GOD IS THE SOURCE OF LOVE
DR. JIM DIXON
1 CORINTHIANS 13
MAY 25, 1980
Dr. James Dobson is a Christian psychologist and professor of pediatrics at the University of Southern California School of Medicine. In his book Hide or Seek, he tells the tragic story of a man whom every one of you have heard of. Dr. Dobson says that this man was born to a woman who was a powerfully built, dominating woman, who found it difficult to love anyone. This man’s father died of a heart attack two months before his birth. Dr. Dobson says that this man’s mother gave him no love, no affection, no discipline, no training. In those early years, she rarely saw him, and she would not even allow him to call her at work. The other children had little to do with him, and he was alone most of the time. He was ugly and poor and seemingly unlovable. When he was 13 years old, the school psychologist said that he probably did not even know the meaning of the word love.
In his adolescence, he was rejected by the girls, and he fought with the boys. Despite a high IQ, he failed academically and dropped out of high school. He joined the U. S. Marines because he heard that the marines built men, and he wanted to be one; but his troubles went with him. The other men laughed at him and ridiculed him. He fought back and resisted authority. He was court marshaled and was dishonorably discharged. There he was a young man in his early twenties. He was friendless. He was weak and scrawny in stature. He still had an adolescent squeak in his voice. He was balding. He had no talent or skill. He was totally rejected. He thought maybe he could go to another country and things would be better. He tried that, but his troubles went with him.
He met a young woman who also had lived a troubled life. He married her and brought her back with him to the United States. He hoped that she would be his ally against a bitter world, but she became his greatest enemy. She grew to hate him and despise him. She belittled him and ridiculed him. She was stronger than he was. She bullied him. She beat him up. She threw him in the bathroom and locked the door. She bore him two children, but he never knew the love or respect that a father should know. Finally, she literally threw him out of the house. He tried to make it on his own, but he was lonely. After a period of time, he came back home and literally begged her to take him in. He surrendered all pride. He accepted humiliation.
He gave her $78, which was all he had. He said, “Take this as a gift and spend it on whatever you would like.” She laughed at him. She ridiculed his feeble efforts to supply the family’s needs. She made fun of his past failures. She even made fun of his sexual and potency in front of other people who were there. Finally, he fell to his knees, and he wept. No one loved him. No one had ever loved him. It seemed to him as though the darkness of his life had fallen down upon him. It was only a few days later that he went out to a garage where he had hidden a rifle. He took it down. He went to a book storage building where he had recently acquired a job. There, from the third floor of that building on November 22, 1963, he sent two shells crashing into the skull of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Lee Harvey Oswald was the unlovable, unacceptable failure who killed the one man who perhaps more than any other man represented everything he longed to be but could not be. Dr. Dobson says that in firing those shots, he utilized perhaps the one skill that he had acquired in his entire miserable lifetime. There is no way that we can excuse what Lee Harvey Oswald did that day. There is no way that we can absolve him of responsibility. One day he will stand before our Lord Jesus Christ and will give an account, but it is tragic to think that there are people like Lee Harvey Oswald who grow up in this world and find such little love.
There are many people in this world like Lee Harvey Oswald. People who feel like they are failures. People who feel rejected. People who feel unloved. Many of them come into this church. They come off the street. They walk into the office. They want somebody to love them.
I would like to share with you a little bit this morning on the subject of love. Certainly, throughout history more has been written about love than about any other subject. Poets, philosophers, theologians, all have attempted in their own way to explain the beauty and the mystery, the necessity of love. But what I am going to share with you this morning did not come from any poet, philosopher, or theologian. What I am going to share with you this morning comes from the word of God.
In the scriptures, God tells us, first of all, that He is the very source of love. Love proceeds, comes forth, initiates in Him. He is the very source of love. John the apostle of our Lord Jesus Christ said, “Love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love” (1 John 4:8).That is perhaps the greatest statement in the whole of the scripture. God is the very source of love. It is extremely important that you and I know that because each and every one of us needs to be loved. We are all like Lee Harvey Oswald. We all need acceptance. We all need love. God is the very source of love.
I remember when I was growing up how much I needed to be loved. I remember I wanted my mom and dad to love me, and they did. I knew that I had great security in that. As I got a little older, I wanted other people to love me too.
I remember as a second grader celebrating Valentine’s Day. Our teacher would put a whole bunch of paper bags along the chalk railing at the bottom of the chalkboard. We all had our name on a bag with a little heart on it. During the day, kids could come and put valentines in our bag. I remember how much I wanted other kids to put valentines in my bag. I remember how it irritated me when the other guy, the guy next to me, could barely carry his bag away. I was able to pop my bag. I had a few cards in there, and they meant a great deal to me.
