Spirit of God Wk 13: Nate Stewart | August 30th, 2026 |

Amen.

Thank you.

So before we start, I did this during the first service as well.

It's been a morning.

Well, whoever wrote It's Easy Like Sunday morning was definitely not in ministry.

And it's been one thing after another.

And I've been kind of feeling I'm catching up the whole time.

So I need to pray for myself to make sure that I'm here for this.

And we're we're going to let the spirit move.

So pray with me.

Heavenly Father, I'll let up me.

That I would not get in the way of the words that you have for your people today.

God, I ask that your spirit would move through me.

That what people need to hear is what they hear.

And that your power is made perfect through my weakness.

Amen.

If we have not met before, my name is Nate.

I am one of the young adult ministry leaders.

And I've been here for a few years.

One of the things that I love to do is apologetics.

If you've not been a part of young adults, if you haven't worked with me before, I love apologetics, which is defending the faith.

And defending the faith and why we believe what we believe.

That all that all can be really tricky.

But it's incredibly beautiful to know and understand God.

And so this sermon series that we're in, talking about the character of God, learning about Him.

It's been awesome.

It's so cool to see people, God's people diving deep into what He has for Him or for us.

It's amazing.

And so thank you for being here.

You are a blessing to me.

You're a blessing to the staff.

I know that too.

So today we're talking about the attribute of God that has to do with love.

Which sounds kind of easy.

Like, yeah, God loves and you know it's rainbows and flowers and all that kind of good stuff.

But it's a little more complex than that.

The idea that God is love is it's hard to be tangible with it.

We can describe feelings of love.

You know, that that kind of ooey-goooey that we get in our stomach, the feeling of warmth.

But it doesn't quite explain what God is love means.

And since the beginning of time, people have been trying to describe it.

The Greeks had four primary words that they used for love throughout scripture.

There's Phileo, which is a brotherly kind of love, close friend, a sibling.

Think of Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love.

There's Storgate, which is a parental type of love, looking down at your child.

There is Eros, which is a romantic kind of love.

And then there's the highest form of love, agape.

Agape is a selfless, selfless, sacrificial kind of love.

It puts others before yourself.

It's the kind of love that says, I am willing to lay down my life for another.

It's unconditional.

That is the kind of love that God has for us.

So to understand the love of God, we need to look at the character of God.

And first we need to acknowledge a fact about God to be able to get our heads around this.

As Christians, we believe that God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, three entities, one God.

They are completely intertwined in a way that even though there's three separate characteristics in it, but it's one God that we worship, one God that we follow.

But it's a God that has the ability to have relationship because of that makeup.

God loves the Father, the Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Spirit.

God is love.

But what's great about God's love, or one of the great things about God's love, is that he doesn't want to hold it in to himself.

He very well could have.

And there was evening and there was more morning the sixth day.

God wanted relationship with us.

He wanted us to experience the love that He has.

But there is a thing about pure love.

For love to be pure, there has to be a choice.

God could have just made robots that would just, yes, everything you say is wonderful, and one of the illustrations I use at young adults is I could have taken my wife, stuck her in a room, tied her to a chair, and said, You're my wife now.

I mean, not really, because she totally would have beat me in a fight.

But that wouldn't have been love.

That would have been captivity.

That would have been servitude.

Love requires a choice.

We had to choose each other.

We have to continually choose each other.

Genesis 2, 15, the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, You may surely eat of every tree in the garden, but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.

For in the day that you eat it, you will surely, you shall surely die.

So they could have chosen in the Garden of Eden to protect the relationship that they had with God.

To nurture that.

Genesis 3, now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made.

He said to the woman, Did God actually say, You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?

And the woman said to the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but God said, You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it lest you die.

But the serpent said to the woman, You will surely not die.

For God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.

She also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.

Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.

They chose to go their own way.

But he didn't, or they didn't.

Adam was right there next to her, hearing this the whole time.

And they, as a couple, chose to go their own way.

And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.

And the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, Where are you?

And he said, I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself.

He said, Who told you that you were naked?

Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?

Now when God asked, Adam, where are you?

It wasn't like he couldn't find them.

He's not a pair of car keys.

Or my glasses this morning, which I still haven't found, so I can't see the back row.

It was a chance for Adam to have some reflection.

Where are you?

Look where you're at.

You're hiding behind a tree.

And then when he asked, did you eat the fruit?

Again, he knew the answer.

But he gave Adam the chance to say.

But instead of being in a reflective kind of stance, they double down.

Which I think is, for me, I think is the biggest tragedy of this whole thing.

We have a loving, forgiving God, but they chose to double down and say, it wasn't my fault.

The man said, The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree and I ate it.

It's her fault.

The Lord God said to the woman, What is this that you have done?

The woman replied, The serpent deceived me and I ate.

It was the serpent's fault.

The devil made me do it.

Right away, God does something extraordinary.

He gives the first glimpse into his justice and his grace.

Lord God said to the serpent, Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field.

On your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.

I will put ennemity and that word, between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring, he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.

Immediately, God foretold how he was going to fix what had just happened.

Immediately he comes back with, he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.

Bruising his heel was the enemy putting Christ on a cross.

Bruising his head was the victory that Jesus was going to have when he overcame death.

When he became the perfect sacrifice for all sin.

When he paid the price for us.

You may bite my ankle, but I'm going to crush your head.

Immediately, God had a plan.

