1. "When your tank of love for God seems to have run dry, how can it be refilled? When the fire of your love for God is faint and flickering, how can that flame be kindled again?"

2. "Before you could love Him or hate Him, God loved you. Before you chose Him, God loved you. When you had nothing to commend you and everything to condemn you, God loved you. When you were unlovely and unloving, God loved you."

3. "Dig as deep as you can into the history of this universe and into the story of your own existence and underneath every layer that you can peel off or peer through, you will find this written in unfading ink: God loved you first."

4. "God loves us welling up from the infinite depths of his own divine being. God loves us freely. God loves us unchangeably. God loves us eternally. Because God is love, God's love for you will never run dry."

5. "The God whose very being is an infinite ocean of love, eternally flowing from Father to Son and from Father and Son to Holy Spirit—this God has made a way for you to dive into that love and be immersed in it forever."

6. "Knowing you are loved is a far more powerful motive than trying to earn love."

7. "God himself gives us the love with which we love him and others. The love that we offer back to God is the overflow of his own infinite existence as uncreated, unbounded love."

8. "To kindle a fire you need a flame that burns big enough, close enough, and long enough. How big a flame is God's love? It's as big as himself. God is love."

9. "Your sin can't make God stop loving you because it wasn't your righteousness that made him start loving you. He has always loved you and he loves you because he loves you."

10. "If your love for God is running low, draw near to the flame of his uncaused, unconstrained, unending love for you."

Observation Questions

1. According to 1 John 4:13, what has God given us that allows us to know we abide in Him and He in us?

2. In 1 John 4:16, what two things does John say are true of "whoever abides in love"?

3. What does 1 John 4:18 say about the relationship between fear and love, and what does fear have to do with?

4. According to 1 John 4:19, what is the reason given for why "we love"?

5. In 1 John 4:20, what does John call someone who says "I love God" but hates his brother, and what reasoning does he give for this?

6. What commandment does John state in 1 John 4:21 for whoever loves God?

Interpretation Questions

1. Why is the order emphasized in verse 19 ("He first loved us") so significant for understanding both our salvation and our ongoing relationship with God?

2. How does the statement "God is love" (verse 16) differ from saying "God loves" or "God is loving," and what does this reveal about the nature of God's love for us?

3. According to the passage and the sermon, why is it impossible to genuinely love God while hating fellow believers, and how do these two loves relate to each other?

4. How does verse 18's teaching that "perfect love casts out fear" connect to verse 17's promise of "confidence for the day of judgment"?

5. The sermon emphasized that God's love "precedes, enables, and kindles" our love. How does this three-fold understanding of God's love challenge the idea that we must earn God's love or make ourselves lovable before He will accept us?

Application Questions

1. When you find your love for God growing cold or your spiritual energy depleted, what specific practices could you implement this week to meditate on and remember God's prior love for you?

2. The sermon noted that simply showing up to gather with God's people is an act of love. In what concrete ways can you demonstrate love for your church family this week beyond just attending—especially toward those who may be struggling or isolated?

3. Is there a fellow believer you have been harboring resentment, frustration, or coldness toward? What step could you take this week to pursue reconciliation or demonstrate love, recognizing that your love for God is connected to your love for His people?

4. The sermon asked: "What does your heart go out to? What are you irresistibly drawn to?" Take an honest inventory—what competes most strongly with your love for God, and what would it look like to reorder that affection this week?

5. How might the truth that "your sin can't make God stop loving you because it wasn't your righteousness that made Him start loving you" change how you approach God after you fail or struggle spiritually?

Additional Bible Reading

1. Deuteronomy 7:6–11 — This passage, referenced in the sermon, explains that God's love for Israel was not based on their merit but on His own sovereign choice and faithfulness.

2. Romans 5:6–11 — Paul demonstrates that God's love was shown to us while we were still sinners and enemies, reinforcing that His love precedes any response from us.

3. Ephesians 2:1–10 — This passage describes our spiritual deadness before conversion and how God, because of His great love, made us alive in Christ—illustrating how God's love enables our love.

4. John 15:9–17 — Jesus teaches His disciples to abide in His love and commands them to love one another, connecting divine love received to love expressed toward others.

5. 1 John 3:1–3 — This earlier passage in John's letter marvels at the kind of love the Father has given us in making us His children, expanding on the theme of God's initiating love.