As I got older, I wanted to be accepted by the guys. I wanted to be one of the boys. When I got into high school, I wanted the girls to like me. Even today, I want people to like me. But I have learned something now that I did not know when I was younger. Even if everybody in the whole world loved Jim Dixon, it would not satisfy my need to be loved. I needed to experience, I needed to encounter the love of God. I needed to go to the very source of love. The Bible tells us how we can do that. We can experience God’s love. We can encounter the love of God. We can go to the source through Jesus Christ. The Bible says, “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” (1 John 4:9). He is the source of love.
When I was five years old, I asked Jesus Christ to come into my life. It is one of the first memories I have. I shared that with some of you. I remember kneeling on the floor in the living room and saying, “Lord Jesus, come into my life. I want to live for you.” And he did. For 29 years He has been in my life. I do not think I really loved Him when I invited Him in. I do not think I experienced or understood much of His love for me. I only knew that I needed Him. I knew that I wanted Him, and I wanted the security that He could give. So I invited Him in, and He came in.
Through the years, I have grown to love Him. Through the years I have grown to experience more and more of His love for me. I have had times in my life where it just seemed like the whole world was crashing in on me. The Lord Jesus was there in my life when I sinned, when I failed Him, when I turned against Him. He was always there willing to forgive me. There have been times in my life where it seemed like I had everything going my way. When I had every blessing. I was so happy, and I knew that they had come from Him. There have been times in my life when I needed guidance and direction, and He gave it to me. Through the years I have seen something of His love for me.
I hope and pray that each and every one of you are beginning to experience the love of God through Christ. I hope each and every one of you are going to the source of love. I hope each and every one of you have come to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior of your life and are beginning to walk with Him in His word and prayer and fellowship with other Christians. You are letting Him love you.
When I was in college, I went to a conference. At that conference, the speaker said, “Let God love you.” A college student who was sitting next to me said he thought that was ridiculous. “You can’t let God love you. Either God loves you, or he doesn’t love you. God is sovereign.”
“Either God loves you, or he doesn’t love you,” this friend said, But I have come to understand that you really can let God love you or you can turn your back on God’s love. I can do the same thing with my wife. I could refuse to let Barb love me. I could walk away. I could leave her. I could never let her hold me again. Never cook a meal for me again. Never laugh with me. Never talk to me. Never cry with me. I could walk away. I could turn my back on her love. Many people have done that with God. They do not let God love them.
I know what the Lord wants me to share with you this morning. First of all, and above all else, is that you can let God love you. You can experience His love. You can encounter His love in Jesus Christ. You can come to Him and say, “Lord Jesus, come into my life. I want to live for you.” He will come in by His Holy Spirit, and you can begin to walk in His love.
There are two things I want to share with you this morning about that love that comes from God. The first thing is this: love is selfless. Jesus Christ said, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends” (John 15:13-14a). The apostle Paul said that love does not seek its own way. Love is giving. It is selfless. God, so loved the world that He gave his only Son. This is what the Bible calls agape love. It is love that is given with no thought of getting anything in return. It is love given to someone who maybe even hates you. Somebody who rejects you. Somebody who despises you. It is selfless love. I think most of us, if we are honest, would have to admit that the love that we have in our life, the love that we share, has a little bit of self in it. It is not really selfless. We are kind of afraid to love somebody for fear they might not love us back, and we maybe want to know a little bit of what is in it for us. But God’s love is not like that. “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). His love is selfless.
I would like to share with you a story this morning. It is about an argument that Barbara and I had. I shared it once before in a class. It happened a couple of weeks ago. I asked Barbara if I could share this story with you. She told me I could. The argument began on a Monday. We went grocery shopping together. Monday is my day off. Sometimes I go grocery shopping with Barbara. I really have mixed feelings about grocery shopping. I sometimes do not like it because I feel like Barbara takes too much time going around the grocery store. I get impatient. But I do like it because I like to be able to put my orders in. What we are going to have around the house.
I remember we were going down the aisle at King Soopers by our house. We were walking down the aisle, and Barb was taking a lot of time. I was kind of getting impatient, so I decided I would go to another part of the store and find something I really wanted to buy. I went over to the bakery section, and I started picking out some donuts. I had some double Dutch donuts and some apple spice donuts. I had a whole bunch of donuts, had them in a box. Then I went over to the junk food section. I pick up some Cheetos because I love Cheetos. I brought these donuts and Cheetos back to the grocery cart, and I put them in. Barb looked at me, and I told her that I was trying to cut back on meat. She did not quite understand that.
