Now back to our Christmas theme: The Love of God.

It is my sincere desire for each one of you, my radio listeners, that this Christmas season will be truly blessed and meaningful for you. It is for this reason that I have chosen as my theme: The Love of God. If you truly taste the love of God at this time, then your blessings will not be limited to a few brief hours of carnal pleasure, but they will last on into the New Year that lies ahead and throughout the rest of your life, yes, and beyond that through an endless eternity.

On the other hand, if you go through life without truly knowing God and His love, then it will make no difference how much pleasure or success you may gain in other ways, ultimately you will have lived in vain.

In my talks last week I focused on two simple, but profound statements: God is love and God is light.

Today, and through the rest of this week, I’m going to develop this theme more fully. The theme for my talk today is Knowing and Believing God’s Love.

I want to begin with a passage from the first epistle of John, chapter 4, verse 16, First John 4:16 and I’m going to read it in two translations so that we can get as far as possible the full impact of what the Bible is saying to us through this verse.

“And we have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love,and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.” (NASB)

Then the other version:

“And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.” (NIV)

You see one version there says, “We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us.” The other says, “And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.” The point that I want to bring out is that it is one thing to know intellectually, theoretically, maybe out of Scripture or out of a sermon about the love of God, but it is something quite different to believe it or, as the other version says, “to rely on it.” I want to make it clear to you that there is a step beyond knowing, it is believing or relying on. It’s in a sense casting yourself upon. It means in a sense taking a risk. You really believe that God loves you so you commit yourself to Him without reservation. You’d never do that if you didn’t trust in His love. If you want to analyze everything and work everything out in advance, then you’ll never take this step of commitment, of total yielding to God, of putting yourself without reservation in His hands, of relying on Him, trusting Him to do whatever He wants, no strings attached, no conditions.

You see, that is how God initially loved you and me, and He brings us to a point where He wants the same kind of response from Him, no strings attached, no conditions, no reservations. It’s not just knowing. It’s believing in a sense of relying on, committing ourselves to, accepting for real what God says, what the Bible says about God, that God is love.

I think there are so many people who have heard sermons about the love of God, who know about it in that way, intellectualy, but they’ve never relyed on it. They’ve never stepped out in faith and said, “God, here I am. Take me

The Love Of God

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