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[00:00:00] There is a verse in the first letter of John and chapter three and verse 16, which has struck me very forcibly.
[00:00:23] One John, chapter three in verse 16.
[00:00:29] Hereby know we love because he laid down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.
[00:00:56] I don't know whether you have the same unfortunate ability I have, but I discover that very often a well known biblical phrase will, somehow or other, just because I know it very well and because I think I understand it, it really has a very shallow meaning to me.
[00:01:28] I don't know if you find that how many times one has quoted this, sometimes in worship, sometimes in prayer, sometimes in ministry. Hereby we know love.
[00:01:52] But when you really think about it, it says far more than hereby know we about his love.
[00:02:11] Hereby know we love.
[00:02:19] We have an intimate, personal knowledge and experience of love.
[00:02:35] How?
[00:02:40] Because he laid down his life for us.
[00:02:50] That is the way that I have tasted the love of God.
[00:02:56] That is the way I have come into an understanding of the love of God.
[00:03:09] You see, it isnt just that God has said a lot of things.
[00:03:19] Many people say so much and do so little.
[00:03:24] All talk, no practice.
[00:03:30] We can be filled with the most marvelous theories and ideals and truths, and somehow or other, we don't know anything about the practical outworking of the matter.
[00:03:50] We know love because he laid down his life for us.
[00:04:01] In other words, God did not just speak, he acted.
[00:04:08] Now, if I had the Old Testament with the law and the prophets and the writings, it would be something of such incredible value.
[00:04:23] Oh, the value of the prophecies alone. I'm not just thinking of predictions about the future. I'm thinking of the unveiling of the mind of God. The unveiling of the heart of God. Supposing I knew something from Isaiah 43, supposing I added to it Isaiah 61. You know, the spirit of the Lord is upon me, anointed me to preach good tithes and all the rest of it. Supposing I had all those wonderful things and he had never come.
[00:05:09] I would still have a tremendous accumulation of truth, a tremendous revelation of the heart of God, but it would not, in the end, have done so much for me.
[00:05:24] I would never have really known the salvation of God, never entered into union with him, never known the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, never known the empowering of the Holy Spirit.
[00:05:38] It was because God not only spoke, but he acted.
[00:05:46] He not only revealed himself, not only expressed his thoughts, not only as it were, by his spirit moved holy men.
[00:06:02] So that we have the scripture but he acted hereby know we love because he loved us. He laid down, because he laid down his life for us. It's interesting that that other great John 316 says, for God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son.
[00:06:36] Now it is in that so that you and I got saved.
[00:06:48] For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son.
[00:07:03] I am eternally thankful, and I'm sure you are. And by the way it has been expressed this morning, it's clear that many share this sense.
[00:07:15] Oh, how glad we are for the love of God.
[00:07:20] How glad we are for the fact that God not only spoke but acted, that he so loved, that he gave his only begotten son.
[00:07:35] And it is just there that you and I know love. We know the inner meaning of it.
[00:07:41] Are you beginning to get perhaps what I'm trying to say? You see, we can know the shallows of love by simply knowing a doctrine. We can know the shallows of love simply by the scriptures themselves, the statements of the words.
[00:07:59] But really, we know love.
[00:08:04] We get an intimate knowledge of God's heart.
[00:08:10] We are brought into an experience of divine love by Calvary.
[00:08:26] Now, when I see what the Lord Jesus did for me, then I understand the real nature of love.
[00:08:35] Then I begin to understand what love costs.
[00:08:48] The apostle John goes straight on to say, and we ought to lay down our lives for the birth of. Do you notice he doesn't say any more about love.
[00:09:05] He goes straight onto the heart of the matter, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.
[00:09:15] In other words, he says, an understanding of this matter of love, an appreciation of it, an experience of it, means that you cannot talk, you must act.
[00:09:30] You cannot just stay yourself. You have to do something. Love is compulsive.
[00:09:42] It will compel you to act.
[00:09:49] So often the people who talk most about love know the least about it.
