The Unconditional Love of God in Christ: John 3:16-17 - The Dawn of Redeeming Grace

Well, we study through books of the Bible here at the village chapel.

If you'd like a paper copy, just raise your hand and someone will get you one for you to follow along with.

And as always, if you are following with a device, we have all the information up on the screen that you might need to do so.

And as we do every week, we'd like to welcome in our friends, our congregation that joins us online.

We are glad you're with us this morning in the last week.

People have joined us from Toronto, Ontario, up in Canada, from Perth in Australia, St.

John, Indiana, and Liberty, Missouri, here in the States.

So friends, thanks for joining us.

The Lord bless you.

Merry Christmas to you.

Well, friends, join me in prayer.

Let's start with prayer and then let's dive into our study.

Let's pray together.

Heavenly Father, we would not know you unless you knew us first.

We would not be breathing unless you breathed into us the breath of life.

We would not see you unless you revealed yourself to us.

Thank you for knowing us, for seeing us, for giving us life, for revealing yourself to us.

We come to you in the stillness of this morning, this new day, and we ask for your presence.

Holy Spirit, meet each one of us right where we need to be met.

Give us open ears to hear your word.

We are listening.

Speak to us now and dwell with us when we depart, and we ask all of this in the name of Christ.

Amen.

Amen.

Well, we've taken a small break from our study of Psalm 119 for our Advent series, The Dawn of Redeeming Grace.

And this is our last Sunday in the series because Wednesday, as you know, is Christmas Eve, and Thursday is Christmas.

Whoop.

So a quick show of hands.

It's not mandatory, however.

Just curious, who's got all your Christmas shopping done already?

Oh, oh, impressive.

You all evidently have more time to get your shopping done than the 9 o'clock service, who was uh more heavily populated.

With the next question is who still has work ahead to finish up?

If you're brave.

Uh okay.

Godspeed.

Yeah.

Well, next Sunday, Pastor Tommy is going to bring us back to Psalm 119.

We're going to return to that for three more weeks, and then we're starting with the book of Acts, and we are so excited to dive into this book.

It's just going to be a great year, and we're excited about it.

I do love the title of our Advent series, The Dawn of Redeeming Grace.

It paints such a welcoming picture of a new day dawning, of a new life beginning, full of promise and potential, abundantly available to all who will come through Jesus Christ.

And the title today for our last Advent message is The Unconditional Love of God in Christ.

Pastor Jim and Pastor Tommy have spent the last three weeks teaching about some great themes.

The unquenchable hope of God in Christ, the unwavering peace of God in Christ, the unshakable joy of God in Christ, and then today the unconditional love of God in Christ.

And I don't think these are four separate topics.

There are four windows, four views of looking at the same thing, the revealing of God's word in the birth of Jesus.

God has now made evident in human flesh what has always been there.

We just haven't seen it yet.

Abundant life, unconditional love, redeeming grace.

And I think out of all of those four themes, hope, peace, joy, and love, I think that love is the foundation, the scaffolding upon which all of the others rest.

They're all rooted and grounded in the unconditional love of God in Christ.

Well, since the subject today's message is the unconditional love of God, let's talk about the word love for a minute.

It's the word used for the steadfast, unchanging, unconditional love of God.

And to adequately define that word in the English language, it takes something like 150 words to define this beautiful complex word.

150 words?

Well, in English, we just have the one word, love, right?

I mean, I use the same word to describe the way I feel towards God, my wife, and pumpkin pie, which I do love.

And we're doing a horrible job of describing different emotional states of being and different relationships.

It's just the one word we use.

And so, honey, I'm sorry if we're going with this word.

Evidently, my level of commitment to you is about the same as per pepperoni pizza.

That's not true.

I'm just kidding.

Well, so okay, in these terms, I was reflecting this week about some of the top songs over the years that had the word love in them.

Of course, there's many.

I just chose five random songs.

Got a little group participation exercise for us.

So these five songs, Tina Turner, ever the skeptic, she asks the question, What's you got to do with it?

Yes.

The band Foreigner, you guys know your 70s and 80s music.

I love it.

The band Foreigner, they just made the honest statement, I want to know what yes.

And Whitney Houston now in a song written by our beloved Dolly Parton.

Whitney's just a little, she's a lot more confident, a lot more sure of herself because she says, I will always.

Yes, she is so confident.

Well then Stevie Wonder, he's just as sure of himself as Whitney is, but he's just a little more fun, a little more friendly, a little more, hey, it's Thursday afternoon.

And I just called to say, yes, you guys know your pop songs.

Lastly, there's the group of great British theologians from the 1960s.

The Beatles, you might have heard of them.

They were firm, they were declarative, they knew what they were talking about, friends, when they decisively said, all you need is love.

Amen.

I rest my case.

Preach it, Beatles.

