Two weeks ago, Pastor Chuck and I had the privilege of sharing about God’s love with a group of Muslims who were attending a conference in a Muslim majority country. There were 218 Muslims that were part of the conference. At the end of the event, 104 of the attendees gave their lives to Christ, 41% of the Muslims in the audience. They responded because, under Islam, they had no sense that God loved them. Only that they must obey him. But the message of God’s love transformed their thinking, and nearly half the group surrendered themselves to God’s love through Christ. In a Muslim land, this is remarkable. Those who openly profess Christ in that situation invite violence from other Muslims, even murder. So, such a commitment by them is real and serious. The knowledge of God’s love transformed them to be willing to take any risk, to pay any price, in order to truly know God through Jesus Christ.
Today I want to share with you the message I shared with them and the key difference between Islam, other religions, and the Bible.
Many of the concepts taught by many of the world’s religions, specifically, Islam, appear at their surface to be quite similar, if not the same, to concepts in the Bible. This is certainly true regarding teachings about many moral standards and codes of personal behavior. However, the basic fundamentals of the religions of the world and Christianity differ sharply. Probably the most important difference is the teaching about God’s love.
In Hinduism, there are 33 deities in their pantheon, though they do have a supreme diety. But you can’t have a relationship with the one true God. Buddhism has no God, so there is no truly divine love. Taoism and Confucianism also have no personal deity. Islam has a single god, but under Islam you cannot know him or have a relationship with him.
In the Bible, the love of God is given as the reason why God selected a people for Himself to save.
Deuteronomy 4:37 says, “Because He loved your fathers, therefore He chose their decedents after them…”
The Bible notes that God loved His people, though there was nothing special about them.
Deuteronomy 7:7 states, “The Lord did not set his love upon you, nor choose you because you were more in number than any people; for you [were] the fewest of all people….”
Even in the Gospels we see that God’s love for man is given as the primary reason He sent Jesus as the Messiah.
In John 3:16 we read, “For God so loved the world He gave His One and Only Son…”
Also, I John 4:10 says, “This is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
These, and many other passages in the Bible, portray God as loving those who don’t love Him and working to redeem those very same people.
Of course, many people believe that God is compassionate and merciful, along with many other wonderful descriptions of His character. That God is compassionate and merciful is not in question, rather, to whom is He compassionate and merciful, and why? This is the key difference between the world’s religions and the Gospel.
Consider these differences in teachings about God’s love compared to Islam and the Bible:
- First, Islam teaches that God does not love the sinner. But the Bible says God loves us even though we sin.
- Some teach that God’s love is reserved for those who do good. But the Bible teaches that God’s love is for everyone.
- Some teach that God’s people may love him, but obedience is the most important thing. The Bible teaches that God seeks a love relationship with us. Obedience is important, but it must come as a result of God’s love working in us.
Does God Love the Sinner?
The Bible teaches that God loves the sinner. But what is a sinner, exactly? A sinner is a person who violates God’s standards of morality and relationship. The Bible tells us that we are all sinners, no exceptions.
Nowhere in the Quran, Islam’s holy book, is God ever reported to love the sinner or someone who does not love Him first, nor is God’s love ever used as the primary motivation to draw someone close to Him. In contrast, both the Old Testament and New Testament record that God loves everyone regardless of their sin.
Ephesians 2:3-5 says, “But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ.”
Among Christians, there is some disagreement about whether God’s love is conditional or unconditional. I look at it this way: In a general sense, God’s love for the world is unconditional. This is called his Common Grace. He loves all of his creation. However, our experience of his love is conditional. No one without Christ experiences God’s love apart from him. His love is unconditional, but our experience of that love is conditional. When we repent of our sin and submit our lives to him, that experience changes.
In the Bible, God’s love for man is illustrated by His willingness to endure our sin as He waits for us to come to our senses about who He is.
Both Moses and Jesus characterized God as loving the unrighteous and desiring to draw the unrighteous to Himself by means of His love. This is something that other religions do not do.
Take your own normal relationships as an example. Certainly, our ability to love and express our love is imperfect, being that we are only human. Consider: The vast majority of parents love their children unconditionally. Even when their children do wrong, their parents still love them and express their love to them in some fashion. This is true even in the most terrible of circumstances.
You may remember the story of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Dahmer murdered 17 men between 1978 and 1991, often eating their remains. When he was discovered, it was a shock to his father. Though his son had turned to great evil, many years later, Dahmer’s father, Lionel, said, “I still love my son. I’ll always stick by him—I always have.” Believe it or not, this is normal.
The majority of the time, though some parents know their children have filled their lives with evil, they still love them and hope that their expressions of love will eventually turn their children back from the brink of destruction.
Nowhere in Islam is God ever described in this manner. In fact, the opposite is true. He only loves those who obey or love Him first.
I Loved You First, I Can Prove It
Consider this short passage from the Gospels in John 15:12, Jesus said, “Love one another as I have loved you.” In the Gospel, God loves people first, and we are to imitate that love.
The Apostle John wrote in I John 4:10, “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He first loved us…”
In the Gospels, we read about practical demonstrations of God’s love, by God, for everyone. Jesus defined the greatest possible expression of love like this in John 15:13, “Greater love has no one than this, than one lay down his life for his friends.” Then He did something remarkable! He expressed His love for us in an even greater way! He says in Romans 5:8, “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners (God’s enemies!) Christ died for us.”
What Does God Want?
God wants something. Certainly, in the Gospels, God commands obedience, but His primary concern is love. Love and obedience are never separate for Jesus. He loved us and enjoins us to love Him. He says a sign that we love Him is if we obey Him as a response to experiencing His love personally.