[00:09:58] Of course, if you read on here, you find that the whole matter in John's mind is intensely practical. Whoso hath the world's goods and beholdeth his brother in need and shutteth up his compassion from him, how doth the love of God abide in him? My little children, let us not love in word, neither with the tongue, but in deed and truth.
[00:10:32] Now I have to say this to my own heart, let alone to anybody else's in our history as a company. So many, many times God has brought us back to this matter of love.
[00:10:48] The easiest thing of all is to make a little shopping list in one's mind of the people you think in the company ought to have an overdose of love.
[00:11:01] You know the kind of thing we all do it, I think, hmm, so and so needs a baptism of love. And then I think, yes, so and so needs a baptism of love. But, you know, really, this is our way of getting out of responsibility. It is a little psychological trick we all play because in the end, love is infectious. When somebody starts to love, before long it warms others.
[00:11:42] It's a most infectious thing, far, far more infectious than chicken pox or measles or flu.
[00:11:55] Love is such an infectious thing. How did you get infected by love?
[00:12:02] I will tell you.
[00:12:04] You got infected by love when Christ touched you and you caught the disease.
[00:12:17] That's why all these great political and ideological systems all lose out. Love is something not in their vocabulary.
[00:12:44] The little point I'm trying to make this morning is really quite simple. And it is just this that we can all sing about love and we can all talk about love and we can all study the word about love and we can all celebrate Christmas.
[00:13:07] And yet, somehow or other, we're not infected by it.
[00:13:15] Infected by it.
[00:13:22] I know that the first time I began to love was when I discovered how much the Lord Jesus loved me. Now, when I began to realize what he had done for me, it was interesting last night, listening to some of those young people, they talked about bursting into tears. One or two of them. Most unlikely subjects, I thought, looking at one or two of them, it was interesting to know that they burst into tears and wept for a week. But that was my experience.
[00:13:49] That was my experience. When I was saved, you might think I never cried, but I did. Oh, I wept and wept and wept. And I don't even know now what I was weeping about. I know I had such a sense of sin and such a sense of the love of God because I had never believed there was a God. And I believe that Christ was a fictitious, just fictitious character made up by people.
[00:14:16] But, you know, when I got saved, two things hit me like a bomb. One was my sin and the other was his love. And the two conspired to make me weep.
[00:14:31] And the more I discovered the Lord Jesus, the more I found that somehow or other a compassion and a love came into my heart for other people. I wanted them to find the Lord. I wanted them somehow to share the discovery I had made.
[00:14:49] Now, when you look back, you'll find the same about yourself. You will find that it was the love of God which touched you. Even if you didn't really quite realize it infected you. You caught the disease for the first time, you began to care for others. I remember some years ago, a lady psychiatrist from a. I think it was a Boston institution not so far from here, asking if she could come to an evening service because she wanted to see one of the erstwhile inmates there, and he had professed conversion. And I asked her, but what are you so interested? Well, she said, I am an agnostic. But she said, these people with psychopathic tendencies, they never care for other people.
[00:15:36] And she said, I hear that the boy is caring for other people. She said, this is just not in our case book.
[00:15:49] And that's what happens when the love of God touches us. We know love through his laying down of his life for us. And that infects us in such a way that something starts to happen in our relationship. Now, dear folks, don't you think that our great problem is that somehow or other we all get tied up in the routine of life, we all get tied up in multifarious activities. It's almost more a problem of the mind than anything else that we get so wound up that in the end we are loving in word and by tongue and not in deed and truth.
[00:16:46] I don't know if you are like me, but I have another wonderful ability, or really, I should say, dreadful ability, and that is to put off till tomorrow.
[00:17:02] I am a tremendous, as they say in South America, person.
[00:17:09] Tomorrow.
[00:17:11] Do you find you're like that? You know, sort of. You watch me think tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow I will love everybody, but today I'm too busy.
[00:17:23] Tomorrow I will do this and this and this. Today I'm tied up. I cannot do it today. My circumstances are such and such that it would be quite impossible for me to do this and this.
