Thank you, John. It’s been a great joy to be with you for this day and a half. It seems like it’s been about a week. So much has been packed into it. I have listened to probably a million words. I think I’ve spoken half a million myself, but I very much appreciate the ministry that I have heard and reestablishing contact with many of you. Some of you were students of mine in different times. One even claimed that when he fell asleep in the class, I actually threw an eraser at him. I had to come all the way here just to be reminded of that. Of course today, you would never do that, because you’d get a lawsuit.

Two Centers in Life

I come to this great theme, and I sometimes wonder why I would do something like this to talk about the love of God. But on the other hand, it is my great concern that it is the great things of Christian life and faith that are getting dim, and if it is the great things which get dim, then we are beginning to look at very great losses. So, I take up this theme tonight of the love of God. I’ll be doing much the same as I did with the Holiness of God, but what I want to suggest to you is that as far as our souls are concerned, there are really two great centers with tremendous powers of attraction toward them.

The one is God in all of the greatness of his love and holiness and beauty. The other is the self, which as far as our lives are concerned, has in its fallenness the power to rearrange them that quite matches the power of God to arrange them. I want to look at these two centers in life, but I think to start with the love of God. There are three remarkable and simple statements that we find in Scripture first that God is love. I’m going to come back to this in 1 John 4; second, from Hebrews 12 at the end of that chapter that God is a consuming fire; and thirdly, one of the references that God is light in 1 John 1:5.

Now, I take it that the last two statements that God is a fire and that God is light, I take it we can bracket those two. Because light is everything that is true in opposition to what is false. He’s everything that’s pure in opposition to what is corrupt. I take it that those last two are statements of his holiness. He is light and he is a consuming fire. And he is love. Here, once again, we have the holy love of God spoken of in these three brief statements.

God reigns, and He rules, and He creates, but He is love. This character of holy love marks everything that he does, whether he is ruling the nations or working out his purposes in our lives. I need to take this up, because as you know and I know, when people hear that expression, “God is love,” they allow it to fill up with meaning from oftentimes whatever it is that is important to them. If it is important that God be seen as benign, then they declare with a sense of emphatic authority that God is love. If they have a political cause to which they are particularly attached, they will in all likelihood march in front of it with a banner saying, “God is love.”

I turned on the television set for three minutes this morning to catch the news to see if the world had changed while I wasn’t watching it. I saw the little group of protestors outside of the impending execution in Texas, which may or may not have taken place. Sure enough, there was the banner held aloft behind this little group: “God is love.”

The Various Kinds of Love

Now, you and I know that when John in 1 John penned these words, he immediately allowed this expression that God is love to fill up with meaning from the immediate context which he gives us. First John 4:10 says:

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.

It was for this that he came, that the son did not know the Father, and did not know the father’s love except as each was conceived in relationship to this cross which he would bear. Love’s meaning is given to it by the self-giving of the Son in propitiation. That’s exactly what John says here. So, it is not love in general. It is not love loosely defined, but it is love that is specific, and love which is cross-defined. Now, we all know that when John wrote these words, the Greek world had given us a whole language of love, and it was shortly to be, if not eclipsed, certainly superseded by the kind of thing of which John is writing here.

We know the other three loves. We know that there is natural affection which binds together, for example, parents and children. It is a natural affection which is there by creation. It is God’s gift. It is strong enough even to survive the assault of hormones in the years of adolescence, which become too numerous and altogether too virulent, but natural affection can even survive that. It’s parents loving and caring for their children.

There is also the love of friendship of everybody having a circle of friends with whom they share common interests, who regard each other, enjoy each other, and help each other. Then there is romantic, sexual love, the pinnacle that joins together in union a man and a woman in the bond of marriage.

Now, each of these three natural and entirely good loves that we have and enjoy, you can say two things. First, at the center of each of these natural loves, there is need. It’s a need that arises from the fact that we were made by God to be social beings. It is therefore an entirely proper and entirely good need. Children need their parents. Friends need each other. Men need women, and women need men. This is entirely natural and good.