When we got home, I ate a couple of the donuts. I did not eat any of the Cheetos. Barb said I should save the donuts. Eat them tomorrow. The next day I was coming home from work, and I was looking forward to eating the rest of those donuts. I could see myself sitting down and eating those Cheetos, too. I got in the house, and the donuts were gone. The Cheetos were gone. There was not one Cheeto left in the bag. I was angry and decided I wanted to give Barbara a loving rebuke. I was really upset with her and began to tell her off. She told me that she and the kids had eaten the donuts and that she had gone to a friend’s house. They were sewing, and they and the kids ate the Cheetos.
I was really angry. She told me, “Number one,” she said, “You already ate a couple of the donuts.” “Number two,” she told me, “Anything we buy at the grocery store is for the whole family.” “Number three,” she told me, “If you really want donuts and Cheetos that bad, the grocery store is only two minutes away and you can go back there and buy more donuts and Cheetos.” “Number four,” she said, “There are plenty of snacks around the house and you have plenty to eat without eating donuts and Cheetos.” “Number five,” she told me, “You don’t even need a snack.”
That really got me angry because a lot of that stuff made sense, and I did not want logic. I wanted donuts and Cheetos. We were enraged and said some things that you never really mean. Finally Barb ran into the bedroom and slammed the door shut. She was in there mellowing out when the doorbell rang. A couple from our church was dropping by. Is not that amazing how that always works? You put on a smile on your face. The conversation goes, “Oh hi.” “How is everything?” “Everything’s great.” Where’s Barb? “Oh, let me see.” Barb comes out, and she says, “Hi. I was just straightening up back there.”
I think back on that whole experience, and I know how much of self there still is in Jim Dixon. I love Barbara with all my heart; but there is a lot of self in me, and I could see it. It comes out in the little things in life day by day. I did not want to share those donuts. I did not want to share those Cheetos I wanted them for me. That was what I wanted.
I recently read the story of a Lutheran minister. He said that a woman came into his office (this was more than 15 years ago), and she was crying. She was crying because she was pregnant. The child that was in her womb was not fathered by her husband. She had just found out from the doctor that she was pregnant, and she did not know what to do. She told the Lutheran minister that she was thinking about having an abortion and not even telling her husband. She said that if she went ahead and had the baby her husband would of course know. Not only that but all the people in the church would know because many of her friends knew that her husband was not capable of fathering children.
The Lutheran minister counseled her to first of all confess what she had done to the Lord Jesus and ask his forgiveness. This she did. Then she went to her husband and confessed what she had done. She asked for his forgiveness. It was a very hard moment. He was grieved but forgave her. They decided to have the child and put the child up for adoption. When the child was born, the baby was so cute that they decided to keep it. For the next fifteen years they went to church every Sunday morning. They had two children they had adopted previously, and they had this little baby. The baby grew up in that church, The Lutheran minister said that through those years he could not count the number of men who came up to him and could not understand the love that that father had, the way that father was able to forgive, and the love that that whole family began to have, and the blessings that the Lord began to place on that family. That father was not so much concerned with his own rights. In his love he was concerned about his wife and the little child.
Love is like that. True love, agape love, is like that. It is willing to forgive. It is thinking about the other person. I have discovered recently just why it is that Christians are able to love selflessly. It is not because they do not love themselves. It is not because they do not care about themselves. It is because they have had their needs met in Jesus Christ. That is what we are to strive for.
When we go to the source of love, when we encounter and experience the love of God in Jesus Christ, the more confident we are in the love of Christ. The more our own needs are taken care of, the more we will trust ourselves to Him. The more we experience His love, we will trust our future to Him and our daily needs to Him. We become so confident of His love for us, that He is taking care of us., that we do not need to think about ourselves much anymore. We are free to think about others. We know that He loves us. We know that He is taking care of us. We know that our eternal future is taken care of. We know that He will provide for us.
When our needs are taken care of, we are free to reach out and love others. We do not need to exalt ourselves anymore. We are free to exalt others. That is the way it should be when we come to the source of love and trust ourselves to Jesus Christ.
One final thing I want to share this morning about love is that love is active. You have heard that before. Yet so often when we think of love, we think of feelings. Love is involved with feelings. Feelings of compassion. Feelings of concern. Feelings of empathy. There is no doubt that when our Lord Jesus walked on this earth, He felt compassion, empathy, and concern for people.
