Good Morning Everyone!
I'm so glad you're all here with us today!
Let's give the Lord a hand clap of praise!
(clapping)
Dear Heavenly Father,
The biggest lie ever told to humanity is that God doesn’t care about
you or your problems. That is a lie from Satan himself that he has
spread for generation.
And for generation people have said “God doesn’t care” and he doesn’t understand how miserable my life is, but he does.
Let
me say this: The wrath of God has not fallen upon us, but on Jesus at
his cross. Our savior absorbed into himself the justice we deserve. Now
we receive what we don’t deserve, our Father’s compassion and his gift
of eternal life.
It seems that we can only praise the creator when we are feeling blessed.
Do we only believe he is great when he gives us our daily bread and heals are aching bodies?
Is not the Creator great from everlasting to everlasting?
John 3:16
EXPERIENCING GOD’S LOVE:
The topic of God’s
love is truly an overwhelming subject to try and tackle in only one
message. There is so much that the Bible has to say about the love of
God that I doubt anyone has ever come close to fully comprehending it.
John 3:16
In John 3:16 Jesus said,
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."
It is only one sentence. And that sentence
contains only twenty-five words. Yet that one sentence is packed with
so much truth that we literally will not have time to fully unpack its
contents this morning.
But I will try. From this one verse we can find at least seven truths about the love of God.
THE LOVE OF GOD IS UNCONDITIONAL. For God so loved the world,
The
Greek word for world, kosmos, is defined as “the ungodly multitude; the
whole mass of men alienated from God and therefore hostile to the cause
of Christ.”
This is the world that God loved.
It doesn’t say that God loved all the good people.
Or that God loved all the Jews.
Or that God loved all the saints. It says, “For God so loved the world.”
So
God’s love clearly isn’t based on our spiritual condition or our moral
predisposition. It isn’t based on our behavior or our attitude toward
him.
Rather we see here that God’s love for mankind is universal
and unconditional. He loves everyone. And this is one of the things that
set him apart from every other god held up by every other world
religion.
What is unique about Christianity? "The answer is Grace.”
Christianity uniquely claims God’s love comes free of charge, no strings attached. No other religion makes that claim.
Buddhists, for example, follow an eight-fold path to enlightenment. It’s not a free ride.
Hindus believe in karma, that your actions continually affect the way
the world will treat you; that there is nothing that comes to you not
set in motion by your actions.
Someone else observed the Jewish code of the law implies God has requirements for people to be acceptable to him.
And in Islam God is a God of judgment not a God of love. You live to appease him
Only Christianity dares to proclaim God’s love is unconditional.
An
unconditional love that we call grace, grace is all about God and God
freely giving to us the gifts of forgiveness, mercy and love.
So God’s love for us is unconditional.
It is as Philip Yancey once wrote:
"There is nothing we can do to make God love us more. There is nothing we can do to make God love us less.”
But this doesn’t mean that a person can continue in sin and please God, God’s love helps us to turn from sin.
THE LOVE OF GOD IS SACRIFICIAL:
He gave
God shows us that true love has nothing to do with what you can do for God, but everything to do with what God can do for you.
And what are the results of God’s sacrificial love?
When we repent and turn to God our sin is forgiving and transformed from us to Jesus who paid the price for our forgiveness.
"Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends. You are My friends if you do whatever I command you."
John 15:13-14
THE LOVE OF GOD IS VALUABLE:
Here we see the value of the
Father’s love for us. Not only was he willing to give, but we see here
that he was willing to give his best.
When you give to someone out of your abundance that is one thing, but when you give out of your poverty that is quite another.
When what you give is a sacrifice it is pleasing to God. How many times have you heard or even said yourself:
“I can’t give you that because it’s the only one I’ve got.” We’ve probably all said that.
But
we learn here that God didn’t have a backup, God didn’t have a spare.
But he loved us so much that he was willing to give us Jesus.
“The
power and passion of God’s love comes across, not through a supposed
special meaning of the Greek word involved, but through the length to
which God was willing to go for the sake of the world.”
To give his “one and only”
GOD’S LOVE IS PERSONAL:
God’s love is not merely some concept. It isn’t just a philosophy or a theological thought.
God’s
love was made manifest in this world through the person of Jesus
Christ. Jesus Christ came into this world to reveal to us the love of
God in human form.
A child was once trying to quote from John 3:16
in the King James Version, which says, “his only begotten Son.” But the
child misquoted it and said, “His only forgotten Son.”
It was one
of those slips of the tongue that carried more truth than we would care
to admit.
For by most people in the world today Jesus Christ is truly
forgotten.
His life is forgotten. His love is forgotten. His
sacrifice is forgotten.
Church, it is our job as Christians, as God’s
ambassadors, to help them remember.
Joe was an alcoholic,
miraculously converted in a street outreach mission. Before his
conversion he’d gained a reputation as a derelict and dirty wino for
which there was no hope.
But following his conversion to Christ, everything changed.
Joe became the most caring person at the mission.
