In his sermon titled 'The Love of God,' Paul Carrington explores the profound and immeasurable nature of God's love, emphasizing its centrality in the Christian faith. Using vivid analogies, Carrington describes God's love as beyond human comprehension, akin to trying to dig to the earth's core with a plastic shovel. He references John 3:16 as a foundational scripture that illustrates God's love through the gift of His Son, Jesus Christ, who took on human flesh, dwelt among us, and ultimately died for humanity's sins. The sermon contrasts this divine love with the distorted and shallow conceptions of love found in other religions and cultures, highlighting that God's love is not only undeserved but also contrary to what humans deserve. Carrington discusses the transformation of biblical figures like Saul (Paul) and the Apostle John, who were once far from God but became captivated by His love, exemplifying its transformative power. The sermon further delves into the dimensions of God's love, describing its width, length, depth, and height, and how it surpasses all understanding. It underscores the importance of experiencing God's love as a fundamental Christian experience and warns against reducing God to just His attribute of love, emphasizing the need to balance it with His holiness and justice. Carrington concludes by urging believers to keep themselves in the love of God and allow it to overflow into love for one another.

Well this afternoon we have the opportunity to take a look at the love of God. And as you even factor in the last verse of that song we just sang on the love of God, speaking of the ocean being filled with ink, and if the sky was a parchment and every stock on earth was a quill and every man on earth a scribe, still we would fall desperately short of actually describing and coming to an apprehension of the love of God as it is in Jesus Christ. And when we consider the love of God, we've really come to the greatest of all of the subjects as it pertains to God. Really and truly the entirety of the gospel, the good news of Christ, is a demonstration of that very aspect, that very part of God's nature, the love of God for people like you, for people like me. And you know, for you young people, just to consider for a moment the love of God.

Some of you, for example, young men, you have a better chance of going into your backyard tomorrow with a plastic shovel and pail and digging to the core of the earth and getting there successfully than I do today of describing the love of God and as it ought to be described, it's immeasurable, it's beyond human capacity, especially to do it within a 30-minute span. But hopefully we can come away with something, even if we come away with a few palefuls or a couple shovelfuls. That's something to comprehend of this marvelous and beautiful love of God as we scratch the surface here this afternoon. And I thought a good place just for us to start is to look at probably the most popular verse at least when you consider our culture today which is found in John chapter 3 verse 16 where John the Apostle records the words of Christ and we find those words that for God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. And I thought this was a good place to begin you can start in so many areas there's you know so many scriptures that refer to the love of God but but when you think of this aspect of for God's so loved that he gave his only begotten son And you think of Christ that he not only robed himself in flesh like what you and I have, he didn't just do that.

In other words, he didn't just leave the grandeur of heaven that he enjoyed for all eternity with his father. He took on flesh but not only did he come and take on flesh but he actually dwelt among us. It would have been one thing for him to take on flesh and then hole up in a monastery or something like that just so he wouldn't be contaminated with the likes of us. And only when you begin to dwell on who we are for a moment, just to actually almost take, as it were, a peek inside of your heart, do you begin to comprehend something of the distance between heaven and earth. And This is what Romans, Paul says in Romans, he says, for when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.

For scarcely for a righteous man will one die, yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die but God demonstrates his own love toward us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for the ungodly He died for us and in these few verses what you begin to understand is this is that your maiden name is Adam That's your maiden name. That's the name that you're born with. That's the name that you have and you're an enemy of God So it's not only that you're just not lovable But you're actually an enemy of God of what Romans 5 says it goes on to say that you were ungodly That you're unlike God. It goes on to say that when you were still sinners In other words, there was no course correction Maybe I'm going the wrong way and I should begin to turn my heart back to God None of that comes into play and yet you who have the maiden name of Adam. What does Christ say?

He says I will be a husband to you and I will put my name on you. I will give you a new name and I will give you a new nature. And so not only does he leave heaven and he robs himself in flesh, Not only does he actually come and he dwells among us, but then the King, the Creator, he was among us as what? As one who actually serves. It's unbelievable to begin to comprehend this.

And then of course the greatest proof of his love is that he not only came and dwelt among us and served us, but he humbled himself, as the Bible says, even unto death. And then not only unto death, but unto death on a cross. It's mind-boggling when we begin to conceive of what happens here so that you and I could be made Sons and daughters and it says as Owen puts it Christ is saying give me your burdens Give me all your sins Thou knowest not what to do with them. I know how to dispose of them well enough so that God shall be glorified and thy soul delivered." And so the greatest distinguishing mark of a Christian, if you had to pick one, what would be the greatest mark? Well, the truth of the matter is this, the greatest and most distinguishing mark of a Christian is that you are loved by God.