Okay, well, so we've established here that uh love is more than just fuzzy feelings, right?

All of our expressions of and types of love pale in comparison to the love that God has for us, the unconditional love of God that is sacrificial and not just sentimental.

And how beautifully we see that unconditional love of God expressed in the birth of Jesus.

And in the Bible Speaks Today commentary, Bruce Milney says this: he says, if the love, the depth of love, is measured by the value of its gift, then God's love could not be greater.

For his love gift is his most precious possession, his only eternally beloved Son.

He could not love more.

The true looking of faith is placing Christ before one's eyes and beholding in him the heart of God poured out in love.

So God, who is himself love, could not love us any more than he already has, as evidenced by the gift of his beloved Son, given to us and poured out for us.

And we call this coming of Jesus Advent from the Latin word adventus, which means coming, and historically there are three Advents that we consider as Christians.

The first Advent, the incarnation of the Son of God, the dawn of redeeming grace.

It's what we celebrate in this Christmas season.

And then we, as we've already talked about, so that's the first advent.

The second Advent will be when Jesus returns, coming in his glory.

What a magnificent day that's going to be.

And yet still yearning and hoping for things yet to come to pass, yearning and grieving for things that have already come to pass.

But sometimes we're looking to Christ for provision, for healing, for comfort.

I mean, we all deal with longing.

And for some of us, we long for things, we ache for things that we can't quite even define, that are just beyond our grasp.

I'm going to be silent for just a few seconds, and I'm going to ask you if you will to let your guard down and just reflect for a few moments on things that you're yearning for, you're hoping for, you're longing for.

So let's just be quiet for just a few seconds.

Well, my parents got married on a Christmas day because it was my mom's favorite holiday.

And she passed away really at a very young age.

I think I was in my twenties when she passed.

And I as I was thinking about all of this stuff, reflecting on it and studying for the message, I was just thinking back to how hard Christmas Day must have been for my dad after my mom passed.

Um I remember the first Christmas that we experienced without her, as I'm sure some of you know this experience.

We we were just kind of stumbling around almost like in the dark.

Um we didn't know how to be, we didn't know how to have Christmas without my mom.

And I remember my dad gave all of the siblings cards that year that said something like this although Christmas can never be the same again for me, I'm still grateful for you.

And I just have thought, you know, my dad must have missed my mom every day, but how particularly hard that Christmas days must have been since that was their anniversary, and and that combination of love for family and traditions, and yet still filled with yearning and longing.

And I know that there are some of us here who are going to be encountering that first Christmas this year with that longing of an empty seat at the table without that person this year.

And uh and I really, really understand that.

Our hearts are made for the fullness of God, for the presence of God and for each other.

And so until he returns, we are going to deal with this Advent experience of longing and hoping and yearning.

Tish Harrison Warren talks about this in her book, Advent.

She says, We Christians believe that Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

This is God's definitive response to the deepest longings of the human soul.

All of our longings meet their end in Christ, coming again, bringing healing, peace, joy, and an unimaginable wholeness in his wake.

And boy, don't we long for that day.

And I love that our deepest longings are met in Christ.

Well, in this season of Santa and Rudolph, courier and Ives paintings and nativity scenes combating for space on our mantles and in our hearts.

How do we hold this all together?

How do we hold yearning in one hand and hope in the other?

So let's take a very brief look at three different passages of scripture that I think will help us better understand the unconditional love of God and his glorious plan for our rescue.

Our first passage, it tells us the truth that because of his unconditional love, God addresses the problem of sin.

In Genesis chapter 3, we read of the introduction of sin into God's good creation, and I think most of us are familiar with this account, but I want to point out a couple of details.

Genesis 3 · chapter mention

After Adam and Eve both eat of the fruit, the fruit that God's forbidden them to eat, they hide in the garden.

They hear the sound of God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and he's calling for them.

Let's not miss this.

Even before he has confronted them about what they've done, he is already, he's already seeking them out, coming after them.

That's such a great example of how God is always the initiator and we are always the responder.

God calls to the man, he says, Where are you?

And Adam says, I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, and so I hid myself.

God is looking for them, already knowing what has happened.

And then what happens next when he confronts them and when they say, Yes, I did this, when they confess, he does not leave them wallowing in sin and shame and misery.

He doesn't immediately obliterate them.

He doesn't shame and guilt them.

Instead, he immediately addresses the problem.

He addresses the serpent, the sin.

So let's look at Genesis 3.15 up on the screen.

This is God talking to the serpent, and he says, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring.

This is the first glimpse of the gospel of Jesus in the Bible, and we're only in the third chapter.

I love that.

Theologians call this proto-evangelium.

Basically, it's God telling the devil he's already lost the game.

He's telling the devil that Jesus, the offspring of Eve, is going to crush him.

