart. It looks worthless, but it’s in a great location, and they see the potential charm if it’s all fixed up.
And so they start. They convince the buyer to actually buy this home against their better judgment, because it seems like it’s a mess. They buy it, and it starts to be renovated, and you go through this process, and maybe it’s an hour-long show. And so by the end, you almost forget how bad that house was. But then, of course, before they do the big reveal, they have to go through and do a voiceover, talking over the different aspects of the house and how bad it was, and then they show you what they did to make it better. And it’s incredible, the transformation.
And of course, the person who bought the house comes in, and they just, they can’t even speak. They’re overwhelmed, because this house is suddenly their dream home that looked like their nightmare. We’re sort of like that, only worse. Whatever the worst house that’s ever been featured on a show like that, whatever the things wrong with it were, we’re that much worse. And yet God looks at us, and he sees what he’s going to do with us, how he’s going to perfect us, how he’s going to transform us into the people he’s made us to be, restoring us to the image of God that he designed us to be.
Those decorators and those construction people, they kind of see it. And of course, though, some of the drama on the show is when they miss some of the things that are wrong. God doesn’t miss anything that’s wrong with you or wrong with me. He sees every bit. He sees all the bad electrical wiring, all the plumbing that leaks, all the drywall that’s falling apart. He sees all that stuff, and he chooses to spend our lifetimes restoring us and making us to be part of his family. We’re already part of his family, but to make us reflect that status.
But we can’t forget that. This is one of those things I think we sometimes struggle with. As God’s working on us, we start to see some of the fruit of his spirit coming out. And maybe we’re even sort of loving someone around us that isn’t the most easy to love. And we think, “Wow, I am doing so great.” And then we start to fall back into that trap. Satan is glad for us to fall into this trap where we think, “Well, I am mostly a good person.” And we start to lean on our works.
But John says here, it’s not about us loving God. It’s about God loving us to bring us back, to remind us, “Hey, don’t forget that before picture.” Yeah, you’re starting to see the halfway point of construction, and things are starting to look pretty good. And you’re feeling pretty much like a genius for picking this derelict house and having the construction crew work on it. But you’re not. Look at the before picture. That’s what God has been working on.
So to understand God’s love, we have to understand that is what it means to follow Jesus. The sort of love that he’s showing us is that love: the love of something, or someone rather, in this case, that seems utterly unredeemable. And yet God chooses to redeem us. We’re not lovable. We’re the worst fixer-uppers ever. Yet God loves us.
Why is that so much easier, the status of being loved by God? Why is it so much easier for us to remember that about ourselves than about others? It’s so easy to think, “Well, yeah, God wants to fix me up. He’s working in my life. This feels really good. I’m a child of God.” We can sing that. We can pray that. We can know that. And then there’s that person, that annoying neighbor, that annoying co-worker, that annoying person at the ballpark, that person who just doesn’t know how to drive that’s right next to you today. And suddenly we can remember about ourselves, “Yeah, yeah, God’s working on me. I’m being restored. Things are coming along.” But the last thing we want to do is think, “That person who just cut me off, yeah, God’s working on that person too.” And if that person doesn’t know Jesus, I should be wanting that person to know Jesus so that person too can experience what it is to be loved, even when we’re unlovable.
Why is that so hard? And yet I think I know for myself it’s easy to fall into the trap of forgetting that. And I bet it is for most of you as well. It reminded me of a time at a place I worked where we’d sit around at lunchtime and talk about the things going on at the organization. And there were a couple of co-workers that just loved to tear down everybody.
And there was someone I didn’t know very well, and they were tearing them down constantly over and over again, day after day, talking about how bad this person was, how annoying this person was, all the things that this person did that were wrong. And some of them were probably true. Some of them were clearly not, I later found out. But it was really hard to fight the draw of just believing every bit of that. Because there’s something in us, I think, that wants to believe the worst about those other people we hear about. If only because then when their really bad, horrible, dilapidated house is right next to us, we can look over and say, “Look at that junker of a house.” We forget all the rafters that are falling off our house.
It was so striking when I finally sat down and had coffee with this person that I’d been hearing about for years. He actually reached out to me and said, “Let’s get together and have coffee.” We sat down and we had coffee. He talked about different things, lots of things that clearly had a very different story to them than what I’d been hearing. But one thing he didn’t do is spend a bunch of time tearing down those other people.
And it was so striking that he actually said, “The poison that we allow ourselves to feed, the poison that I’d allowed myself to feed on, that people were talking about their neighbors in such an unloving way.” And yet, again, I think that’s the temptation. Because then we feel a little more lovable when we have someone to compare ourselves to who isn’t lovable. It comes to wanting to see our worth in ourselves and in what we do rather than what God does in us. And that is a question we need to come to over and over again, because we’re going to slide on this. Do I see my worth in light of what I do, or in light of what God has done?