Or as the Bible often says, be loved. That's the greatest, most important thing for us to understand and and so you can begin to get a an apprehension as to how the contemplation of the love of God like no other subject takes you out of your depth faster than anything else. You could think of people like for example at one time you had the man by the name of Saul. The scriptures describe him as breathing out threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord. Like he's breathing out threats and murder.

That was his way of life, coming and welling up from within his evil heart. He even went so far as to try to get approval from the high priest so that he could go and hunt disciples of Christ in foreign cities. Or you could look at a man early on in the Gospels like the Apostle John who at one point he sent his mom to go ask Jesus if he and his brother would be able to sit on his right hand and on his left when he comes into the kingdom. Or it didn't get better right away after that, he didn't learn his lesson, but on Jesus' final trip to Jerusalem before he dies, he turns around and he finds that all of his followers, including James and John, are arguing among themselves who is going to be the greatest. He was called one of the sons of thunder wasn't it?

You remember the account where he asked the Lord after what looked to be almost a failed mission attempt, they went into a village and The gospel wasn't received and James and his brother say, hey Lord, should we call fire down and burn these people up? Perhaps with a bit of hope that his request might be answered. And Jesus turns around and he looks at him. He says, you do not know of what spirit you are of He wasn't he wasn't feeding on the spirit and the love of God But over time what do you do? What do you see you see both men are captured they become utterly captivated by the love of God and they themselves, both of them, Saul, as we read all of his apostles, all of his epistles, he writes so much on the love of God and of course you know you could see it all through their ministries, the aroma of love just coming off of them in their self-sacrifice and their desire to make Christ known, to serve Christ's people.

All of this and writing decades later, we learn from the very apostle of love who at one time was a son of thunder. He makes this statement in 1st John verse 4-7 he says God is love. Not merely that God is loving or not merely that he loves or even that he loved so much that he sent his only begotten son but look at what Albert Barnes who's an American an American theological expert he said this and this is the 1800s but he says never was a more important declaration made than this never was more meaning crowded into a few words than in this short sentence, God is love. It's beautiful. It's not even a mere attribute of God.

We've been studying the attributes of God, but this is at his very nature. It's his very essence is the love of God. It permeates all of his being and in a few minutes I'm gonna read to us 1st John chapter 4 verse 7 to 21 we'll go through that but but I want to just take a moment and and Help help us to think through the The reason why you might not be utterly shocked by what you hear of the love of God is simply because of your exposure to it. You've got a Bible you hear every week you come there's preaching and so on and so forth but I want you to first consider before I read the black backdrop that is man. And if you consider that for a moment, it's a wonder that even after our rebellion that God didn't just just snuff us out, But even if you go down through the annals of history, what do you find?

You can't even find a single year in the history of man where evil and hatred doesn't flourish, where you can't go to one corner of the earth and you find a war going on. It's a condemning tale of darkness and lovelessness. But look at this just for an example. The Christianity itself was born at the time of the Roman Empire. That's where the message of the gospel was first introduced.

And so you consider the Roman Empire just for a minute and the Roman Empire itself though it flourished geographically it spanned all content, you know three different continents and It conquered it did so many different things, but it was submerged in this prolonged terrible night living without love. Morally speaking it was utterly worm-eaten all the way through. Military conquest was its greatest virtue and when you begin to take a look at some of the Roman gods it's just a story of pure terror you know these gods were just a fearful band of unpredictable violent drunken drunken capricious gods that would just do things on a whim the The chief god of the Rome zoo in the Roman Empire, Jupiter, that's their chief deity. He practiced cannibalism. He actually ate one of his own daughters.

Now these are false gods, But the story of these gods reflect the mindset of the culture that this false religion grew up in. He was an uncontrollable adulterer. That's their chief deity in Rome. The most prized spectacle in Rome was men killing other men in an arena or in a coliseum. If you want to talk about the treatment of women, your jaw would fall to the ground.

It was so pitiful. No such thing as feminine honor. Child abandonment was common. You have a baby and you just leave it somewhere and it dies of exposure. That's the world that the gospel was first introduced into.

But you could look at all other religions. If you look at Hinduism, for example, Hinduism has the same kind of thing, a pantheon of false gods, and the concept of love doesn't exist. If you go to something like Buddhism, you won't find love. They tell you to look inside of yourself as the source, and over the course of time, when you fall in love with yourself, you'll be able to love others. You go to any ism and what do you find?