He spent his days there, doing whatever needed to be done.
There
was never anything he was asked to do that he considered beneath him.
Whether it was cleaning up vomit left by some sick alcoholic, or
scrubbing toilets after men had left them filthy
Joe did it all
with a heart of gratitude. He could be counted on to feed any man who
wandered in off the streets, undress and tuck him into bed, when they
were too out-of-it to take care of himself.
One evening, after the
mission director delivered his evangelistic message to the usual crowd
of sullen men with drooped heads, one of them looked up, came down to
the altar and kneeled to pray, crying out for God to help him change.
The
repentant drunk kept shouting, “Oh God, make me like Joe! Make me like
Joe! Make me like Joe!” The director leaned over and said, “Son,
wouldn’t it be better if you prayed ‘make me like Jesus?”
After thinking about it for a few moments, the man looked up with an inquisitive expression and asked,
“Is He like Joe?”
What a great story and what a powerful way to live!
Are you living your life in such a way that you are reminding people of the only ‘forgotten’ Son of God?
God’s
love is personal, because it was made manifest through a person – Jesus
Christ – but also because it is bestowed on a person – you!
Max Lucado writes:
"There
are many reasons God saves you: to bring glory to himself, to appease
his justice, to demonstrate his sovereignty. But one of the sweetest
reasons God saved you is because he is fond of you.
He likes
having you around. He thinks you are the best thing to come down the
pike in quite a while… If God had a refrigerator, your picture would be
on it. If he had a wallet, your photo would be in it.
He sends you
flowers every spring and a sunrise every morning. Whenever you want to
talk, he’ll listen. He can live anywhere in the universe, and he chose
your heart. And the Christmas gift he sent you in Bethlehem? Face it,
friend. He’s crazy about you!"
GOD’S LOVE IS ACCESSIBLE: that whoever believes in him.
The really good news about God’s love is that it is not limited to a select few.
It is not available only to those who were born with right color of skin or on the correct continent.
Nor is it difficult to obtain. It is not reserved for only the intellectual elite or the power brokers or financial wizards.
The love of God is accessible to “whoever believes in” Jesus – the only Son of God.
From
the human perspective, when you compare God to the other gods of the
other religions in the world, you have to say our God is really sort of
odd.
He uses the most common of people, people that aren’t any different from any of us here; He comes in the most common of ways.
He’s not the Above-Us-God, too holy to come down.
God’s love is so immense that He wants to come down.
And He has proven his love by the fact that He did come down and gave His life for ours.
God has come down to our level. Not in the sense that he has lessened His holiness or lowered his standards.
But only in the sense that He has made his love accessible to the average, ordinary person like me and like you.
He is not a distant God who loves us only from some mystical,
far-away place that is completely removed from us.
But rather He has entered
into our world and He longs to enter into our lives.
Will you believe in his Son who made the ultimate expression of God’s love by giving His life on the cross for your sins?
By choosing to believe in Him you access the love of God,
The grace of God and the forgiveness of God.
By believing in Him you access the new life that only He can provide.
GOD’S LOVE IS NONJUDGMENTAL:
God’s goal in sending His Son from
heaven to earth was not to condemn you or to show you how bad you are,
how unworthy you are or how hopeless you are.
God’s only desire in sending Jesus was to show you His love and draw you into a love relationship with Him.
Jesus didn’t come into the world in order to rebuke you. He came to rescue you.
He didn’t come to criticize you. He came to cleanse you.
He didn’t come to punish you. He came to pardon you.
He didn’t come to destroy you. He came to deliver you.
However
this does not mean that God is not a God of judgment. For there is a
huge difference between recognizing right and wrong and being
judgmental.
There is a difference between judging the unrepentant sinner and being judgmental.
Being
judgmental means that one has a critical spirit that only looks for the
bad in people and then is quick to condemn them when it is found.
God on the other hand will judge us for our sins and even sentence us to
hell, but only as a last resort – only over His Son’s dead body only
if we refuse to accept His offer of forgiveness.
Another way of looking at it is that it isn’t so much that God sends
us to hell as that we choose hell over heaven – we choose Satan over God
– we choose sin over righteousness.
But as a result of God’s love, each of us can have an eternal life.
In closing...
If
you think God doesn’t love you because you have faults and have sinned I
want to tell you that God Himself came in flesh to experience what you
go through every day and He understands you better than you realize.
So
if you don’t know Him as your Savior, I make this invitation to you,
come and let Him show you just how much His love can help you.
REPENT AND BE BAPTIZED AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE THE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.
Christ in you, the Hope of Glory!
Say that with me,
Christ in you, the Hope of Glory!
"To
them God willed to make known what are the riches of the glory of this
mystery among the Gentiles: which is Christ in you, the hope of glory."
Colossians 1:27
And now may the Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make His face shine upon you,
And be gracious to you;
The Lord lift up His countenance upon you,
And give you peace.
Now and forever, in Jesus' name
Amen
Brian Monzon Ministries