The second thing that you can say of these other three kinds of loves is that each one dies in the absence of returns. These loves cannot survive without returns. A child will not go on loving their parents if they are abandoned and shuffled off. If friends do not sustain their friendship, that friendship dies. In a sexual relationship, there has to be a response, otherwise, there is no relationship. It is that fact which nourishes the career as we know of an entire army of counselors, and a massive literature on sexual technique. Why are all of us there? It’s there because this kind of love, like the others, dies in the absence of returns.

Divine Love

So, when we come to this divine love, this agape love, it’s at these two points that we see its great characteristic differences. Agape love, the love of God, which is then refracted and echoed in human life in terms of 1 Corinthians 13 — this love does not have need at its heart. Furthermore, it lives on in the absence of returns. It never dies, because it never feeds off its object. In a sense, it is always giving and never taking. It loves its object, not because there is something to be had in return. It does not need to be nourished by those returns.

There is never in any sense a calculus of profits and losses in this. In actual fact, it is this kind of love that creates value in what it loves, and therefore, it can be entirely indiscriminate in what it loves. You and I love friends who usually are very much like ourselves. We love our families, because they are flesh and bone of our own, but this kind of love of God’s loves those who are cast on one side as worthless and is useless as well as loving those who have great power and prestige in this world. In that sense, it is indiscriminate in its love.This is God’s kind of love. It is not a response to desert, and nor yet does it arise from its own needs. In that sense, we can say that God’s love is uncaused. It did not arise in response to something in you and me. It is uncaused.

Now, I hope you can take hold of that. There is nothing in all the world more liberating and more marvelous to take hold of than that thought that God’s love is uncaused. Have you ever thought how many hours, how much psychological energy you and I put into preserving our natural loves? We have to, because natural loves die in the absence of returns, but this love of God will never die. It’ll never die regardless of what you and I do. This is a marvelous freeing understanding of our relationship to God.

It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples . . . (Deuteronomy 7:7).

So don’t think that this is some response on God’s part to something in you which has elicited this as if this is on the ground of friendship in which each nourishes the other’s love. It’s not like that. This is in an entirely different category.

The Incomprehensible Love of God

So, I come back now full circle to 1 John 4:8, where John says, “God is love.” Now, how did he know that, and what is he doing here? Is he taking from his own experience of these other human loves, and enlarging this, and then projecting it onto the being of God? Some of our praise songs would lead us to think that, because they have projected onto God language sometimes, which is almost erotic. But no, this is not an intuition, and it is not a calculation on John’s part. This is simply a deduction, and it is a deduction based on two things. In 1 John 4:10, it is a deduction based on the fact that we did not love God first, but that he loved us. This is not a magnification of a prior love that we have for God projected upon him, and it is at least a deduction, secondly, based on the fact that it was his own Son that he gave. That is what defines the nature and the depth of this love.

He gave him. He gave him to be the propitiation for our sins. He gave him to those who were not friends, who were not amiable toward him, but those who were rebels and implacably hostile to him. That is what God’s love is like. This is what this agape love is like.

And so it is no surprise when we come to 1 Corinthians 13 to see what Paul does, where he takes a selection of gifts, and then he takes some of the greatest natural expressions of human giving, even the giving of ourselves in some great noble cause. He says that even these loves are nothing, that this agape love is in a category by itself. So, it is no wonder that Paul prays for strength to be able to apprehend the length and the breadth and the depth and the height of this love of God, this infinite love of God that simply surpasses our understanding. We know it in our redemption in Christ. We know it in the midst of our sorrows. We know it in the midst of our trials and sufferings, and yet in its greatness, it eludes us. It is so immensely real. It is so overwhelmingly beautiful. It is so beyond any comparison, and yet it is greater than anything that we can think of.