Utter bankruptcy. And even in our modern day, forget the Roman Empire, forget all the isms, but come down to our our modern day and it's fascinating because here we are as creatures made in God's image, as much as people would like to deny it. And people are desperate for love. It's because the way we are wired, we're made in God's image. I was talking to some brothers at lunch and you know that the third most looked up word at merriamwebster.com is the word love.

See people are looking for love. It furnishes the theme of so many of the songs that are sung even in pop culture but of course it's a distorted, wicked, lustful self-love that is so much the theme of it but it's the most central need of the human soul when you begin to consider this. If you ask a thousand people in our modern day, you know, tell us about the God of love. They might even, that is the one attribute most men would would rave about and love to speak about, but then When you peel back just a little bit of a layer, what do you find? You find this weakly, sickly, indulgent God of love that simply tolerates.

And so tolerance has now become the equivalent of love. As long as you tolerate me in whatever I want to be or define myself as or however I want to live you love me. That's what the world has to say. It's a sentimental indulgent God of love totally divorced from his moral purity. And when you begin to look at all these aspects of love it shows you just how bankrupt our modern-day world is.

And oftentimes even sadly in the church we adopt some of these false notions of who God is. And when you look at something even like Islam, I just want to talk about this for a moment, but a couple of months ago I was talking to a Muslim gentleman and I asked him about grace the word grace which is grace comes from love it's it's a derivative of the love of God this unmerited favor and we began to talk about the word Grace in his mother tongue, so I'm not speaking about grace Theologically from from the Bible. I asked him about the word grace in his mother tongue to describe to me what grace is and here he is he's a teacher but he looked at me blankly grace like what is great he had no conception of grace of unmerited favor of true love and that's because it's totally absent in their religion. Where there's no love there can be no conception of grace and whereas in the Bible the word love is mentioned 409 times, 223 times in the New Testament. In the Quran you get 22 times where the word love is used but unfortunately it's what God does not love.

In other words I don't love this, I hate this and that's how they define love. The 20 times that it's used positively in that God loves. So 22 times what I do not love, their false God Allah, and then 20 times what he does love. But then again you look at what does he love? Those who do good.

Those who are pure and clean. Those who are righteous. Those who fight for his cause. It's one of those features that begins to say he doesn't really love at all because who is righteous who is good who is pure None of us at all And Allah has 99 names that they or 99 attributes and he's called the guardian He's called the most gracious the exalt or the light the most high but love doesn't appear in one of those 99 names and so only when we begin to see the black backdrop of what the absence of love, not just in our current culture but all the way through history, and then Christianity, the message of God comes in, do we begin to understand it. Now I want to just read to us 1 John 4, 7 to 21.

Now notice this, 27 times in this short, what is that? How many verses? Very, very few verses is the word love used. 27 times the son of thunder, who is now the apostle of love speaks of it more than in all the gospels Combined in these few verses that I'm gonna read to us right now Now look what he says Beloved let us love one another For love is of God and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

In this the love of God was manifested toward us. That God has sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time.

If we love one another, God abides in us and his love has been perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us because he has given us of his spirit and we have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son as Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him and he in God. And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. Again, God is love.

And he who abides in love abides in God and God in him. Love has been perfected among us in this, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment, because as he is, so are we in the world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves torment, but he who fears has not been made perfect in love. We love him because he first loved us. If someone says, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar.

For he who does not love his brother whom he has seen how can he love God? Whom he has not seen and this Commandment we have from him that he who loves God must love his brother also It's beautiful again when you consider how unique Love is in this world And I want to just give a few warnings though about love Notice what it doesn't say in these verses. It says God is love, but it doesn't say love is God because that would be utterly false. Now our modern-day world of New Ageism and everything would love it to be that definition that since God is love love is God but that simply isn't the truth and Here's something else. It's important.

The fact that God is love is not the total truth about God. That's why we have the whole counsel of Scripture and so many even Christians can run aground here in that you can elevate the love of God which we ought to but at the expense of other aspects. For example, earlier on in the same epistle, John says that God is light. And what is light? Light is holiness.

It's this moral purity that God has. So his moral purity and his love aren't at odds. In John chapter 4 when he meets the woman at the well Jesus says God is spirit, not a spirit but God is spirit and we've heard last I think the last few weeks we've heard about the omnipotence of God and the omniscience of God, the omnipresence of God And so we don't want to take it out of its realm. This is what Ryle has to say. He says, beware of manufacturing a God of your own, a God who is all mercy but not just, A God who is all love but not holy.

