Dardanelle Missionary Baptist Church — Dardanelle, Arkansas
Pastor Chuck Trusty — Sunday morning service, August 23, 2026 Understanding Christian Love · A3 D6–D7 (merged) · 1 John 4:7–8
► Watch this lesson on video (40:31)
The One Point
Love grows when we stay close to its Source.
The Thread
Two Sundays ago we stood at the well. Love flows one direction — from God, through us, to our neighbour — and we are only the bucket. Last Sunday, morning and night, we stepped back onto the staircase and learned that brotherly kindness is family love that climbs one step past our own front door. And tonight, Lord willing, that staircase reaches its very top step: charity.
So this morning, before we stand at the top of the staircase tonight, we come back to the love series and settle the two questions underneath every step of that climb. Where does this love actually come from — and how does a man get more of it?
Here is the question we are going to answer. If real love does not come to us naturally — and it does not — then where do we go to get the love God commands us to have for one another? He does not only command us to love one another. He commands us to love our enemies. Now wait a minute. How in the world are we supposed to manage that?
The Text
“Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love” (1 John 4:7–8).
John puts both halves of this morning in one breath. Where does this kind of love come from? It is of God — that is the source. And who walks in it? The one that knoweth God — that is the nearness.
Source, then closeness. That is the whole lesson, and now we will prove it.
The only way to fill a bucket with water from a well is to put the bucket in the well. If we never get the bucket close to the well, the water that is in the well will never get in the bucket. If we ever want to grow in Christian love, it is not going to happen while we keep our distance from God. The only way to grow in love is to get closer and closer to Him.
The Word Itself
John’s word for this love is agape — love that gives without needing anything back. For the youngest ones in the room: it is not the love we fall into naturally, the way we naturally love our own families. It is the love that picks up a towel and washes feet.
You remember when the Lord washed the disciples’ feet. I am going to chase a rabbit here — that is not a third ordinance given to the church. All in the world it was, was an illustration of humility. The God-man who had the power to speak worlds into existence knelt down and washed the feet of sinners. He washed the feet of the man who was about to deny Him. And what prompted it was the kind of love God has toward those who do not love Him back.
Mark this. The Bible never asks us where we feel this love. It tells us where this love lives. It is of God.
Truth One: It Is Not in Us by Nature
We are factory-set for selfishness.
Think about what that term means. An automobile comes off the line with certain settings put in at the factory. Well, at our factory we were set for self — set to put self above everybody else. Nobody ever had to teach a toddler to say mine. Watch the little ones. Somebody has a toy and it is mine, mine. Nobody taught that. And nobody had to teach you and me how to be selfish either.
So if agape were a natural kind of love, John would not have had to command it of us.
Christian love is supernatural — by which I mean it is a love from above. It originates with God. It flows from God. And it is impossible without God. A lost man cannot love the way we are describing. And truth be known, it is a real struggle for a saved man to practice this love with any consistency.
Truth Two: He Moved First
“We love him, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
The word that carries the weight in that verse is first. He moved before we did. Our love is never the opening move; it is always the answer to His.
A well does not thank the bucket for the water it contains. The bucket thanks the well.
Truth Three: Love Is Evidence, Never Condition
Love is the evidence of salvation. It is never the condition of it.
Now read that eighth verse carefully — “he that loveth not knoweth not God.” That is not telling us that if I fail to love the way I ought, I must not be saved. It is telling us something else. If we love in a worldly way and do not love the way a Christian should — if we are not growing in love, if we are weak in it — that does not mean we are not saved. It means we are not as familiar with God as we ought to be.
Put a man fifty feet away from you. You can see him and you can probably tell who he is, but you miss most of the details. The closer you get, the more you see. That is exactly the idea about getting close to God. The nearer we are to Him, the more we will value what He values; the further away, the less.