The unconditional love of God addresses the problem of sin.

Friends, God is not afraid of our sin.

He is not afraid of our brokenness.

He runs to meet us in our sin and brokenness.

He tells Adam and Eve about the consequences of their sin, but he does not condemn them for their sin.

This is really important.

Instead, this is the introduction of the gospel to a world already compromised.

God's unconditional love for us in Christ will address the problem of our sin and it will do what we cannot do for ourselves.

John Stott says this: He says, our confidence is not in our love for Him, which is frail, fickle, and faltering, but in His love for us, which is steadfast, faithful, and persevering.

Thank God that it is.

Well, our second passage tells us that the unconditional love of God is a promise based on God's character.

God's love isn't based on a feeling.

We don't have to bargain with or cajole him into loving us, because his love that is set on us is based on who he is.

For our next, this next passage, would you read with me some verses from Psalm 103?

And I've got it broken up into three slides.

So let's read this first one together.

The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.

He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever.

He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.

Immediately, the psalmist describes God's character to us.

And then look at verse 10.

I just love it.

God doesn't deal with us based on our behavior, but based on his character.

And that is so freeing.

Because his love isn't based on our behavior, it takes performance out of the equation totally.

The good news is that there is nothing that we can do to earn God's love for us.

And the even better news is there is nothing that we can do that will lose God's love for us either.

It is constant.

Let's continue with the next few verses.

For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love towards those who fear him.

As far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.

As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him, for he knows our frame.

Verse 11 His great and steadfast love as high as As the heavens are above the earth, that gives us such a good picture of the vertical plane of the cross.

And then he uses the horizontal plane of the cross to explain how far the love of Christ on the cross removes our sin from us.

As far as the East is from the West, friends, we can't even comprehend how far he removes our sins from us.

Let's keep reading on our last slide of this.

As for man, his days are like grass, he flourishes like a flower of the field, for the wind passes over it and it is gone, and its place knows it no more.

But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him, and his righteousness to children's children, to those who keep his covenant and remember to do his commandments.

The Lord has established his throne in the heavens and his kingdom rules over all.

Wow.

What a great contrast between how brief our lives are and how long-lasting God's love is from everlasting to everlasting.

And then verse 19 finishes the passage out by reminding us that God's kingdom is firmly established.

It's not on shaky ground, and that he is truly sovereign.

God's love for us is based on the promise of his character.

Kelly Capic has a new book out.

It's called The Christian Life, and he says this about God's character.

He says part of what is distinctive about Christianity is that we believe God is love.

It's not that God is theoretically or intermittently loving, nor is God merely capable of love.

The truth is boundlessly better than that.

Love is who God is.

From all eternity, one God pulsating in Trinitarian love, God perfectly satisfied, whole, and complete.

God doesn't love us only when he feels like it.

And it's not that he's just able to love, it's that he is love.

And because of that relationship within the Trinity that is already there and has pre-existed everything, God is not needy, he's not lonely, he's perfectly whole and complete.

And here's some news for us.

Because God is perfectly whole and complete, we are beautifully, totally unnecessary.

And that makes God's love for us that much more astounding.

C.S.

Lewis says it like this God who needs nothing loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that he may love and perfect them.

Friends, because we're not needed by God, it enables us to just be loved by God without having to do anything.

And we see in the picture, it's a good picture.

Well, our last passage brings it all together.

Because of his unconditional love for us, God has a plan for our rescue.

And the next two verses, they hold a concise nuts and bolts explanation of the gospel.

This is why we have Advent.

This is truly the reason for the season.

And those verses are John 3, 16 and 17.

And would you mind reading those with me as well?

For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

Man.

When we read that God gave us his only son, that gift it travels from the manger to the cross.

It doesn't stop with baby Jesus in the manger.

It also includes Jesus crucified and resurrected and risen again.

And that is the extent for God's love for us in the context of the phrase, as far as the East is from the West.

Such good news.

God has a plan for our rescue and our redemption.

He's always had a plan.

And I think those two verses perfectly explain his plan.

John Stott talks about the intent behind this plan in this quote.

He says, You can never take God by surprise.

You can never anticipate him.

He always makes the first move.

He is always there in the beginning.

Before man existed, God acted.

Before man stirs himself to seek God, God has sought man.

In the Bible, we do not see man groping after God.

We see God reaching after man.

This is the plan, and because of his love for us, this plan existed before creation.

Well, so to understand the significance and the scope of God's plan, we're going to travel a little bit.

We need to travel both backwards and forwards in time, even faster and farther than old Ebenezer Scrooge traveled with the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future in Dickens A Christmas Carol.

So hang on.

Here we go.

So first, we're going to travel backwards in time before all of the Christmases that we've ever experienced.

Back past all of the cultural artifacts and traditions that our popular ideas of Christmas are based on.

