I’m going to start by asking you what might be the most important question in your life.  “Do you love Jesus?”  I realize that question might make you uncomfortable, or startle you, convict you, or you might respond, “Yes I love him with all my heart!”  Of course you don’t have to give me your answer!  But it does matter how you would answer Jesus, if he came right up to you, and said, “Do you love me?”  That’s what he did to Peter.  He asked Peter that, three times.  

There were some unique reasons why he asked Peter this question, but the point is this: When Jesus commissioned Peter as his apostle and shepherd, he was interested in one thing. “Peter, do you love me?”  He asked Peter for his love.  And Jesus asks you for your love.

There IS a great need for workers!  For pastors, teachers, for helpers in the church, for people to help the poor, right here and around the world. But Jesus is looking for ONE motive in all his people, in all his workers, in all who serve Him.  He is looking for people who love him!  THAT is the qualification behind all other qualifications. Jesus doesn’t ask you if you are smart or beautiful or talented or eloquent, or if you have a great personality.  He asks, “Do you love me?” 

Alexander McLaren said, “Jesus Christ pleads with each of us, not for primarily for obedience, not for repentance, not for conduct, but for our heart; and if we give him our love, (then) our loyalty and service...will follow.”

Each time Peter answered, “Yes, I love you, Lord”, Jesus said, “Feed my sheep”. Love for Jesus comes BEFORE doing things for Jesus.  But love DOES compel us to do things for Him.  Jesus could have said, if you love me, pray, or give, or serve, or teach SS, go love people, love your wife and family. Christ wants love to compel everything we do for Him.  

Jesus was in the house of a Pharisee named Simon.  There was a woman in the town who had lived a sinful life. She came with a jar of very expensive perfume, and began to wet Jesus’ feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head and kissed his feet and anointed them with her perfume. Simon condemned Jesus for letting her do that. 

“But Jesus said, You did not greet Me with a kiss, but she has not stopped kissing My feet since I arrived. You did not anoint My head with oil but she has anointed My feet with perfume. Therefore I tell you, because her many sins have been forgiven, she has loved much.”  Simon lived a more righteous and respectable life but he didn’t love Jesus much so he didn’t do much for Jesus!

But this woman loved Jesus much because he forgave her MANY sins. And because she loved him, she poured out her expensive perfume on Jesus. And I don’t think she worried about the cost of her perfume!  Her love for Jesus moved her to worship. Love moved her to express that love.  

Love stirs us to action!  Laws and commands alone, can’t do that!  Paul said “For the sake of your souls, I will most gladly spend my money and myself. If I love you more, will you love me less?”  Basically Paul was saying  I am happy to pour out myself and my money for you BECAUSE I love you!  

If you love the Lord Jesus Christ, worship and obedience will come naturally like good fruit on a good tree.  

When people are NOT interested in prayer, or fellowship, or serving, or church or worship, or the Bible, or whatever, we tend to thing people just need a kick in the pants. We think they need a more severe sermon from the pastor.  The need is a heart that loves Jesus! Love is what drives the bus.  Love is what compels our work and faithfulness to Jesus and to his church!  The goal of the gospel is to get people to love Jesus!  

Hudson Taylor said, “I besought Him to give me some work for Him, as an outlet for my love and gratitude; some self-denying service, no matter what it might be, however trying or however trivial.”  That is the cry of a heart that loves Jesus!

Calvin said this about pastors, “No man will steadily persevere in the duties of this office, unless the love of Christ shall reign in his heart, in such a way that he forgets himself and devotes himself entirely to Christ.”  “On the other hand Paul said the mark of ungodly and false teachers is that they do not love the Lord Jesus.”  1 Corinthians 16:22 “If anyone does not love the Lord, let him be under a curse.” Calvin went on to say, this solemn close to the letter “was designed to direct them to the great and essential matter of (Christianity), the love of the Lord Jesus.”

Peter wrote to the early Christians, “Though you have not seen Him, you love Him; and though you do not see Him now, you believe in Him and rejoice with an inexpressible and glorious joy.”  Two things stand out: One, Peter knew these people loved Jesus!  He didn’t say I want you to love Jesus.  He said although you haven’t seen him, you love him!  The early church loved him!  The more that we are a NT church, an apostolic church, the more we are in line with the NT the more we will be a church that loves Jesus.  And second: Love for Jesus gave them joy inexpressible and full of glory EVEN in their fiery trials.

