I. Intro & Recap.
A. God calls us to walk in His ways.
1. Proverbs 8:32 “Now therefore, listen to me, my children, for blessed are those who keep my ways.” (Prov 3:5&6)
2. Way defined: derek, manner of life, how God lives, His motivations and heart.
3. Ultimately, there are only two ways— the way of good that leads to life and the way of evil that leads to death.
a. Jesus in Matthew 7— narrow way and the broad way.
B. Key Scripture & Analogy.
1. Ps 103:7 “He made known His ways to Moses, His acts to the children of Israel.”
2. One of the main lessons that we should learn from the scriptures is that God’s acts impress us, but His ways transform us. Miracles can amaze us without changing us.
a. Many in the church chase the acts but not the ways.
b. God used Moses, the one who knew His ways, to do many of his acts.
c. Miracles reveal God’s power, His ways reveal His heart.
3. Analogy: Rear View Mirror vs GPS
If we only know God by His acts, we’re always looking in the rearview mirror—wondering if that was the right turn, or was that the address we’re looking for. But knowing His ways is like having the GPS on before we even pull out of the driveway.
4. GPS: God Positioning System
C. The three legged stool.
1. Three inseparable qualities of God’s ways. These come together like a 3 legged stool. (The Way of Love, The Way of Life, The Way of The Word) (Deut 30:15&16)
2. Can’t have one without the other two. (Eden)
II. The Way of Love.
A. God calls us to walk in the way of love.
1. Ephesians 5:1&2
1 Therefore be imitators of God as dear children. 2 And walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma.
2. Notice it says that we are to be imitators of Father God. We are to imitate Him as His own children. And then it says to walk in love as Jesus did.
3. So to walk in love we will have to learn to imitate our Father and our Lord, Jesus. How does someone learn to imitate another person?
a. Keen observation of their voice & mannerisms.
b. Watching & studying them to adopt their traits.
4. But we are not learning to imitate our Father and our Lord as an actor studies for a role and then moves on to something else. We are imitating them with the goal of becoming like them, of adopting their nature as our own.
5. We are not imitating to perform, we are imitating to become.
III. Four Principles to Help us Understand Father’s Love so We can Imitate Him.
A. #1: Love is God’s Nature.
1. Love is not an act for God. Love is not an emotion that He feels from time to time. Love is the very essence and nature of God. Love is the core of Who God is.
B. Love in the Godhead.
1. Father.
a. 1 John 4:8 “He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.”
b. We cannot know God without knowing love.
c. John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son…”
d. This is lavish, extravagant love, to give His own perfect Son in exchange for His rebellious creatures.
2. Jesus.
a. John 15:9 “As the Father has loved Me, so have I loved you. Remain in My love.”
b. Jesus loves us with the same love that Father does.
c. Jn 15:13 “Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”
d. Love was His motivation for going to the cross.
3. Holy Spirit.
a. Rom 5:5 “Now hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”
b. Gal 5:22 “But the fruit of the Spirit is love…”
c. 2 Tim 1:7 “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”
d. He is the Spirit of Love.
4. The Father created us in love, the Son gave Himself for us in love and the Spirit now fills our hearts with love to bring that same quality of divine love out of us.
B. #2: God loved us before we loved Him.
1. Since God is love, then everything He does is done in love and we were created in love, for love.
2. 1 John 4:19 “We love Him because He first loved us.”
a. Before we were even alive to try & earn God’s love, He already loved us.
b. We need to embrace the love that was waiting for us at the moment of birth.
c. We didn’t earn our way into His love, we woke up already there.