Sermon Main Topics

I. The Draining Effects of the Pandemic on Our Lives

II. God's Love Precedes Our Love (1 John 4:19)

III. God's Love Enables Our Love

IV. God's Love Kindles Our Love

V. Finding Stability in God's Unchanging Love

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Detailed Sermon Outline

Is your tank near empty?

Over the past few weeks and months, I've had my share of pandemic fatigue, being tired from the pandemic and tired of the pandemic. Like many of you, I've experienced different drains on my energy that I'm not used to. There are so many ways this pandemic can drain away your energy. Having to keep going to your workplace but under more dangerous conditions. Working from home where everything blurs together.

Caring for kids who are cooped up and missing their friends. Canceled trips and vacations. Lost time with extended family. Kids. Maybe you were or soon will be having to do school by screen.

That's hard. It's hard to stare at a screen for hour upon hour. There are fewer, shorter and more distracted church gatherings. Constant hard decisions about who to see, how close to get and with what precautions. And there's the ever-present fear of getting sick or getting others sick.

You might be feeling drained physically, mentally, emotionally, relationally or all of the above.

But I'm most concerned about whether you are drained spiritually.

When your tank of love for God seems to have run dry, how can it be refilled? When the fire of your love for God is faint and flickering, how can that flame be kindled again?

If you have a Bible, please turn with me to 1 John. It's right near the end of the Bible, shortly before Revelation. 1 John 419 is the text for this sermon. I'll read verses 13 to 21 to provide the context.

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 His Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God.

And God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, I love God and hates his brother, he is a liar.

For he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.

I'll read verse 19 again. We love because he first loved us. There you go, now you've memorized the verse. That's all it took. And what a verse it is.

Carry this verse with you all week. Keep it in your pocket throughout the day. When your love for God burns low, pull out this verse and pour on fuel. What does 1 John 4:19 teach us? God's love precedes, enables, and kindles our love.

God's love precedes, enables, and kindles our love. First point one, God's love precedes our love. We love because he first loved us.

Who is the we here? It's Christians, all believers. Christians are known by love, marked by love, defined by love. Verse 19 simply says, We love. It doesn't spell out who we love.

I think the primary focus of the verse is our love for God. Consider the nearly identical statement back in verse 10: which focuses on our love for God. In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

Of course, as John says in the broader passage we've just read, to be a Christian is to love both God and God's people. If you say you love God but do not love God's people, you are deceiving both yourself and others. But God's love for you always comes first. Think back to some of the phrases we just confessed a moment ago in our article on God's purpose of grace in our church's statement of faith. We believe that election is the eternal purpose of God according to which he graciously regenerates sanctifies and saves sinners, that it is a most glorious display of God's sovereign goodness, being infinitely free, wise, holy, and unchangeable, that it utterly excludes boasting and promotes humility, love, prayer, praise, trust in God, and active imitation of His Free mercy.

The main point of the doctrine of election is this: God loved you first.

Before you could love Him or hate Him, God loved you. Before you chose Him, God loved you. When you had nothing to commend you and everything to condemn you, God loved you. When you were unlovely and unloving, God loved you. Before you existed, God eternally set his affection on you.

Dig as deep as you can into the history of this universe and into the story of your own existence and underneath every layer that you can peel off or peer through, you will find this written in unfading ink: God loved you first.

The theologian Gerhardus Vos has written, the best proof that he will never cease to love us lies in that he never began.

And God himself, proclaims in Jeremiah 31 verse three, I have loved you with an everlasting love.

But how has God loved us?

God loves us welling up from the infinite depths of his own divine being. God loves us freely. God loves us unchangeably. God loves us eternally. Because God is love, God's love for you will never run dry, but specifically, how has he loved us?

How has his love come to us? Consider these four statements from earlier in 1 John. You can write down the references and kind of glance through a theology of God's love in 1 John 3:1. See what kind of love the Father has given to us that we should be called children of God. And so we are.

3:16. By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. 4:9 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. And again, chapter 4:10, In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us.

And sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. This is exactly the love we all need. By nature, we are all haters of God and rebels against God. What we deserve from God is not love, but hatred. God is our holy creator and our righteous judge.