A God who has a heaven for everyone but a hell for none. Such a God is an idol of your own. He is not the God of the Bible. And so may we never divorce the holiness, the moral purity of God from his actual love, where we pit his justice in sending sinners to hell against the love of God. And so, what is the love of God?

Well, I just want to go over a few different aspects of it and again We could spend months and months and never even come close even to the foothills of the love of God and as it truly is and as we can truly comprehend it but but the first Thing that we may want to consider is that the love of God is it's an underived sovereign love and and this is just Logical in the sense that since no fallen human being would ever set his sight upon a righteous Holy God God has to be the first mover. Man would never choose to love God because of who man is and that's why we just read in 1st John 4 in this is love not that we loved God but that he loved us Because it's important that we again are dead in our sins, that we comprehend that. But not only that, but there's nothing in us, is there, to draw out or to attract God's love. So not only is the love of God undeserved, but it's actually contrary to what we deserve. It would be one thing if we just don't deserve it, but for it to be utterly contrary is, again, just speaking of the height and the depth of the love of God.

Just consider for a moment, get a picture in your mind of someone that you love. For example, when a man is considering a woman to marry or vice versa, this love is based on what? Something that they see in that other person. Even our friendships, even our deep friendships, when I say I love that guy or you say a sister might say that about another sister, there's a reason why I love that person. And even when we say we love God, it's based on a reason.

We love God because he is good. Now consider the objects of God's love. Listen to this from Deuteronomy. In Deuteronomy chapter 7, verse 6 to 8, or 7 to 8, it says this, the Lord did not set his love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any other people for you were the least of all the peoples but because the Lord loves you and because he would keep the oath which he swore to the fathers. The Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt." And so what's the message here?

I loved you. Why? Because I loved you. I loved you because I loved you. Nothing in you as a people caused me to love you.

It would be beyond comprehension, just to consider this for a second that he would even take us in as hired servants or even as slaves but to take us in as sons and His daughters Not only that but to make us heirs not only heirs, but joint heirs with his son, his overcoming, only begotten son, Jesus Christ. It's unbelievable that he would do this. And this is what B.B. Warfield says, he says, the marvel of marvels is not that God in his infinite love has elected, has not elected all this guilty race to be saved, but that he has elected any. And so we see that the love of God is an under-rived, sovereign love.

But also let's consider the dimensions of the love of God. See everyone in this world, everyone that exists in this world in some sense is a partaker of the love of God, the common grace of the love of God that sends his reign on the just and the unjust. He causes his son to rise on the unjust, on the unjust as well. You breathe, you eat food. By the way, one of the pet peeves I have is when people, when they're evangelizing, say, God loves you.

And that's how they start off by God loves you That's just we'll talk about that maybe another time, but but that's not necessarily overly accurate there's a special love and electing Love that God's people enjoy and in Ephesians chapter 3 verse 14 to 18 This is what Paul wants the Ephesians to know he says for this reason I bow my knee Knees to the father of our Lord Jesus Christ from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant you according to the riches of his glory to be strengthened with might through his spirit in the inner man, that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love may be able to comprehend with all the saints." And then he speaks about the dimensions. He wants you to comprehend with all the saints what is the width. And this is this aspect of the love of God embracing whosoever will. When you go throughout the course of history that's the call. Whosoever will.

Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear. That's the call that we see in John 3 16 that whoever believes in his name would not perish, but have everlasting life. The width or the breadth of the love of God is sufficient. If there were 10 worlds like ours, and even more evil than ours, even then the love, the blood of Christ would be sufficient and the love of God would be powerful enough that's the width but what about he goes on to say the length and he talks about this idea that you might know the width or the breadth as well as the length And this is what we'll be experiencing all the way through eternity. In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul talks about how faith and hope and love are these wonderful things, but the greatest of these is love.

And that's because Faith will go away. When you now stand before God, there will be no more faith. Hope will go away when you actually enter into the thing that you've been hoping for all your life. But does love ever go away? Love never fails.

And this is the length of love. It started in eternity past. It's actually false to say it started. It never really started. But it's been from eternity past and it will be all the way through as a thing that exists.

This is the length of the love of God. And then he says the depth. This is the unfathomable, bottomless love of God that even when you take your little plastic shovel and you begin digging in your yard you could be there for 10, 000 years and you will never get to the bottom of the love of God as it exists in Jesus Christ. The height, it's beyond reach. To know the love of Christ which passes knowledge.