[00:17:39] I'm a great tomorrow person. I don't know about you. I'm so glad the Lord Jesus wasn't a tomorrow person.
[00:17:47] You know, I suppose if I know anything about people living, there must have been an awful lot of organization in heaven.
[00:17:58] I mean, there were millions and millions and millions of angels. I've said, we've got to care for them.
[00:18:03] Everything was done, is always done decently and in order.
[00:18:09] I can well imagine the Lord Jesus being so filled as he can say, tomorrow, tomorrow. Yes, father, I will. But tomorrow. You know, if there had been a tomorrow, we would never have known the salvation of God.
[00:18:31] Today we have a tomorrow because he had a today.
[00:18:40] Do you understand?
[00:18:44] It was because the Lord Jesus said, I come to do thy will.
[00:18:50] And there was a today in it immediately that you and I have a glorious tomorrow.
[00:19:00] I can't help feeling that I and you, we lose many opportunities of bringing people into a glorious tomorrow because we don't do today what we should do.
[00:19:16] It is tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, always tomorrow.
[00:19:24] We mean well. But in the end, we fall into a trap. We are not hypocrites. I don't suppose there's one here who wants to be a hypocrite. We don't mean to be. But unwittingly, we get pushed into a trap where we become those who love in word and in tongue, but not in deed and in truth.
[00:19:47] How do you and I love others?
[00:19:53] Only when we lay down our lives for them. And what does it mean to lay down our lives, dear friends? It is a question of time.
[00:20:04] It is a question of energy.
[00:20:08] It is a question of money.
[00:20:12] It is a question of ourselves.
[00:20:18] Don't think that you can lay down your life in a sort of glorious sort of outburst of splendor. And in a moment you sort of say, here I am, thank God, when we make a commitment, because that's the first step. And you know the old chinese proverb, a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.
[00:20:44] Never deride or devalue a commitment.
[00:20:48] It is the first step in a journey.
[00:20:52] But nevertheless, you know, you and I, we just need more than just the glow of a splendid moment.
[00:21:04] We can sort of say, here I am.
[00:21:07] But we don't think it comes to a matter of time. I don't know what we all feel about laying down our lives with one another. We seem to think that somehow it's a kind of lovely thing, a kind of cozy thing, a comfortable, sort of gorgeous feeling. My dear friend, it's not at all.
[00:21:27] It's a matter of time, and none of us have got it.
[00:21:32] It's a matter of energy, and many of us are losing it.
[00:21:39] It is a matter of money.
[00:21:47] It is a matter of all kinds of practical things that come down to this matter. Practical love.
[00:21:57] Our Lord Jesus gave time, all of it, 33 years.
[00:22:08] He gave energy, all of it.
[00:22:12] 33 years of it.
[00:22:15] He gave money, all of it. The little he had, he gave himself.
[00:22:26] That's how you and I know love.
[00:22:30] Now, if you and I together are going to know that in its outworking, oh, don't we need to take a real step?
[00:22:44] I'm sure there are so many things that we could do, even this week, just simply getting on with it.
[00:22:58] May God help us.
[00:23:02] I remember years ago, I told some of you the story. I will finish with it.
[00:23:07] A very dear and aristocratic lady. Who was the Lord told me one of her experiences that made a great impression on me after the loss of her husband. Not knowing what to do, she gave her life to the Lord and said, lord, you use it and do what you will with it.
[00:23:28] And he put into her heart that she should go to Egypt.
[00:23:33] And when she went before the board, these dear old gentlemen gave the normal questions, how do you know you're born again?
[00:23:43] How do you this? And then one gentleman said to her, do you love the Egyptians? And she said, no, I don't. And there was a start all round the room, the sort of butterfly collars sort of twitched.
[00:24:04] And then one old gentleman bent forward and said, naming her, but whatever you going to Egypt for if you don't love the Egyptian?
[00:24:17] And she said, because God told me to go, I believe he will give me the love. And because I can't help feeling that the sister was somewhat wealthy, put it mildly, plus she had a title.