If we all got what we deserved, we would be condemned to an eternity of torment, of condemnation, of punishment.

But God is love and God loved us first. In love, God the Father sent his son into the world to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. In love, God the son laid down his life for us and bore God's wrath to reconcile us to God. In love, he triumphed over death so that we could be united with his love. In love, he calls you to repent today and embrace his love.

In love, the Holy Trinity purposed eternal life for us and purchased eternal life for us. The God whose very being is an infinite ocean of love, eternally flowing from Father to Son and from Father and Son to Holy Spirit. This God has made a way for you to dive into that love and be immersed in it forever. If you've never turned from sin and trusted in Christ, believe in him today. Commit yourself to him, rely on him alone to save you.

He is your only hope of knowing God, not as a condemning judge, but as the loving Father.

If you're here today and you belong to another religion, we're very glad you're here. You're welcome here in any of our gatherings. What role does love of God play in your religion? What role does you, loving God, play in your day-to-day practice of your religion? What role does being loved by God play in your religion?

Does it seem presumptuous to say that God loves you personally before and apart from anything that you have done for him? It would be presumptuous. If it weren't the truth.

What motivates people to live a good life? What can make people better? Not just outwardly but inwardly? Is it merely knowing and doing your duty? Not by a long shot.

Knowing you are loved is a far more powerful motive than trying to earn love.

Brothers and sisters, members of CHBC, where should you find assurance of your salvation? Our statement of faith, we just confessed, addresses this. When you question whether you are saved, where should you look first and look most? God's love takes first place in your salvation. So it should take first place in your search for assurance.

Find assurance in God's uncaused, unprovoked, unearned love for you. God's love precedes our love. We love because he first loved us. Point two, God's love enables our love. We love because he first loved us.

If God hadn't loved us first, we wouldn't and couldn't. Love him or his people. God's love is what gives us the ability to love.

How exactly does God's love enable our love? Look back at verse 13, 1 John 4:13.

It's one of the few times it might be easier to use a phone or a tablet to read your Bible so the wind doesn't blow it away. 1 John 4:13, By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. God's Spirit lives in us, which means that we live in God and God lives in us.

We live by his power and in His love. Our spiritual life is enabled by, suspended from, and immersed in His own divine life. And then look at verse 16, just a couple verses down. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.

God himself gives us the love with which we love him and others. The love that we offer back to God is the overflow of his own infinite existence as uncreated, unbounded love.

As we saw a couple months ago in my sermon on the fall of man, by nature we are, as our statement of faith says, utterly void of that holiness required by the law of God positively inclined to evil. And as Isaac taught us a couple Sundays ago on regeneration, God is the one who raises us from spiritual death to new life. Again, as our statement of faith says, regeneration consists in giving a holy disposition to the mind and its proper evidence appears in the holy fruits of repentance and faith and newness of life, just like Isaac taught us last week. Or, to boil it all down and put it in 1 John's terms, God's love turns the loveless into lovers.

Over the past few months, our electric kettle has slowly degenerated and died. At first, we'd have to flick the switch a couple of times, you know, put a little weight on it to keep it down.

We would check the specific circuit on the wall that it was attached to, push the little red button, make sure it was operative, but it became clear that the problem wasn't anything else, it was the kettle itself. And then last week, the kettle just quit. If I were an electrician, I might be able to take it apart, get inside there, put some wiring back together, bring it back to life. But of course, I'm not an electrician, so all that I can do is go buy a new one, which I did yesterday at Target.

Brothers and sisters, before you became a Christian, you were just like that broken kettle. No merely outward solution would do. You needed a whole new internal rewiring. And that's exactly what God has done by giving you the new birth and causing his own Spirit to dwell in you so that now, instead of loving the world above all things, you love him.

God's love enables our love.

Point three, God's love kindles our love. Point three, God's love kindles our love. We love because he first loved us. Us. This point is an implication and application of the whole verse and it brings us back to where we started.

When your love for God grows dim, how can you kindle it back to a blazing fire? A couple months ago, our family spent a few days out at a country house in Virginia. One sweltering afternoon, we decided to make s'mores with the kids in an outdoor fireplace. So I set about trying to build a fire. The wood was a little bit damp from recent torrential rains.