Further back than Saint Nicholas of Myra in the fourth century.

Backwards still past the Magi come to visit the infant king, past the angels and their midnight visit to the shepherds of the hills.

Further back, even still, past the prophet Isaiah, who foretold the birth of Jesus some 700 years before it even happened.

Further back even than that third chapter of Genesis, where the serpent tempted Adam and Eve.

Back even before the foundation of all creation, back to the plan.

The plan for the rescue and redemption of all mankind, because, my friends, that's where the core meaning of Christmas actually started.

Before God ever said, let there be light, there was a plan in place for our redemption.

Well, the plan begins to travel forward in time now.

As soon as there is time, as soon as there is space, well, now we begin to see what a master planner and architect God really is.

Out of nothing, he creates all that there is, and when humans, his crown jewel of creation, the only beings in the world made in his image, defy him and decide to make themselves little g gods, he doesn't give up and walk away because of the plan.

We first heard of it in Genesis chapter 3 after the fall, when God makes that first announcement of the gospel to the serpent, and the serpent is already defeated before he even got started.

Genesis 3 · chapter mention

So we continue traveling forward past Adam and Eve, gathering speed, moving past Noah in the ark, where we hear of God's presence, presence promise never again to cover the earth with water.

Forward to a man named Abraham, chosen by God, of whom God said, I will build a mighty nation of you that will bless all the nations of the world.

Forward still to a man named Moses, leading that very nation out of bondage to freedom in a foreshadowing of the plan to rescue all of mankind.

Forward still past a great, great, great descendant of Abraham named David, a king, a man after God's own heart, of whom God says he will always have a descendant on the throne as long as they follow God.

And when they don't follow him, here we are at Isaiah again as he prophesies about that coming Messiah, the wonderful counselor, mighty God, everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

And we move forward still past the exile of Israel and Judah, and then through their return from exile to the 400 years of utter silence.

Nothing from God.

And yet, even though God was still silent, the plan is still moving forward.

And so we move forward to the announcement to this young woman named Mary that she will carry and bear the Savior of the world.

Forward still to those angels appearing before the shepherds, forward to that utterly helpless baby in a manger.

How can this be the savior of the world?

Him, the new king?

He's not strong.

He's weak.

He's utterly dependent on his parents.

He's just a baby.

How can he be the mighty God, the Prince of Peace?

Is this the plan?

Well, we keep moving forward because the plan is still moving forward, and because there is a direct line between this manger holding this baby and wrapped in swaddling clothes and a Roman cross bearing an adult Jesus nailed to that cross at the end of his physical life, again utterly weak and helpless.

Is this the plan?

How can this be the mighty God, the Prince of Peace, being executed like a common thief?

Surely this is not the plan.

But the plan keeps moving relentlessly forward, and so we move with it, moving past the lifeless body of the one who was the baby in a manger, laid in a tomb and sealed shut.

But that doesn't stop the plan because in a few days' time we see the doors of that tomb thrown wide open with no lifeless body in it, and the one who was slain is alive again.

He has defeated death, and he promises he will be with us always.

He's going to prepare a place for us to all be together again.

And now we wait for him to return, not in utter silence, because his spirit now lives and moves in and among us, and we are alive in him, and we know that he is indeed the wonderful counselor, the mighty God, the everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace, the Lamb of God, the Savior of the world, the King of kings, and the Lord of Lords, and He will return and make all things right, and heaven and earth will be as one, and we will be forever with him, and the plan will be fulfilled.

And that, my friends, is the real, real meaning of Christmas.

Amen.

So Amen.

Let's close with this last quote from A.

W.

Chozier that I think further explains this magnificent and unconditional love of God.

Because God is self-existent, his love had no beginning.

Because he is eternal, his love can have no end.

Because he is infinite, has no limit.

Because he is holy, it is the quintessence of all spotless purity.

Because he is immense, his love is an incomprehensibly vast, bottomless, shoreless sea.

Oh my friends.

God is so good and loves us so much.

Let's pray.

And uh as we get ready to pray, uh remind you that our prayer team meets in the back.

And these dear people would love to pray with and for you if you would like to go pray with them.

So let's let's pray, friends.

Heavenly Father, um, it is overwhelming to think that before time and space even began, you knew that we would turn our backs on you.

And yet you still created us.

You did not give up on us.

You had a plan from the very beginning to run after us, to rescue us, to redeem us.

And so as we wait in that in-between time, as we yearn and we hope for things that haven't happened that we're longing for, or we grieve, things that have happened already that we're we're yearning and hoping for, for you to return and make all things right.

We have this bundle of of hopes and dreams and fears and yearning, and we lay all of those at your feet, and we trust you because you are good.

Your plan for us is good.

We are grateful for Jesus.

We lift this up in his name.

Amen.