*Without love for Jesus, the Christian life becomes a dead legalism, a forced duty.  John said, “And his commandments are NOT burdensome.” Sam Storms “What would MAKE them burdensome?”  It is simply having to do something we don’t WANT to do. Or we want to do something very much and being told NOT to do it.  But when we love God, we WANT to do what pleases him! 

I read somewhere that there are 3 forms of obedience.

• I have to because someone puts a gun to my head
• I have to because it is my duty.  I don't like it but I'll do it.
• I have to because Jesus is the joy and the love of my life. 

People often quote Augustine who said “Love God and do whatever you will.” But his full quotation was, “Love God and do whatever you please: for the soul trained in love to God will do nothing to offend the One who is Beloved.”  When you decide you are going to love the Lord it just simplifies your life.  I’m here to love Jesus, today tomorrow and the next day.   There is such liberty in loving God! 

So let’s get to the real need in our lives.  It is not first just to do more, pray more, read more give more, get to church more.  The real need is hearts filled with the Spirit and the fire of the gospel, to have hearts that love the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.   

Jesus said this is first and greatest commandment. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind.  The second is to love your neighbor as yourself and you can’t separate those commands but there is an order.  Loving God is first. Everything flows from that!  

**How do we become people who love God first and in this total way?  We respond to the love God has for us. It starts with God’s love for us. The Christian life begins with us NOT loving God, at all!  John said, “It is not that we loved God but that he loved us and gave His Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.”  “We love because GOD loved us FIRST”.

Our salvation and our safety with God is NOT earned by how strong OUR love is for God, but it’s based on HIS love for us and WHAT he DID because he loved us.  God’s love for you is not based on how much love you FEEL for him at a given moment.  He loved you BEFORE you loved him. 

Alexander Mclaren “We have a Gospel that is worth preaching, (because) we can come to men who have no love in their hearts, and say, ‘Brothers, listen to this-you have to bring nothing, you do not have to originate affection for God; you have nothing to do but simply to receive the everlasting love of God in Christ His Son.”  No one loves God except the one who has first learned that God loves him (or her).” 

This is why the emphasis in the New Covenant is the love God has for us!  2 Thess. 2:13 “We thank God for you brothers, WHO are loved by the Lord.”  Who are we?  We are those who are loved by God.

John said, “We have believed and come to know the love that God has for us.”  4:16  That is how we learn to love God! 

We look at God, suffering for us, in Christ, on the cross.  God in Christ, mocked for us, beaten for us, rejected for us, bleeding for us, becoming cursed for us, dying for us. And we see real love! We see Someone who loves us totally, deeply, at ANY cost to himself.  And we are moved, stunned, compelled to love Him back.  Our indifference toward God, is changed into passionate love for God.  And God’s love for us becomes the driving force of our lives.  

That’s what Paul meant when he said “The love of Christ compels us, because we are convinced that One died for all, therefore all died. And He died for all, so that those who live, should not longer live for themselves but for him who died for them...and was raised again.” 2 Cor. 5:14,15 

*Second: We are able to love God because God puts that love in us.  Deut. 30:6  “The LORD your God will circumcise your hearts... and you will love Him with all your heart and with all your soul, so that you may live.”  What is God doing inside you? He is working to help you to love Him with all your heart!  

Galatians 4:6 God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” God puts that cry in you. God gives you this heart attachment to the Father in YOUR heart!  The Spirit of Jesus has come into your heart to CAUSE you to love the Father just like he does!  He creates in your heart a longing, a desire, a love for your heavenly Father.  He removes the fear, the apprehension, the sense of bondage, or rejection.  And warms your heart with love for God so that you cry out Abba Father.

That is an encouragement to give yourself over to loving God. Because the Holy Spirit is working into you that love.  Maybe you know someone or you have read Christian biography, and you think that person really loves Jesus. I wish I loved the Lord like that. Well if you have the Spirit, He is the same Spirit that other person has, and you just give yourself over to the work of the Spirit in you. Respond to those Holy Spirit promptings to love the Lord with all your heart and soul!

*Because our love for the Lord is a response to His love for us, we need to pray for a greater revelation of God’s love. We grow in our love to God by greater revelation of His love for us. God’s love for us is so great and so far beyond any kind of love we’ve experienced in this world that we need His help to understand it. 

Paul said, “I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, in knowing God.”  The word is apocalypse. It means “an unveiling, uncovering, or revealing.”  This is a prayer for God to uncover something, to show you something that you just couldn’t see or understand before.

