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This sermon – God’s Love and Our Love – was originally preached 2013.03.16 by Dan Freed.
This is also part of a series of messages preached at the 2013 Bethel Mennonite Church Youth Rally.
- Jesus The Light
- Jesus Our Lawyer
- God’s Love and Our Love
- The One Who is in You
- That You May Know that You Have Eternal Life
Passages used: 1 John 3, Jeremiah, Peter.
Quotable Quotes
Love is demonstrated by the actions that we do. We will never come close to loving God in the same way that He has loved us. But as we think about God and his love, it will help us to understand some more about how we are to love as his Children.
God Loves Us
Christ’s love to us is incredible. Before we even knew who God was, for sure before we were his friends he loved us. God didn’t just love us as sinners, but went the next step and brought us in, into his family. We are part of the greatest royal family of all time. We are God’s Children!
We are all very special people, created by God and with a purpose for our lives. These plans are good for us not something that is a drudgery. These plans are both general and specific. God wants all of us to be his children, but he knows us and has plans for our own unique individual life.
Our testimony is not just something that is what we say, it includes and may be more dependent on what we do.
The love of the Father is a great love – it is bigger than we can know – beyond words and beyond thoughts. Someday when we are with Him we will understand it more. The Bible tells us that we know what love is because Jesus showed us what love looks like.
We love God because He first loved us.
There are a lot of bad kinds of love. We have several types of love competing within us, love for the world and love for God.
A paradox of the Christian life, if we love our lives we will lose it, if we love God we will not lose our lives.
Our Love towards Others
This kind of love is hard. Because we are all human and we all have been hurt by other people. One thing that can help us with this is to understand that yes we have been hurt by others, but we have also hurt others. We all need forgiveness.
The problems in all of our churches have the same root. The biggest problem is me and my attitudes and my problems. Maybe instead of focusing on the problems of the people around us we should be praying for them and for ourselves and about our attitudes.
John tells us that if we aren’t loving our brothers and sisters we do not love God. The love that we have for others is only because of Jesus and our love for God is evident in whether we love our brothers and sisters.
We can only overcome our love for ourselves and the world – only through faith in God and the Son Jesus Christ.
Jesus summed up the entire law and prophets by saying that the two from which all of them come are loving God with all that we are and loving our neighbors as ourselves.
Saving Faith has at least three elements. The first one is knowledge, in our mind we learn the facts of the Gospel, that we are sinners and God sent Jesus to die for us. The second is an agreement with God that we are sinners and that we are in need of a savior. The final element is surrendering to God and giving him all that we are, our sins, our good things, our all…