This is the one center. This is the one center in our world that draws our soul to itself. If there is a right sense in which we can speak about having self-care, about caring for ourselves, it is at this point. If we care for ourselves, we will allow this love of God to draw us into itself, to fill us with its own nature, to draw us out of ourselves, and into this great, vast, fathomless depth of his immense purity and grace. He calls us. He draws us as a magnet to himself. It is here that our souls will grow. They will grow large.

The scope of their interest will increase. We will become big once again. What happens when we are drawn into the other circle of influence is that we become increasingly small, narrow in scope, turned in on ourselves, and lost to our own self-interest. Now, that’s what I want to pursue just briefly. I want to look at how this happens. Once again, I’m going to be taking you down some cultural paths. I want to consider two ways in which this other kind of center in our world fragments and shatters our understanding and experience of the love of God.

Drawn Away from the Love of God

It happens I think at two points, and the one concerns Christian piety. It is where the love of God gets separated in our understanding and experience from his holiness. It also happens in our Christian proclamation, at least for some people, where the love of God is separated from truth. Let me take these two up in turn.

The Separation of Love from Holiness

First of all, consider Christian piety in the separation of love from holiness. So, what happened when human nature fell? I’m here once again going to return to Jonathan Edwards. I will even give you a little bit of the quotation I gave you before from his Charity and Its Fruits. He says:

When the love of God filled Adam’s soul, there was a greatness to it. As created, he was exalted and noble and generous, but now, we’ve become the best and ignoble and selfish. Immediately upon the fall, the mind shrank from its primitive greatness and expandedness to an exceeding smallness and contractedness. Human beings as sinful shrank, as it were, into a little space, circumscribed and closely shut up within itself to the exclusion of all things else, and sin like some powerful astringent contracted his soul to the very small dimensions of selfishness. God was forsaken, and fellow creatures forsaken, and man retired within himself, and became totally governed by narrow and selfish principles and feelings. Self-love became the absolute master of his soul, and the more noble and spiritual principles of his being took wings and flew away.

What was the principal mistake that was made in our fallenness? It is, Edward says, in thinking that the issues of life flow from the self, and that the self has within it all that we need to be happy. What is God’s work of redemption by contrast? Well, it is to lift us out of this smallness into which we have fallen. It is to reach into our lives, and to find the “I” which is hidden within us, withdrawn from God, withdrawn from other people, lying somewhere within us crouching, hiding its face. God in his redemption reaches into it, and begins to draw it out.

Now, Edward’s analysis of this bears a very striking parallel to what I’ve been describing in contemporary postmodern culture. Because that is the case, what I want to suggest to you is that today in all of this therapeutic talk in which we are engaged, there is an awful danger that not many people have understood. The danger is that this therapeutic talk, this understanding of the whole of our world insofar as it relates to the self may well be choking off the love of God in our lives and experience.

Thinking Much of Ourselves

Now, why do I say that? Well, I say it because within this therapeutic world by which we are surrounded, if you will think about it, I think you might agree that pride is present at almost every turn, and pride is the antithesis of love. Now, let me try to develop that.

We may typically think of pride as simply boastful words, arrogant actions, contempt for others. In Neil Plantinga his book however, he has a very nice single sentence in which he captures what I think is the essence of the whole thing:

Pride is a blend of self-absorption (that is, narcissism) with an overestimate of our own abilities or worth (that is, conceit).

Pride is thinking much about ourselves, and thinking much of ourselves. It is because we think much about ourselves and much of ourselves that we come to look to the self to do for us what in fact only God himself can do. Now, how does this happen? Well, I think it’s easy to see how it happens in society. If it is true that there are few and perhaps no objective norms outside of people today — 66 percent for example, do not believe in moral absolutes — then how are we going to judge ourselves? As it turns out, we can only judge ourselves by ourselves.