And here is where that lands. God loved each individual person enough to die on the cross for his sins. When we picture the person we would like to choke half to death — not literally, but you know what I mean — and then we remember that Jesus died to pay for that person’s sins, we start to look at him in a different light. We begin to see him a little more the way God sees him. And that is what causes love to grow. That is what I mean by getting closer to the Source.
We do not love our way into the family of God. We love because we have been born into it — “every one that loveth is born of God.” It does not run the other way. We walk because we have legs; we did not grow legs so that we could walk.
So when a saved man fails in love, the phrase “knoweth not God” speaks of distance in fellowship, not of damnation. Cold love is a symptom of a far walk. It is not the symptom of a lost soul.
Dwelling, Not Visiting
“And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him” (1 John 4:16).
The word that does the work here is dwelleth — meno, which means to stay, to abide, to make our home. The simplest way I know to say it is that there is a difference between visiting a house and living in it.
Love does not grow where we visit God. Love grows where we live with Him. It is the difference between God is part of my life and God is my life. Is our wife part of our life, or is our wife our life?
And growth is slow on purpose. Contrary to popular opinion, salvation is the seed going into the ground — not the harvest. Salvation is not a fruit we finally reach up and pick and then it is all over with.
Seeds work underground first, slow and invisible. Then a shoot breaks through. Then a stalk. Then, eventually, fruit. Knowledge grows the same way. Strength grows. Wisdom grows. Love is exactly the same, and nobody can rush a harvest. You can sit and stare at the ground all day and it will not sprout one minute sooner.
Think about school — kindergarten through four years of college and beyond, master’s degree, doctorate. How long does it take? Sixteen years and more, and nobody says there is something wrong with you for it. Some things are intended to take place slowly.
Three truths, one case. Love lives in God. He loved first. Therefore more love only ever comes from being closer.
The Footprints
Let me show you what closeness actually looks like, out in a field a long time ago.
When I was little, I thought my dad was the greatest thing since sliced bread. I practically worshipped Daniel Boone, but I knew without a doubt my dad could take Daniel Boone without much of a struggle.
I used to walk through the field behind him. He had a long stride — steady, purposeful — and I did my best to walk just like him. I stepped where he stepped. I watched where his feet went.
And here is the thing. When I was right behind him — close enough to see the print of his foot pressed down in the grass — it was easy. I still had to stretch to reach, but I could see exactly where he had been and put my own feet in the same places. But when I got distracted, when I looked off somewhere else and fell behind and let the distance grow, those footprints got harder to find. The grass does not stay scrunched down forever; it starts springing back up. And if I drifted far enough back, I could not find them at all.
That is precisely what John is teaching us. Close to God, His character is clear. We see what He values, how He responds, where He is stepping — and walking like Him becomes possible. Not perfect. But real.
Drifted away from God, we are trying to copy footsteps we can no longer see. Do me a favour: pull out a songbook or your Bible and try to read it with your eyes closed. You cannot. And a man who says he wants to follow a God he can barely make out on the horizon is not going to follow Him. “No man can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24). We will serve the God we are interested in. We will serve the God we love most.
The Campfire
Or take a cool night around a campfire. Right next to the fire we are warm. Step back a few feet and we feel it immediately — not gradually, immediately. Cooler, dimmer, colder.
Now mark this. The fire did not go out. The fire did not change at all. We moved.
And if the warmth of God’s love feels distant this morning — if loving people feels harder than it used to — the question is never what is wrong with God today? That borders on blasphemy. The question is: how far have we moved?
A child can carry both pictures home in one hand. Stay close enough to see the footprints. Stay close enough to feel the fire.
The Mechanics of Staying Near
If closeness is what grows love, then the practices that keep us close are the practices that grow love. These are not rules for the sake of rules. They are the mechanics of staying near the fire.
Prayer, because we cannot walk closely with Someone we never talk to.
