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When God is Big... is a sermon series examining what happens when you have a bigger vision of who God is. Community is Unbreakable — When God is small, our emotions and desires become very great. Shared preferences become almost a prerequisite for relationships. However, the Bible defines love as self-sacrificing action for the benefit of another. Love is rooted in who God is and should be the defining mark of the Christian community. Recorded on Sep 19, 2021, on 1 John 4:7-21, by Pastor David Parks. Sermon Transcript All year, we’re focusing on The Greatness of God. And today, we’re continuing a sermon series we started last week, called When God is Big… Way too many Christians have way too small a view of who God is. But when God is small, not necessarily in reality but in your mind/imagination, that has a direct impact on your life. Even though you might believe in God, when God is small, other things become big. Your circumstances, emotions, and failures can not only become big, they can become all-consuming. But what happens when God is big? What happens when you have a better/truer/bigger vision of who God is? Well, in this series, we’ve started with our four core values of worship, community, ministry, and mission. Our values change with a bigger vision of God. Then, after that, we’ll consider three issues that people in/outside the church struggle with today including fear, personal identity, and addiction. When God is big, it changes how we live out our values and how we deal with our issues. So today, we’ll move from worship last week to community this week. What should our relationships be like in the church? What defines them? Well, my goal for today is that you would see that when God is big…community is unbreakable because it is marked by the very love of God. Please open your Bible/app to 1Jn 4, starting with v. 7. 1 John 4:7–12, “7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.” Let’s pause here. So the Apostle John is sometimes known as the Apostle of love. Does anyone have any idea how he could’ve picked up that nickname? Love is a central theme of John’s gospel and his epistles/letters, such as this. I like to point out the fact that John didn’t start out as overly loving. He was a young man when Jesus called him and his brother, James, to follow him. They were initially known as the sons of thunder and at one point asked Jesus if they should call down fire from heaven on a town that had rejected Jesus. Not the most likely candidate to be known as the apostle of love later in life. But that’s the impact that Jesus has on people — he changes us. But here, we have a very famous passage where John says that God isn’t just loving in his character. But rather, he says that God is love. Look again at v.8 “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” And modern people love that idea, that God is love. However, C.S. Lewis pointed out that most modern people (of course, he pointed this out in the 1940s and ’ ’50s) believe in something more like love is God, not God is love. In Mere Christianity, Lewis writes, “They [modern people] really mean that our feelings are love, however and wherever they arise, and whatever results they produce, are to be treated with great respect. Perhaps they are: but that is something quite different from what Christians mean by the statement ‘God is love’.” (p. 174-175) Now,