How can you know something that passes knowledge? Just to be acquainted with it Somewhere in your heart through experience that you may be filled with the fullness of God and then so we talked about the sovereign Love of God we've talked about the dimensions of his love but consider the expression of his love, his proving of his love. That love existed in the Trinity from eternity past. We understand that this love that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit enjoyed for all eternity, That's the love that actually resulted in the incarnation of the Son of God coming to this earth. And you can never speak of God's love without speaking of God's gift, can you?

Christ Jesus our Lord. And nothing, nothing displays that love more clearly than the cross of Calvary and that's why we we started with for God so loved the world that he gave he gave it's expressed through the gift of Christ this God who spared nothing He gave the most expensive gift of heaven so that we who deserve not only nothing but we deserved His wrath could be made sons and daughters. It's amazing. So that we could call on him as our God. Christ first had to cry those terrible words, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

So that we could enter in to his rest. And so those are just three small points, but for the Christian, for the Christian, why are you worrying about God's love? Do you sometimes worry about God's love? Worrying about God's love for you is like standing beneath Niagara Falls and somehow worrying that the water is gonna run out. It's never going to run out.

And what we find out is in 1st John 4-7 that love casts out fear. You don't have to be wondering and in fear living a life of fear because your identity is secure in the Lord there's a security that casts out fear most of your fear comes from what insecurity And so that's the reasoning that John applies in 1 John 4, 7. And this is something that I want you to just take away, that experiencing the love of God should be a normal part of Christian experience. In other words, it's not the domain of some super Christians, But this is for each and every Christian. It shouldn't be fitful expressions, you know, you get fitful impressions of the love of God.

Sometimes you feel it, sometimes you don't, but there should be this abiding sense of the love of God because of your putting your faith in his promises, the God who cannot lie. So why do I fear? Why do I distrust? Why do I grow so cold or become so half-hearted when he loves me so, when he's spared nothing so that I could enter into this love and be beloved of Him. What can the world do to a man or to a woman who has been persuaded by and is grounded in the love of God through Christ?

And I want to leave us with one verse, Maybe one you've not even looked at or paid much attention to that is so helpful when you consider the love of God And it's found in Jude verse 21. There's not even a chapter per se It's just Jude verse 21 and he says this toward the end of his Epistle he says these few words keep yourselves in the love of God Keep yourselves in the love of God Keep your eyes on the cross. I think what he's saying here is he's saying to us maintain a continual awareness of God's love for you. And when you have that continual awareness of God's love for you, abiding there, do you know how much that's going to change absolutely everything else in your life? When the most important thing about a Christian is not what he does, but that he is loved.

That begins to overflow the banks like we see in the lives of men like the Apostle Paul or John or go through the eon, go through the, go through the hall of faith and you'll see men captured by the love of God. My prayer for myself and even for us here is that the greatest obstacle, the greatest inhibitor to love, which is self, Be brought under the love of Christ like the the son of thunder was he he became that apostle of love And as as I said earlier just as that that most distinguishing mark of who you are Is that you're loved of God think of that like the root the root But here's something that my wife and I were reading the other day about the Apostle John. And it's an extra biblical account but it's an account from history. And before he died of old age there he was in Ephesus and he could no longer walk. He had to be carried into the congregation and his voice had become so faint that he could hardly be heard.

It was just a whisper dying in his old age. But what did he do? He kept repeating when he couldn't preach a sermon anymore, he kept repeating, little children love one another. Little children love one another. And one of his followers who was carrying him one day asked him, he says, Why do you keep saying the same thing?

And he says this, he says, because it is the Lord's commandment. And if it alone is done, it is enough. You see, out of the root, being beloved, comes the fruit, our love for one another. And I just want to end by reading just a few verses here from 1 Corinthians chapter 13, what love is, and consider this as we consider our love for each other. Love suffers long and is kind.

Love does not envy. Love does not parade itself, is not puffed up, does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil, does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. And it says in verse 8, love never fails. Well, let's pray. Oh Lord, the depths of your love for us.

Lord, we swim in this ocean depth and sometimes we have so little comprehension of it but we pray more and more Lord to be taken up taken up with an understanding that we are loved by you. Lord, you spared no expense, but you sent Heaven's best to prove your love because you are a God of love. Lord, may that change the way that we look at one another. May it change the way we look at a perishing world me may we be taken up Oh Lord and and be dispensers Words of this man that you've given to us Praise you. We thank you for your goodness in Jesus name in Jesus name.

Amen.