But love is not just a feeling. It is feeling that reaches out in action. If you do not feel compassion, if you do not feel empathy, if you do not feel concerned, you can still do the loving thing. You can still do what love demands. It is the beauty in the mystery of the gospel. It is the beauty and mystery of Christ in us and the working of the Holy Spirit that as we do what love requires feelings come. The Holy Spirit helps us to feel that compassion, that empathy, and that concern.
Love is action. It results in action. It produces action. When I was very young, my brothers and I would ride in the car together. We would sit in the back seat. Mom or dad would drive. I was the youngest of three boys. My oldest brother always got the window on the right. My other brother got the window on the left. I always sat on the hump. It was like that the whole time I was growing up. Even when we get together now, coming in from all different states, if my mom and dad are in the front and we are in the back, my brothers expect me to sit on the hump. I do not know why that is.
I remember one Sunday we were leaving church, and we got into a big fight. It seemed like we had most of our fights either on our way to church or on our way home from church. One of my brothers hit me as hard as he could. My mom turned around. She looked right at him and said, “Why did you do that? We just came from church. What did you learn at church? How does Jesus want you to feel about your brother? Jesus wants you to love your brother.” I was silent for a second. We never knew exactly how to argue with my mother when she did that so we just sat there. My brother thought about that: Jesus wants you to love your brother.
Finally, my brother said, “Well, I love him, but I just do not want to have anything to do with them.” A moment later, we all began to laugh because we knew that did not make any sense. You cannot love people and have nothing to do with them. When you love others, that love is going to be active. You want to be involved in their lives. You want to be concerned about them. You want to take care of them.
The Lord Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan. You have all heard the story. In that story, he told how a man walked down the road from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among robbers. The robbers stripped and beat him and left him half dead. The Lord Jesus said that a priest came down that road later. When he came to the place where the man was hurt, the priest passed by on the other side. A Levi came by a little later. When he came to that spot, the Levi also passed by on the other side. But when a Samaritan came to the spot, he saw the man and had compassion. He bound the man’s wounds and took the man to an inn. He cared for him.
When the Lord Jesus told the story, he said, “Go and do likewise.” They had asked him, who is my neighbor? He was saying that your neighbor is anyone who is in need. There is no way that you can meet the needs of everybody in the world. There is no way that you can meet the needs of everybody in your neighborhood. But wherein the Lord Jesus has called you to respond to a person’s need, He expects your love to be active. He expects you to care for that person.
We are part of a church where it is easy to come and receive, but it is not always easy to come and give. Love is giving. God so loved that He gave. Last week you heard from Chris Feldman. She told you about some needs that we have in our Sunday School. Dean spoke a little bit to that. There are many opportunities for you to serve in this church. There are many opportunities for you to express love in action. There are many opportunities for you to be selfless. We want to encourage you to do that. The primary reason that we are on this earth is to learn to love. It is not to accumulate things. It is certainly not to accomplish great things. It is not even to evangelize, important though that may be. The primary reason that we are on this earth is to learn to love.
The Lord wants us to come to Him as the source of love, to receive His Son Jesus Christ, and to begin to walk in His love. He then wants us to learn to love. We love because He first loved us. He wants us to learn to love selflessly and actively. John the apostle of our Lord Jesus Christ was a man who did not know how to love when he was young. The Lord Jesus called him Boanerges, which means son of thunder. When they came out of a Samaritan village and Jesus Christ was rejected, John wanted to call down fire from heaven and destroy the city. The Lord Jesus had to rebuke him; but through the years as he walked with Jesus Christ and was touched by the Holy Spirit, he learned to love. You cannot read 1, 2, and 3 John or the Gospel of John and not be absolutely amazed at the love that flows from this man of God because he grew in love as he walked with Jesus. Jesus Christ says to us, “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).
Shall we pray? Father, we thank You for Your great love for us, the love that reached out for us in Jesus Christ. Father, we thank You that You loved us so much that You gave your Son. Lord Jesus, we thank You that in Your love for us, You died for us. And You offer now to come into our lives and to fill us and to make us new. Lord, if there be anybody here who has never come to You, never touched that source of love, never received You as Lord and Savior of their life, I pray, Lord, that they might do so today. And dear Lord, for the rest of us who have known You, some of us for months, some of us for years, we want to be faithful to You. We pray that You might teach us how to love. Help us to love selflessly. Help us to love actively. We give You the praise and the glory. We pray these things, Lord Jesus, in your name. Amen.