What happens when you do that in a fallen world? What happens is that you get a great deal of conceit. David Myers in his book, The Inflated Self study after study, which simply illustrates this. For example, of one million high school students who were studied, 70 percent rated themselves above average in leadership. Only two percent thought they were below average. In their ability to get along with other people, zero rated themselves below average and 60 percent rated themselves in the top 10 percent, and 25 percent rated themselves in the top one percent.

In another survey, 94 percent of a college’s faculty judged that they were above average. So when merit pay was given, there were a lot of people who were disappointed. Plantinga observes, “Professors have been known to leave faculty meetings feeling more enlightened by what they said than by what they heard.” And all of this is at a time when we are apparently suffering the most chronic afflictions of self-esteem.

The Lie of Self-Esteem

Apparently, the loss of self-esteem is at the root of every human malady that there is. Last spring in Massachusetts, there was very earnest discussion as to whether the spelling bee should be continued, because when a child misspells, they sometimes cry, and you see that’s a blow to their self-esteem. There was earnest discussion as to whether little league should be continued, because when kids get up and swing a baseball bat, they often miss, and it’s a blow to their self-esteem. There is hardly a problem — not a marital problem, not an academic problem — in society that has not been rooted somewhere in the lost self-esteem, and yet what we have here is just the reverse. The problem is the most extraordinary self-inflation.

Does this happen in the church? It will happen in the church, I can tell you confidently, if the holiness of God continues to lose its weight, if it continues to lose its gravity, its power to rest upon us, its power to call us to account, because then what will happen is that we’ll begin to judge ourselves simply by ourselves. That is the one side of pride. It is conceit, it is thinking much of ourselves.

Thinking Much About Ourselves

What about the other side? Thinking much about ourselves. Do we in this society think much about ourselves? Well, we obviously do, and we do for all of the reasons that I’ve tried to give you. We have now moved into an essentially psychological view of reality. That is compounded by what I have mentioned several times, which is the enormous cost of living in this modern world. To the question, “Are we better off than our parents?” or, “Are we better off than our grandparents?” you have to give a very careful answer, because in moving from their time to ours, costs and benefits have rearranged themselves.

There is no question about the benefits. In this century alone, we have almost doubled our lifespan. Since 1930, we’ve added two decades. We’ve pushed back the frontiers of disease. We have mightily changed the circumstances under which we live for good. It is hard to think that only 50 years ago, many houses in America didn’t even have the things that we consider basic amenities like refrigeration and central air conditioning. Thirty percent didn’t even have running water. In the 1950s when Levittown was being built, the houses were sold with the unheard of advantage that each house came with its own washer. Imagine that. We have more opportunities, more choices, more freedom, and more abundance than any prior generation. Those are the benefits.

But now, you have to pay a toll to enter this highway of modernity. There is a cost you’ve got to pay for it. We all pay it. You can’t get on this toll road without paying the toll, and the toll is all registered inwardly. We are working longer weeks. We are sleeping shorter nights. We have higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depression. We are more frazzled. We are more uprooted. In any given year, 20 percent of American adults move somewhere.

The storage locker has become a powerful metaphor of our time, I think. It’s easier to build and maintain and more lucrative than apartment space, these storage lockers are springing up everywhere. They’re prominent on our social landscape. Why? Well, I suppose in part because living in America is about having stuff, and stuff soon overwhelms us, especially if you’re married to someone as I am who hasn’t thrown out a single thing in her entire life. But the storage locker is also there between the many disjunctures of life, most of them unhappy. It is there between moves. For many people, it is there between marriages. It is there between children coming and going.

There are all of these things that eat away at the continuities. There are so many people today who don’t belong. They don’t belong in a family. They don’t belong in a circle of friends. They don’t belong in a place. They don’t belong to anything. This takes an enormous toll. How we are feeling as a consequence has become probably the most relentless question people face today. So is it surprising that they think that the sense of loss and panic sometimes comes over, and they don’t don’t know how to cope. There is insecurity in the face of threatening developments in the marketplace.