The Difficulty of Loving God
Of all of the commands and admonitions in the Bible there is probably one command that stands out as the most difficult of all commands. It’s something that we often think we are doing, but in fact, it’s not something that can be done apart from the power of the Holy Spirit. It is to love the Lord.
Let me show you, from the scripture, why truly loving God is so difficult.
Jesus said this is the greatest commandment, Deuteronomy 6:5, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”
There are three areas in life whereby we are to love the Lord: Heart, Soul (mind), and Strength.
What is the second greatest command?
Leviticus 19:18, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
There is only one problem with these commands. The standard of behavior is us. Let’s take a look at why loving God and others is so difficult.
Our heart
Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”
Our mind
Romans 8:6, “For to set the mind on the flesh is death.”
Our strength
Psalm 31:10, “My strength fails because of my iniquity…”
Our “selves”
Ephesians 4:22, “Put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires.”
If we are corrupt to the core what hope is there for us to truly love God and love others? How can I love God with a deceitful heart, corrupt mind, and failing strength? There is a solution in Jesus Christ.
How did Jesus love others?
John 13:34, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.”
This sounds a lot like Leviticus 19:18, about loving your neighbor. But, in fact, it is different. Listen carefully to what Jesus said.
“Love one another as I have loved you.”
How did Jesus love us? Through the cross! The standard of love in this passage is not us; it’s Jesus. This is why it was a new command.
We are all made in the image of God. If we are his image, designed to reflect him, then we must know how God loves us if we are to imitate that love.
How does God love us?
He loves us with his heart.
Look at II Corinthians 5:17-18. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself”.
Notice that word “Reconcile.” It’s a financial term. It literally means, “An exchange of equal value.” God loves us so much that he considers us as of equal value to his own son. This is how much he loves you.
He loves us with his mind.
His thoughts toward us are always of good and of peace. Jeremiah 29:11
Says, “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the Lord, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.”
He loves us with his strength.
He poured out his strength on the cross.
If we truly want to be people of love, then we need three things. We need to have the heart of God, the mind of God, and the strength of God. Through the Holy Spirit, this is exactly what we have.
We have God’s heart.
Psalm 73:26, “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”
We have God’s mind.
I Corinthians 2:16 – “We have the mind of Christ.”
We have God’s strength.
Philippians 4:13 says, “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” – Better translated to say that we can Endure all things through Christ.
If Jesus endured the cross for us, and he promised in John 14:12 that we would do greater things, then imagine what we could endure for his sake.
The key to loving God is to be empowered by his Holy Spirit to do so. The Holy Spirit is the key to living the Christian life. Through the Spirit, we are empowered and can love the Lord with hisheart, his mind, and his strength.
This love from God and our love for him reveals that we can have a personal relationship with God through Christ. Jeremiah 9:24 says, “Let him who boasts, boast in this, that he knows and understands me…” You can know God. And you can know him intimately.
The notion of having a personal relationship with God is foreign to most religions. Within the world’s holy books, man is not said to have a personal relationship with God, or to know God personally.
The Gospel reveals that man’s purpose is to know God and enjoy a love relationship with Him forever. We obey and serve Him in response to His love. Jesus said in John 15:9-10: “Just as the Father has loved Me, so I have also loved you; abide in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in my love…”
In this passage, the emphasis is on loving God. The concept is not “prove you love me by obeying me”. Rather, the concept is “keeping,” which denotes an action of the heart rather than rote obedience. The Greek word used in this passage for “keep” is Tereo, meaning “to hold onto.” By this means we come to know God and His love for us.
Note these other passages: The prophet Jeremiah said in Jeremiah 24:7, “And I will give them a heart to know me.”
I John 5:20 teaches, “We know that the Son of God is come, and has given us an understanding, that we may know him that is true, and we are in him that is true, [even] in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life.”
God’s People Imitate God’s Love
In 2008 while we were living in Mongolia, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I had sunken into a deep depression, so deep that I was nearly nonfunctional. Thankfully, I had a counselor, pastor, and doctor who each met with me weekly to get me through my condition. During the first meeting with my counselor, he asked me, “What’s life been like for you?” I mumbled out some things, not really coherent. Then he turned to my wife, Diane, and asked, “What’s life been like living with Tom?” She then began to tell him the horror story that it was living with me for the previous few years. As she spoke, I thought to myself, “How does she know this? Why is she speaking this way?” Then, it occurred to me she was paying attention to our marriage. She loved me and had to relate the truth about what my life was like. It was at that moment that I began falling in love with her all over again. Just as I responded to her love with more love from me, so too, our response to God’s love should be more love from us.
A few years later, when we decided to leave our ministry in Mongolia and return to the States, we were being interviewed for a new position with Cru. When the interviewer asked Diane about our lives together, she said, “Tom is my whole life.” I couldn’t believe it. I really began to understand just how much she loved me when she said, “Tom is my whole life.”
Listen, Jesus Christ has made you his whole life. His love for you was demonstrated in the most incredible way. He became human and suffered the most painful death a person can experience to pay for your sin. And he did it because you are his whole life. He rose from the dead, never to die again, so that we can experience his love.
Romans 8:35-39 tells us, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword…No, in all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us, for I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
My friend, what is your response to God’s love for you? Do you want to experience God’s love firsthand? You can! And you can know without any doubt that He loves you and has a plan for your life. Commit your life to follow Jesus today. If we confess our sin and commit ourselves to him, then we can experience God’s love firsthand.
