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Who We Are - Sermon, Friendship Sunday, April 6th, 2003
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1 John 4:9-10 as follows --
"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. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins."
Dear Friends in Christ Jesus,
Sometimes people do it with a sudden, huge outpouring of emotion. Other times, we do it in a quiet, steady, life-long devotion. Sometimes you do it by giving lavish, expensive gifts to mark a special occasion. Other times you show it by doing little, seemingly insignificant things, just out of the blue. Sometimes we call it "tough" -- when we have to take a stand and hold the other person accountable for his or her actions. What I'm talking about are some of the many, many ways people have of showing love for other people. There are many ways, and, of course, the way you show love to a particular person depends on who it is, and what the relationship is, and what the circumstances are. And, as you know, the two people involved might not even agree that it is a loving thing -- like when we have to show "tough love" to someone, or, when a husband gives his wife a snow-blower for Christmas!
It seems that people also have different ideas about how God should show his love. I mean, most people do believe that there is a God and that this God loves us. Well, people have some fairly strong opinions about how God should prove that he loves us. Some look at the big picture, at all the ills that plague the human race. If, they say, God loves the world, then he ought to put an end to war and disease and crime and poverty and all that, and make the world a nice place for everybody. Others treat it on a more personal level. If God really loves me, then he ought to show it by healing my diseases or solving my problems or healing my broken relationships or giving me whatever I think will make me happy right now.
It is true that there are many different ways of showing love. It certainly is true that love reveals itself by its actions. You can tell if a mother loves her children by her actions, and you can tell if a husband loves his wife by his actions, and you can tell if I love my neighbor by my actions. Therefore, if God loves us, there ought to be some actions that prove it, some hard evidence of the fact. Well, dear friends, there most certainly is! Listen to the Word of God written by St. John, who was one of Jesus' original 12 disciples, one of Christ's apostles, an eyewitness. In his first letter he wrote: "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. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins."
Indeed, you and I might have all sorts of ideas about how God ought to show his love for us. But we might be mistaken. We might be focusing on the wrong things. We might even be thinking too small. This, John tells us, THIS IS HOW GOD SHOWED HIS LOVE. How? "He sent his one and only Son into the world." God the Father, the almighty and eternal Creator, sent his one and only Son into the world. The Bible tells us that the Son of God "became flesh and lived for a while among us." God joined himself to the human race in a most astounding way! God's Word says, "God sent his Son, born of a woman." This was God's love in action, as Jesus himself said in some very famous words, "God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son." God loved, and that love revealed itself in actions: God gave. God sent.
Our president has sent many thousands of our fellow Americans on a mission. Its goal is to bring about a regime change. Our coalition forces have been fighting fierce battles and making great personal sacrifices in order to topple a regime. They were sent to remove an unspeakably evil dictator from the power he has used to enslave and terrorize his own people. Our troops were sent to liberate those enslaved people from his death-grip.
God sent his Son into the world to effect a regime change and to liberate sinners. Since Adam's fall, the whole world lay under the power of Satan. The human race was enslaved, trapped in an endless cycle of spiritual darkness and death. Each one born a sinner, unacceptable to God. Each one separated from God from the word go, and subject to God's righteous verdict, "Guilty." But God sent his Son into the world, John tells us, "that we might live through him." Christ came to overthrow our worst enemy, to topple the dictator, to liberate the human race from the control of Satan and from the curse of sin and from death -- the everlasting condemnation -- that is the result of sin.
God's purpose was to give us life, spiritual and eternal life, through Jesus. So how would he accomplish that? John says, "He sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins." Do you see, dear friends, what God chose to do? People always want God to show his love by treating what in reality are merely symptoms -- crime, sickness, war, poverty, relationship problems -- all the ills that plague the human race. God, however, chose to not to ignore the symptoms, but to attack the cause -- sin itself, the sins that separated us from God.
And here we see what love costs. Our liberation from the death-grip of sin did not come easily nor cheaply for God's Son. A price had to be paid that all the world could not pay. The price? God's Word says, "Christ loved us and gave himself up for us." Jesus told his disciples that he had come in order to "give his life as a ransom for many." Christ came to give himself, his immeasureable precious life.
Would you agree with this definition of love? ÔLove is doing what is best for the other person, no matter what it costs you to do it.' St. John wrote in this same letter: "This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us." On a hill just outside Jerusalem, called Calvary, on a spring Friday at the time of the Jewish Passover, on a wooden cross, the final battle was fought and the ultimate sacrifice offered. There the Lamb of God suffered the punishment for sins of all. There the only sinless, righteous, holy, loving, obedient person who has ever lived -- as Isaiah had prophesied -- "was pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities." There, "the punishment that brought us peace was upon him." There "the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all."
In plain words, Jesus Christ suffered the hell we earned. He received the punishment we deserved. Did we really deserve all that? Our text gently reminds us, "This is love, not that we loved God." That's it in a nutshell: we did not love God. Not one of us in our original, natural-born condition could love God, not the way God deserves and demands! He demands that we "love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind." He requires that we "love your neighbor as yourself." And due to our sinful condition, that was impossible. We fail miserable; we fall short entirely.
But Jesus atoned for all sins and for us sinners. John wrote earlier in this letter, "He is the atoning sacrifice for the sins of the whole world." That's why every one of us can sing, "Chief of sinners tho' I be, Jesus shed his blood for me." His sacrifice was enough, and so, St. Paul tells us, "We have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins." It was all done, finished, complete, on that Friday afternoon when Jesus' lifeless body was gently taken down from the cross and hastily wrapped up and sealed away in a borrowed tomb.
Then the mourning began in earnest among the few friends he had left. But that mourning only lasted until Sunday morning, the "third day," when God's Son took up the life he had laid down. Christ rose from death as the prophets had foretold, as he had predicted, and as so many eyewitnesses have testified -- like Peter, who said, "God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of the fact." It is a fact, dear friends, that God's Son died for you. It is a fact that his sacrifice for your sins was accepted. It is a fact that when he rose from death, you were declared "not guilty," justified, forgiven, holy in the sight of God. And that means life instead of death, as our Savior himself has promised: "Whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life."
On the scale of basic human needs, being loved must be right up there near the top. We need to know that somebody loves us, and knowing that someone loves you makes all the difference in the world, doesn't it? We truly want to know that God loves us -- and what a difference it would make in our lives if we could be sure of that! Well, you can be sure. If love reveals itself by its actions, and if real love means doing what the other person needs no matter what the cost -- then there can be no doubt whatsoever that God loves you. THIS is how God showed his love: "He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him."