3. He knew us before our existence and loved us.
a. Rom 8:29 “For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren.”
b. He knew us before we were born & chose us for adoption into His family.
c. Rom 5:8 “But God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
4. When we come to God in prayer, we are embracing a Father Who has loved us from eternity past.
C. #3: God’s love is eternal and unchanging.
1. Lam 3:22 “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, His mercies never come to an end.”
2. Psalm 103:17&18
17 But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him, and His righteousness to children’s children, 18 to such as keep His covenant, and to those who remember His commandments to do them.
a. mercy: Hbr hesed steadfast love, lovingkindness, mercy
b. Notice the context includes The Way of the Word
3. Jer 31:3 “The Lord has appeared of old to me, saying: “Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you.”
a. The Hebrew word used here for love is ahavah and it means to have affection, to like someone, to choose someone, to count them as a friend
b. God didn’t just love you once, He loved you first— and he will love you forever.
4. When we are afraid or ashamed to come to God in prayer, we must remember that His love for us has no end. He has chosen us because He likes us, He has affection for us and we will always be loved from now into eternity.
D. #4: Nothing can separate us from God’s love.
1. Rom 8:38&39
38 For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, 39 nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
2. ***Nothing can separate us from God’s love, but unconfessed sin disrupts our fellowship with His holiness and dulls our experience of His presence until it is confessed and repented of.***
3. God’s love is not fragile, but fellowship with Him is relational.
4. When a child disobeys, they don’t stop being a child — but they may stop enjoying closeness. Love remains, but intimacy waits for reconciliation.
E. RECAP: To help us imitate God’s love, remember these four principles.
1. Love is God’s very nature.
2. God loved us before we loved Him.
3. God’s love is eternal and unchanging.
4. Nothing can separate us from God’s love.
IV. Three Steps to Walking in the Way of Love.
A. Accept that God’s loving nature is now your loving nature.
1. Just as a father & mother pass their DNA on to their children, our Father has passed His nature on to us when we became a new creation, born again, born anew, born from above, born of the Spirit.
2. 1 John 3:1 “Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God!”
3. We may not feel like we have God’s loving nature in us, but His love is not based on feelings or emotions. It’s His nature and now it’s ours.
4. God is asking us to embrace His loving nature as our own. All that this requires is an open heart.
B. Imitate God by observing His voice— His Word.
1. Remember Ephesians 5:1&2 tells us to imitate the love of our Father and our Lord, Jesus. We can do that by:
a. Observing and meditating on how He shows His love to us and others.
b. By observing His nature in His Word.
2. 1 Corinthians 13:4-8
4 Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; 5 does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; 6 does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never fails.
3. This is the gold standard of love in the Kingdom of Heaven. Father, Son and Holy Spirit has demonstrated this passage for us. His Word gives us a written standard of the love that we all should aspire to show.
C. Choose to Love even when you don’t feel it.
1. So what do we do when we fall short of that standard? What do we do when we don’t feel very loving? Or when we have an offense against someone and yet we are called to love them?
2. We simply choose to love. We have to stop waiting to feel it and choose it instead. The feelings will follow if we choose The Way of Love.
3. When we choose to love, we choose to obey the Lord Jesus.
4. John 13:34&35
34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. 35 By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”
5. 1 Cor 16:14 “Let all that you do be done in love.
a. Everything you do… choose to do it in love.
b. Not wait until you feel it, or until comes naturally, choose to do it in love.
6. What is love? The will to do good. Agapé, doing good to someone purely for the value that God places on them.
7. He loved them so much that He sent Jesus to die for them, Jesus loved them so much He went to the cross for them, and God wants them to experience His love so much that He put His Spirit within you to give you the love for them.
V. Closing.
A. Let’s imitate God’s love by remembering those four beautiful qualities of it.
1. Love is God’s very nature.
2. God loved us before we loved Him.
3. God’s love is eternal and unchanging.
4. Nothing can separate us from God’s love.
B. We can put this into practice with these three actions.
1. Accept that His nature is now your nature.
2. Observe His love in His Word & by remembering the ways he has shown His love
to you and others.
3. Choose to love even if you don’t feel it.
C. Let’s take this love out the door with us today.
1. God isn’t asking us to believe in love, He’s asking us to walk in it.
2. When we choose love…
a. we choose the way of Christ.
b. we imitate the Father
c. and the world sees Jesus.
3. Let’s no longer ask ourselves if we feel like loving, instead let’s ask “What does love require of me right now?”