My kindling materials were not the best. Nevertheless, I valiantly put in all kinds of sweaty effort for a half hour, repeatedly lighting it, blowing on it, seeing the flames kind of rise up and almost catch and then die away. After a half hour of this, our children began to find it more and more amusing. Although they're sort of covering their faces to try to go easy on dad's ego. Kristen was up in the house about 100 yards away and she could see the pathetic little puffs of smoke periodically trickling out of the chimney.

So she grabbed a cardboard disc that had lain under a take-and-bake pizza. She came out, she rolled it up, she stuffed it in, she lit it, She blew on it and in 30 seconds we had a roaring fire.

What does it take to kindle a fire?

To kindle a fire you need a flame that burns big enough, close enough, and long enough. How big a flame is God's love? It's as big as himself. God is love. How close does God's love get to our hearts?

God's love gets within us, it reshapes us, and it fills us. Whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. Through the gospel, love himself takes up permanent residence within us. And how long does God's love burn? From everlasting to everlasting, the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever.

1 John 4:16, God abides in him. Has God kindled this love in you? Do you love God? Do you love his people? If you answer yes to both of those questions, what evidence in your life backs up those claims?

I well understand and affirm the many reasons why so many of our members feel they can't or shouldn't gather with the church right now. But for you members of CHBC who are here, One evidence of your love for God and his people might simply be that you've showed up today. It's harder to get here, it's hard to have to meet here, even if you feel like you are getting less out of church these days, you are giving something simply by showing up. You're giving the gift of yourself, your presence, to everyone else who's here.

Simply by being here, you are showing love for God and love for his people.

A couple weeks ago, I took my kids fishing with Garth Bear and his son Davis. The river we were fishing on is Tidal. And when we got there, it looked like the water was moving upriver, meaning that the tide would be coming in, getting higher. So I said to Garth, oh, is the tide coming in? And he said, No, no, no, it's not.

Just find a rock right in front of you, see how high the water is, look again in 15 minutes and you'll see it's going out. Sure enough, I pick a rock, I look 15 minutes later and the water's gone down several inches. What I had seen was just the wind blowing on the surface, making the very top layer of the water move when the whole body of water was pulling in the opposite direction.

Sometimes outward behaviors are mere ripples on the surface. They can create an appearance precisely opposite to the reality beneath. Which way does the current of your heart pull?

What you love reveals which way your heart is flowing. And your heart can only flow in one of two directions: toward God or to the world. What does your heart go out to? What are you irresistibly drawn to? Like water raked over a riverbed by a moon that's 238,000 miles away.

If you're a believer in Jesus, what should you do if you find yourself loving what you shouldn't and not loving what you should?

You should meditate on God's love for you. Study His love for you.

Believe his love for you. As Spurgeon put it, love believed is the mother of love returned. God's love for us is the prime motive of our love for him. God's love for us moves our hearts to love him. If you've wandered from God's love, don't think that you need to pass through a spiritual quarantine before you can come back into his presence.

There is no moral or mental purgatory you have to pass through in order to reenter God's love. Your sin can't make God stop loving you because it wasn't your righteousness that made him start loving you. He has always loved you and he loves you because he loves you. As we heard in Deuteronomy 7, he loves you because he is love. If you're discouraged by your circumstances or frustrated by your progress in the faith or lack thereof, know that God is for you.

Despite losses and disappointments, God is no less for you than He was in February. He is no less for you than He was a thousand years before you were born. He will still be for you tomorrow and every day of your life and on the day you die and into eternity.

If your love for God is running low, draw near to the flame. Of his uncaused, unconstrained, unending love for you. God's love kindles our love.

In some ways, this pandemic has radically accelerated the pace of change in our lives. Logistical, even cultural change. People moving away without being able to say goodbye. Having to change some of our most basic and unquestioned routines and habits. Change, change, and more change.

If you're a Christian, do you know what won't change? God's love for you in Christ. That flame never grows dim. That support never gives out. That tie never weakens.

That tank never nears empty. His love, not mine, the resting place, His truth, not mine, the time. Let's pray together.

Heavenly Father, We thank you for loving us first. And we pray that we would love you and love your people. We pray that we would persevere in love. We pray that you would grant us to bear fruits of love. We pray that the love we have for you and for each other would commend your love for the world to those who don't yet trust in Christ.

And we pray all these things in Jesus' name. Amen.