Looking for Self-Techniques

It’s all tremendously real. Yet once again, I have to ask you, have we realized just how dangerous self preoccupation is, real as the causes for it might be? Because if we become absorbed in how we are feeling, and we lose our understanding of what it means to be sinful people, pride is just half a step away. Why do I say that? Well, I say it because the essence of pride is forsaking the self, and finding in the self what can only be found in God. Almost inevitably when we become self-preoccupied, we are going to go out and look for self-techniques.

We want to hear from the preacher: Seven ways in which I can handle the stress, five ways in which I can overcome loneliness, or six ways to make friends. That’s what I’m going to want to hear. Then as I lose touch of the moral world in which I actually live, what happens is a process in which first intellectually, in the thought life, we begin to confuse our own intuitions with the authority of God. We begin to think that the way we sense things is actually a measure of what is there. Am I right in thinking that perhaps this might account a little bit for the loss of appetite for God’s word in the church today?

Then what happens as pride begins to intrude a little further into the self, it emerges morally, so the prideful self becomes self-righteous. The standards which I have evolved for myself become standards that I expect to be universally recognized as norms. Paul saw the Jews of his day as having a zeal for God, but they were not enlightened, because they were seeking to establish their own righteousness, and were ignorant of God. But the worst and the final form of it is when pride enters our religion. I found this extraordinary sentence in Karl Barth. He said, “Thinking of ourselves what can only be thought of God, we are then unable to think of him more highly than we think of ourselves. Why? Because he says, “Being to ourselves what God ought to be to us, he is no more to us than we are to ourselves.”

Do we not have here in these two brief sentences a simply extraordinary description of what we find in some of our evangelical churches today? I don’t discount at all the enormous damage done to the human spirit by living in the modern world with real aches and confusion and pains. But I also have to say, but without the recovery of holiness and without a recovery of self forgetfulness, the love of God is going to be lost in our experience. For if pride is thinking much of ourselves (conceit), then the antidote is to think solely of ourselves, measuring ourselves not against ourselves, but against God and his word.

That’s where holiness begins. If pride is thinking much about ourselves, then do we not need as an antidote humility, a small part of which is that we become forgetful of ourselves, because humility is not as much beating ourselves down as it is being freed from the demands of attention that the self is making all the time and to relinquish those rights? Isn’t this really what Philippians 2 is telling us? Where holiness and where humility so work in our lives, then the love of God can blossom forth as if it were a flower in the desert.

Christian Proclamation

Now, quickly, let me take up the second, which is the matter of Christian proclamation, and the separation of divine love and divine truth. So, I come back to John’s interest in 1 John 4 that God is love, that word, that statement, drawing its meaning from its context that we cannot understand what God’s love is aside from and apart from the self-giving of the Son at the cross. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see how culture today works against this. One of the chief consequences of living in a secularized society like ours is that truth dies. Seventy percent of Americans do not believe in absolute truth. They do not believe that there are truths that should be held and believed by all people in all places and all times. Seventy percent do not.

You and I are a cognitive minority today, because what secularization has done has been to move God and his Christ and his truth to the very peripheries of our vision, to the very margins of relevance so that these are not the criteria of what is important in our public life. If you want to know what’s important, you ask what the television cameras are looking at, or you ask what “Newsweek” is writing about, but you do not ask what God says or who he is. That does not give the criterion of importance in this society.

This then coalesces with the second thing of our modern world, which is that in this vastly urbanized society of ours — 94 percent living in cities, 50,000 and over — what happens is that very, very different worldviews have to rub shoulders together. What also happens is that we are living at a time of tremendous immigration, and so you have an increasing diversity in our cities — different lifestyles, different religions, and different worldviews with some strange anomalies. Today in America, there are more Muslims than there are Methodists. What happens when these worldviews rub shoulders in this way? What happens almost inevitably is that you cannot say that one is exclusively true, and the others are not. The demand for tolerance becomes simply overwhelming.