[00:24:36] I'm not sure that other candidates would have been accepted, but she was accepted by the mission and sent and then began her problem.
[00:24:45] The more she saw of Egypt, the more she not only didn't love them, she disliked them.
[00:24:53] And this dislike grew and grew and grew until it became a positive revulsion.
[00:25:02] She was sent out into the egyptian villages and after many years later in India, she said there was nothing so poor or so dirty as an egyptian village.
[00:25:20] And then one day someone came into the clinic and said, there's a so and so. And she mentioned a name. She's collapsed outside the town.
[00:25:32] And the doctor found that the nurse was away on another errand. And she said to this dear sister, you'll have to come with me. On the way, she said to her, now, this woman is a well known prostitute. She's covered with ulcers.
[00:25:48] She said, you're going to have to hold her while I give her an injection. She has never had an injection before. She'll probably fight like a wild cat.
[00:26:00] When they were somewhere away, my dear friend said I could smell her.
[00:26:05] She said it was the most repulsive smell I'd ever smelt.
[00:26:09] She said I had to kneel down and hold her while the doctor got ready for the injection.
[00:26:20] And then she said, as I looked at her, I thought, oh, God, I can't love these people. Why did she do this? Why did she get into this mess?
[00:26:30] And then not a human voice, but in her spirit, she heard the voice of God say to her, kiss her.
[00:26:38] And she shuddered.
[00:26:41] And then again the voice said, kiss her.
[00:26:46] And she shuddered again and then the voice of the Lord said again, kiss her. And then she said, I bent over and kissed her.
[00:27:00] And in that moment I was baptized with a love. She said, for the Egyptians that never left her me. And indeed, she spent quite a few years in Egypt and then a major part of her life in India in service.
[00:27:20] If she had never taken a step when her heart was as cold as stone, she would never have known the love of God. Fill her heart. You see, that's why we have to wash one another's feet. Not because the person is worthy, not because the person is nice, not because the person is someone that we feel somehow relationship, but because the Lord told us to wash one another's feet. And it's when we do practical things, humble ourselves before one another, actually do something, that the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts. And we find the love of God increasing more and more. Have you got a problem on the matter of love? Do something practical. By the word of God, by the direction of the spirit of God, give yourself to the Lord. Let's pray. Shall we?
[00:28:14] Bow in the Lord's presence?
[00:28:18] If you feel a need of love, perhaps you'd just like to stand up, and then we'll pray together.
[00:28:25] Anyone who feels a real need for the Lord to give them a new baptism of love, just quietly stand up.
[00:28:41] Now, don't just think of others that you know could do with the baptism of love. What about your own heart?
[00:28:57] God has spoken to you. You just quietly stand by standing. It doesn't mean that you a miracle is worked, but it is an outward indication that you feel a need in your heart and life.
[00:29:22] Any others.
[00:29:37] Father, for everyone who has stood in thy presence and humbled themselves by so doing, wilt thou meet them in these days in a new way in this matter of love?
[00:29:59] O Father, thou knowest in every one of our circumstances there's some practical thing we can do. Lead us to it, Lord, and then meet us in a new and deeper, fuller way.
[00:30:12] We don't want to be people who love in word and in tongue. We want to be people who love in deed and in truth.
[00:30:24] Lord, help us to lay down our lives for one another.
[00:30:28] Truly.
[00:30:30] Come upon us by thy Holy Spirit and do this work. We pray and we ask it in the name of our Lord Jesus.
[00:30:41] Amen.
[00:30:45] Thank you.
[00:30:48] Now the Lord will lead you who have stood in a quite definite way to do something practical. You will find something in your circumstances, someone to visit, someone, some need. You will have to humble yourself in some way.
[00:31:03] Now you've taken a first step. Take the second and obey the Lord. And then you'll find the Lord will begin to meet you. You in this matter for the rest of us. May God meet us also in this matter of really knowing the love of God released in our hearts.