The Word, because that is where His character is on display, and we cannot imitate what we have not seen. I do not know about the rest of you, but the older I get the shorter my memory runs. I will pass a car on the road and decide to make myself remember the license plate — six or seven numbers — and five minutes later I could not tell it to save my life. We cannot imitate what we cannot see. If we do not look in the Book, we do not see Jesus Christ; and if we do not see Him, we cannot imitate Him from memory.
Obedience, because every act of it is one step nearer, and every act of disobedience is one step further. Get out on the highway and drive. It does not matter who you are or how long you have been driving, you will not hold the car perfectly equidistant between the lines. You veer a little; somebody comes along and you get back over; you drift toward the centre line and catch yourself. And every so often you hit those rumble strips and they bring you back where you belong. That is what obedience does. It keeps us, as nearly as is humanly possible, between the lines.
The church. Answer me this. We are talking about love — can love exist when there is only one person? I am not talking about love of self. If there is only one person, love cannot exist; the very definition requires at least two. God grows love in us through one another. Nobody grows in love alone.
What Happens When We Do
The solution is never try harder to love. I have been guilty of that — I am going to live a better Christian life, I am just going to strain and grunt real hard. The solution is always to get closer to the Source.
And we can be comfortable and mistaken about even that. Sometimes we pat ourselves on the back because the well is right here and we are sitting beside it with the bucket in our hand — and we never take the trouble to lower the bucket in.
But when we do:
Difficult people get easier, because we start seeing them through His eyes. God died for the man you cannot stand.
Forgiveness gets faster, because we are living in forgiveness ourselves. The Lord said if we do not forgive men their trespasses, our own will not be forgiven. And if anybody wants to answer, well, preacher, I am practically perfect, God does not have much to forgive me for — that man is in trouble.
Patience gets deeper, because we are drawing from a deeper well. Have you ever tried to dip water out of a shallow pan with a big bucket? You can get the bucket in, but you cannot get much water. Patience gets deeper when there is enough water to sink the whole bucket.
Drift Is Fixable
If there is anybody here this morning whose love has gone cold — and I am sure I am not the only one this describes — that does not mean we are lost. It does not mean we were never saved. It means we are guilty of drift, and drift is what we all do. Do not sit there and tell me you have never wandered outside the lines. We all have.
But drift is fixable.
Think about a homing pigeon. No matter how far that bird has travelled, it needs no map to get home. Turn it loose and it heads for home, because the way home is built into the bird.
Every saved person has Someone built in — the Spirit of God — who always knows the way back to the Father. Who always knows: I am past the line, I am on the rumble strip, and here is exactly what I need to do to get back.
We do not need to add a program to the church. We need to be turned loose toward home. Back to prayer. Back to the Book. Back to God’s house. Back to the fire.
Homework
How far are we from the fire this morning? Be honest — and remember that first on the list of the seven things God hates is pride, so we need not go any further than that. How far are we from the fire, and which step back toward it will we take first?
Two things this week, with shoes on.
First, ten unhurried minutes a day close to Him — Book open, and a prayer that is honest about our condition. Confess it, and He is very quick to forgive. And not I will do that on Sunday, preacher. All seven days.
Second, each of us pick the one person we find hardest to love. There is a one person in everybody’s life. Pick that name, and watch what nearness to God does to the way we look at that same person by the time next Saturday gets here.
The Close
The one point of our lesson this morning was: love grows when we stay close to its Source.
Stay close to God, and love will take care of itself. Take care of the pennies and the dollars take care of themselves.
Tonight, Lord willing, the staircase reaches its top step — charity, the love that keeps giving when nothing comes back. And I will tell you plainly, I have many failures in my life. It is easy to love those who love us back. But the single hardest thing we will ever do as Christians is to act in the best interest of those who do not love us at all. I have had people do bad things to me. It is a challenge. God commands this love, and He gives it — if we are willing to be close to Him.
Scripture Used
1 John 4:7–8 · 1 John 4:19 · 1 John 4:16 · Matthew 6:24 (all KJV)
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