Forty or fifty years ago, critics of Christian faith charged that it was untrue, because of this or that point, and therefore should be rejected. Today, postmodern critics of Christian faith say, “You should reject it because it claims to be true.” Now this, I believe, is what is driving many of the attempts to disengage saving truth from this person of whom John writes in 1 John 4. The attempts have been numerous from those who jettison his divinity, and say that the love of God is evident in all religions. John Hick is trying to move from a Christocentric religion, which is what you have here, to a theocentric view of things, that God is present in all religions. You have others who say that Christ is present in the other religions, but this is not the Christ of whom John is speaking. It is not the Christ who made propitiation for our sins.

Keeping the Truth Together

Then you have those now bleeding off on the edges of the evangelical world who want to tell us that God’s love is of such a nature that he could not condemn those who did not have an explicit knowledge of Christ, and who did not see that Christ was the propitiation for their sins. All of these attempts, whether mild or radical, are all floating on this fallacious claim that they are in actual fact enlarging the love of God. They are not. They are diminishing and destroying it, because we have no way of knowing what the love of God is except as we see its exposition through the death of Christ.

Therefore, we are not thinking consistently with that love, and thus we are thinking in terms of the prepositions that relate to Christ. It is through Christ that God revealed himself, because of Christ we are accepted, and in Christ we are redeemed. Our sins were imputed to Christ and his righteousness was imputed to us. We are living for Christ, we are living under him, and we are living toward that time when we will be with him and when we will be with him forever. What we want is not love without holiness, not love without truth but love the divine love in its profound interconnections with holiness on the one side, with truth on the other.

These are the links that our culture is trying to cut and these are the links that we in the church need to reestablish, because if one of these falls, the others fall with it. Each, on the other hand, strengthens the others. Each gives us a vision of God which expands the soul, which enlarges its scope and interest as they unite together, as they bring us together into the very heart and being of God — God who is the fount of all truth, God in all of his transcendent goodness and love, God who is this overflowing abundant light of goodness. He draws us as does a light draws the moth.

We who had lived in a room without so much as a skylight in it find now that the room is filled with light, and as it filled with light, and as our souls filled with the love of God, we ourselves become bigger people. As we know our own insufficiency, we can only love God the more for having loved us in the first place. As we know our own corruption, we can only marvel that his holiness did not overwhelm us, but in Christ that his love drew us. The more entirely we know ourselves, the more entirely we want to give ourselves to him, and the more earnestly we want to know his grace and holiness working out in our lives.

So surely, our prayer for ourselves and for the church today is that we might be drawn to him in the beauty of his holiness, and that we might be filled with all of the fullness of God.

Questions and Answers

In a recent interview that you gave to Ken Myers, you mentioned the brutality of life as a possible means the Lord might use to transform the evangelical churches. Could you elaborate on that a little more, please?

I have to tell you I had forgotten that I said it. One of the most alarming things that happens to you is that you have words that you have said quoted back at you, and you can’t remember having said those, but I’m sure I said it. I think in New England, which is the most secularized region of the country, I have observed this because I think we see life coming apart at the seams more there than other parts. Those of you who are from that region will know. I think what has struck me about it in the times that I have talked to people is not that any of the problems per se are unique. There have always been infidelities. There has always been abuse and so forth. But what amazes me, and especially as I think back to the days when I was pastoring in comparison to now, is that people have clusters of these problems. They have warts growing on warts, any one of which it would seem is almost beyond solution. So in times like this, the rather trite and superficial kind of faith that sometimes might get people by just isn’t going to cut the mustard.

I see it as a moment when a serious biblical faith has an opportunity it hasn’t had for a long, long time. People really can’t hide so easily today, and especially where the culture is disintegrating more than other parts.