We ask that question and we think that, well, of course, it’s what God has done. But then we’re finding reasons to either ourselves cut down other people or feed on other people cutting down the people around us. I think that’s an indicator that we’re actually starting to slide back into that. I’m seeing my worth in myself, in my own deeds. And I need other people to be bad because of that.
This is toxic. This is something that we should reject wholesale in the church. Unfortunately, we don’t. But it has no place in Jesus’ church. We should seek to be those who build up. Now, that doesn’t mean that we don’t correct. It doesn’t mean that we don’t point out when someone does something wrong.
God’s love isn’t the sort of wishy-washy, useless love that doesn’t actually care enough about another person to point out when they’re doing something that’s harmful to themselves, that’s cutting off their relationship with God or hurting other people. It’s not about that at all.
But what it is, is that when we see someone, even in those moments when what we’re seeing is what God is seeing—that if this person, as a believer, we’re seeing someone who is a brother or sister in Christ, someone who God is working on just as he’s working on us—we go back to our before picture and we say, “Oh, well, if I look like that, yeah, that person maybe looks a little bit like that right now, too.”
But I may actually look worse. And if that person isn’t a believer, if God isn’t yet renovating that person, what we think is not, “Oh, that horrible, annoying person,” but, “There is someone who desperately needs the most masterful construction crew ever, the crew of one, the crew of Jesus that could be working on them.”
That’s why we’re called to love one another. And that’s what John says as we go on in verses 11 and 12. John writes:
“Beloved, if God so loved us, we 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.”
What does it look like? What assures us of God’s abiding love in our lives? It’s that he is working in our lives to bring out that love towards others.
Peter’s first term for love that he uses, brotherly affection, is a love for someone that we have an affiliation, a connection to. In other words, that we’re fellow Christians with.
The false teachers of the time that John is writing about here were teaching something else, and he seems to allude to it at the beginning of that passage or that verse in verse 12a. He says, “No one has seen God.” These false teachers were going around saying they had visions in which they’d actually seen God in his spiritual glory.
John here, who had actually spent years with Jesus, who had seen God in the flesh, says, “Well, wait a second here. These people that are saying, ‘Well, I can one-up John and the other apostles. I can say that I actually saw God in the fullness of his glory,’ he says, ‘Well, no one’s been able to do that.’”
Not in the sense that they’re claiming. Why are they claiming that? Because they see their worth in themselves and not in who God is. They want to have a special affiliation, then other people want to come and follow them so they can have that special affiliation with them, too.
But this brotherly affection, this brotherly love, is a love that we show not because of some kind of special achievement in our lives or in the lives of those who will spend time with us. It’s the affiliation that comes from being adopted into God’s family and into being brothers and sisters in Christ. That’s it. It’s the only one that matters, is that we’re God’s.
All those other affiliations—what church we belong to in particular, what denomination, what country we live in, what neighborhood we’re in, what clubs we belong to, all these things that we build our value on—those things are worthless in light of one thing, which is that we’re God’s. And when we look at other people and we start to divide ourselves off because we belong to this or that group, we’re missing the point. Those groups are fine. They can often be useful, but they’re not what gives us our value. Only God gives us our value.
That value is what he has placed in us, not what we have done.
So I was thinking about this passage. It came back to a story I read a few months ago about someone by the name of Daylen McLee.
Daylen, a number of years ago, got a phone call from his sister. She’d been at a nightclub and a fight broke out, and she asked him to come and pick her up. He drove over there, and as he arrived, this fight was getting worse, and someone came out of the nightclub with a gun.
Daylen saw the situation, acted wisely and quickly to stop the man. He managed to get the gun away from the man and throw it down on the ground before anyone was shot. But just as he did that, the police arrived, and they thought that Daylen was the one who had started the big commotion, the one who had the gun. And despite his denials and ultimately security tape that showed he wasn’t, he was arrested and imprisoned for over a year.
Unfortunately, a year in which it came very close to the end of his terminally ill mom’s life. I can’t imagine being in a situation like that where you’re wrongfully accused of something, especially as you’re trying to do the right thing. You’re trying to help your sister, and then you’re trying to just help people in general. And in fact, he is suing the police department that arrested him for wrongful arrest.
In all of the context of our current society, it would be really easy to see how he could just feed into the animosity we see between groups such as African Americans and police. We see this tension that’s broadcast on the news that we just have to hate each other, that police should hate minorities, and that minorities should hate police, and this ugliness that we see in our society.
But Daylen had a different perspective. That’s what’s so striking about his story. It was just back in June on Father’s Day, in fact, he was at a family gathering and he heard an explosion. He ran out the front door to see what happened, and he saw a police cruiser that had crashed. It would be easy for him to just feed the hatred we see in our society and say, “I don’t need anything to do with whoever’s in there. He is getting what he deserves. I got what I didn’t deserve.”
What did Daylen do? He ran down from his porch, ran over, and in what people described as a Herculean demonstration of strength, managed to wrest the police officer out of his car before it caught fire and exploded. He saved the man’s life.