It’s God showing us something that we may have heard over and over but we just never got it, we just never owned it.  It never became ours. 

Paul used this word in Phil. 3:15 “All of us who are mature should embrace this point of view. And if you think differently, God will “reveal” this to you as well.”  He was just saying God will show you this.  That’s what Paul was praying for.  We need God to reveal or unveil his love to us!

We all need it.  Every single one of us.  Some of us, for whatever reason, desperately need it.  Whether due to something in our past or something we’re going through, some really need an unveiling of the love of God. 

Paul goes on in chapter 3, “I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”   IE The love of God is so big, so strong, so above and beyond any other kind of love, that we actually have to pray in order to comprehend it!  

When I was a little boy, my mother used to wake us up in the morning by playing a song on the record player.  There was one I really liked but she hadn’t played.  So I asked her to play that song that says “we shall run around”.  Well, mother finally figured out the words were NOT we shall run around but “in the New Jerusalem we shall wear a crown.”  I couldn’t grasp the idea of wearing a crown in the New Jerusalem. It was so far outside my experience as a little boy. All I heard was “we shall run around”.  That was where I was at in life.  

I really think that same kind of thing is true for many Christians.  Something like that happens to many of us.  God says, I LOVE you.  And it doesn’t register because we are so focused on our own issues, and our feelings of rejection or jealousy, or insecurity. We don’t really hear God’s love or receive it in our heart. Because we are living in another realm. That’s why we need to pray for revelation, for our ears to be opened, to eyes to see, the love God has for us.  

Pray like this! Psalm 143:8 “Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love”. Or Psalm 90 “O satisfy us in the morning with your loving-kindness”  These are prayers to know and experience the love of God!  We should pray like that because we need this heart experience of being satified with God’s love.  I ask you: in your heart are you deeply and richly satisfied with the love of God?  If you need more of that, pray for that.

*We grow in our love for God by thinking about his love.  (meditating, dwelling on it)   HIS love for you must become your focus, you must drink this in.  The word loving-kindness or steadfast love is used 128 times in the Psalms.  “Think about His love”.  “So great is the measure of our Father’s love!”

*And there is a choice involved.  We come to love Jesus by choosing to love him.  Jesus said, “Do you love me?”.  Every man and woman, every boy or girl, teenager has to make that choice.  It’s not something somebody else can do for you.  It’s a decision you make that I want to be somebody who loves Jesus with all my heart. 

*And there is a place for repenting when we have lost the zeal or fire of our first love for him. Jesus said to the church at Ephesus, “You have persevered and endured many things for the sake of My name. But I have this against you. You have abandoned the love you had at first.” 

This church had sound doctrine, they did good works, they endured hard things but they had lost the first love they had for the Lord and for each other.   The solution Jesus gave them was pretty simple: Therefore, keep in mind how far you have fallen. (Sometimes we have to make an accurate assessment of how far we are from where we should be.) Repent and perform the deeds you did at first.  Love like you did at the first.

There is a time to get our our knees and face the reality that we have NOT loved Jesus or others like we should, or like we did at first.  To go back of the lukewarmness in our hearts. 

Two ways we show our love for the Lord. *We show our love for Jesus by obedience.   Jesus said, “If you love me keep my commands”.  John 14:23,24 Jesus said, “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching”…. And  “Anyone who does not love me will not obey my teaching.”

Jesus asked Peter, “Do you love me?” But he went on to tell him to live that out!   “If you love me go take care of my people!”  If you love Jesus go live for him.  Go care about what he cares about.  Go and love his church, serve his people, build them up.  Give, love, pray, take care of your family, go do your job as unto him! And because you love him!  

*You show your love to the Lord, by telling Him you love him. Tell the Lord Jesus you love him. Make that part of your prayer life.  Of course, you don’t love Him absolutely perfectly, neither did Peter. Peter had denied that he even knew Jesus! But just a few days later he said,  “Yes, Lord you know that I love you”.  I think that was important for Peter to verbalize, to say, “Yes Lord, I do love You!”.  David begins Psalm 18:  “I love you, O Lord, my strength!”  Guys, You don’t go around telling your wife how much you don’t love her.  You practice speaking and acting as a loving husband.  

Word’s matter.  God tells us He loves us over and over. So we should respond, “Yes Lord, I love you.”  

So my prayer this morning is: May the Spirit of love for the Lord fall upon this church in a mighty and powerful way.  May we be a church that loves Jesus with all our heart and soul and mind and strength.