People asked him afterwards, “Why would you do this? You’ve been mistreated. You’ve gone through these things. You should have just seen hatred towards this man.” And I love what his answer was. He said, “I know this man is my brother through Christ, and I couldn’t leave him behind.”
That is what we’re talking about in this passage. When we see other people as those whom Jesus has claimed, it doesn’t matter whether they deserve our love. It doesn’t matter if we see them as part of a group that we think we should dislike or who has disliked us or mistreated us. What matters is that we are those who have ultimately mistreated God, and yet he has claimed us.
And so no matter whom we see, we should seek to show love to them as well. This is what it looks like to show that brotherly affection. And as we do that, to move towards that second sort of love that Peter refers to there, the very love of God himself.
We start with recognizing, “Hey, this is someone that maybe doesn’t belong to the groups I do. Maybe doesn’t think necessarily in everything the way I do. Maybe even seems downright antagonistic towards me.” And yet what do I know? This person belongs to Jesus. So we love someone because of that affiliation, that connection we have through Christ. And then we go from there. And that’s how God prepares us to show love to the world.
What is our goal in the things that we do in life? Are we looking out and when we see someone crash in life, are we thinking, “There’s someone I need to help because that person over there, that person over there, this is someone who is a member of God’s family. And that’s all that matters.” Are we thinking, “What can I get out of it? What’s going to make me look good?” We’re going to struggle with that. But as we constantly seek after that call to follow Jesus, as the Spirit of God works in us, he enables us to start to give that answer.
And I believe that when Daylen gave that, that was the Holy Spirit speaking through him. Because in our natural strength, that’s not where we go. But what do we say when we see people struggling, even people who have been antagonistic and cruel towards us, when we see them crash and we seek to rescue them? We should say, “We know that man, that woman is a sibling of mine. That person belongs to Jesus.” And that’s what matters is that God has shown love to me. He’s shown love to that person. I’m simply called to be a vessel of that love.
When that isn’t the reason we do things, then the end of this verse is so crucial and cutting, because it says, John says, that God’s love is perfected, is the way it’s often translated, in us when we do that. Now, that doesn’t mean that God’s love is inadequate. What it means is that it’s perfected in the sense that it’s completed, that it’s accomplished, that God’s goal for our lives is accomplished when we show his love.
When we’re not showing his love, we’re letting those cars burn and people get burned and people that need Jesus, that need to know him, be lost. But God has chosen to use us as his instrument in this world, to use us as his hands and his feet to show his love, so that when we look at those people and we see those before pictures and we think that they’re worthless, when we see people, and people like them have mistreated us, and we just want to say, “Those people are worthless or worse than worthless,” what do we see? Instead, we see that this person is my brother, my sister through Christ. Because of that, we show love. And through that, God’s love is perfected, is completed in this world.
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13, so now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love.
That’s our second question tonight: Do I see the goal of what I do in light of God’s love? Is that what’s really setting where I’m headed? We need to come back to that every time. Every time we see that we weren’t worthwhile of saving, that we were worthless, that we were the group that we should just hate and not want to be a part of helping. And God didn’t say that. He rescued us. Now he’s called us to be those who offer his rescue, his love to others.
Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for your love that you have rescued us, that though we aren’t worthy, that you have called us worthy. As we look to others, Lord, I confess tonight, it’s far too easy to see others and see how they aren’t worthy, to see how I should find reasons not to help them, to believe things that are said that are untrue about others, and to encourage those who bring forth such accusations. But instead, Lord, would you direct all of our hearts that we might look to you, we might see how you see us, but we may also see how you see those around us. And through that, Lord, would you give us a passion that we might all turn to those that we would be most inclined to run from, to not help, to not love, and to show them love because you have shown us love. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Well, I’m so glad that you joined me for this series. It’s been so wonderful exploring this list of things that we see as we follow Jesus with you, and we’re going to kind of take a detour that isn’t really a detour next week. We’re beginning a new series called The Temptations.
Part of following Jesus is understanding what God has undertaken for us, and what we face and struggle with in life. So we’re going to turn to the temptations of Christ that are told in the Gospels, how Satan came and tempted Jesus, and think about those temptations.
We’re told in Hebrews that Jesus is just like us, and yet he didn’t fall to temptation. He faced the same things. He had a human body. He faced what it means to be human, and yet was without sin. And so we’re going to think about those temptations and think about the temptations we face, and through that seek God’s encouragement to resist those temptations and to be faithful to him.
I hope this message tonight has been encouraging to you. If it has, I’d really appreciate it if you’d go ahead and give it a like, leave a comment about something that impacted you about this Scripture that we were looking at tonight, so we can encourage each other. And of course, if you’d share this video, that helps us to get the word out.
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I hope you have a wonderful rest of your holiday. I hope you have a blessed week, and I hope to see you back here next week as we begin our brand new series, The Temptations. Have a great evening.