God punished the serpent for his role in things.

Because the devil came to destroy man, but he left with a curse.

And God showed his grace through all of this.

But just because God is loving and forgiving doesn't mean there aren't consequences for our actions.

Adam and Eve had to leave the garden.

There was now a chasm in between us and God in a way that they'd never experienced before.

Genesis 3.20.

The man called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living.

And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them.

Why did God do that?

He kicked them out because it was punishment for what they had done.

It was the result of their actions.

But why make clothes out of skins?

Because Adam and Eve had already made clothes, but it was out of fig leaves.

God had mercy on them because they had never experienced death before.

They didn't realize that these green leaves were going to turn brown, crumble up, and fall off.

Even in the midst of all of this that's going on, God still cared for them.

He gave them clothes that would last.

He showed that he loved them.

He showed that even though they were being taken out of the garden, there was still a plan for him to love them.

He was not abandoning them or throwing them away.

The wages of sin is death.

He made clothes out of animal skins to show the reality of what death looks like, but also to provide care for the people he loves.

1 Corinthians 13.

It's called the love chapter.

You hear it at weddings all the time, seeing greeting cards.

It says, love is patient and kind.

Love does not envy or boast.

It is not arrogant or rude.

It does not insist on its own way.

It's not irritable or resentful.

It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never ends.

God was patient.

He didn't storm into the garden immediately and hit them with a lightning bolt.

He walked into the garden to meet them where they were at.

He was kind and gave them the clothes that they would need.

He didn't insist on his own way.

He didn't say, well, okay, now I have to force you to do it.

Rejoices with the truth.

He educated them.

Look what happened.

And look why it happened.

God's grace and mercy never end.

In Hebrew, there's a word that it doesn't have a complete translation from Hebrew to English.

It's pronounced Hasid.

Hasid is a covenantal love.

The love that God has for us is covenantal.

When you have a covenant with God, it is an unbreakable promise from him.

Noah had a promise that when the rainbow came out, we'll never flood the earth again.

Abraham received a covenant from God that his offspring would be blessed.

Moses had the covenant of blessings for Israel in the promised land.

David had the covenant from God that the Messiah would come from his family line.

And all those things came true.

Because God never fails.

Love never fails.

He always kept his side.

Even when we walked away, he still continues to love us.

And then there was the new covenant, the one that we get to take part in.

Romans 5, but God shows his love for us that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Since therefore we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved from him, or by him from the wrath of God.

For if we were for if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.

More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

John 3.16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever 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 it.

God gave up everything for us.

He came down out of heaven, he appeared as a baby, helpless in food drop.

He lived a perfect life.

He shared the good news of the gospel to everyone.

He did everything right.

And he was killed for it.

So we think, why do bad things happen to good people?

Because bad things happen.

But God had a way out.

God had a plan to restore, to bridge that gap so that we could understand grace.

And grace is not just being forgiven of the things that we've done.

Because God's love requires justice.

There has to be some sort of punishment.

It's like if I were to appear before a judge after I committed a crime, I've been found guilty, and the judge says, you know what?

I'm going to let you go.

That's not justice.

It's mercy.

Because he's just letting me off.

But it's not justice to the victims of whatever crime I hypothetically did.

But if I'm standing before that judge and he says, here's your punishment, you're going to spend X amount of time in jail.

But then Jesus steps in and says, It's okay, Judge.

I've already done that time for him.

The punishment has already been paid.

I took that on myself.

That is grace.

It's justice.

But it's grace.

Unearned favor.

I didn't deserve it.

But God gave it freely.

Revelation twenty-one.

This is um easily my favorite section of scripture.

When I look at my life and all the things that I've experienced, the the negative, the hard times.

And there have been plenty.

The pain has been very real.

Suffering has been very real.

The loss has been very real.

And I know I'm not alone in that.

I could look at all those things in my life and say, well, I guess this place kind of stinks.

I'm just going to give up.

But instead, with God's love, with his plan, he gives us hope.

Hope that one day I will be able to look at all the things that I've been through and be like, now I get it.

I understand why you allowed that to happen.

God doesn't make bad things happen to people.

But sometimes he allows them to happen because he has a purpose and a plan and a way that he is using that circumstance to shape us or to minister to others through us.

He has a plan.

And because he has a plan, I can have hope.

It's Revelation 21.

This is after it's at the end of the book.

God won.

Evil has been destroyed.

It says, Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.

For the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.

I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.

He will dwell with them, and they will be his people.

And God Himself will be with them as their God.

He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more.

Neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.

And he who is seated on the throne said, Behold, I am making all things new.

Also he said, Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.

They were a covenant.

And he said to me, It is done.

I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

To the thirsty I will give from the spring of water of life without payment.

What we had in the garden, the opportunity to walk with God in the cool of the day.

God is bringing that back.

He will wipe away all of our tears, all the things that we've suffered through, all the things that have hurt us, the people that have hurt us, it's real.

Pain is real, and God is going to free us from that.

Through his plan, through the hope that we have if we accept that free gift that God gave us when Jesus died on the cross and then rose again three days later.

That if we would believe in him, that we would have eternal life, we will walk in the cool of the day with God once more.

Because love from God is unconditional.

It's unfailing.

A perfect covenantal law that says no matter what, I will never stop loving you.

Heavenly Father, I thank you for the opportunity to be loved by you.

I thank you that you do have a plan, that you do have purpose behind all the things that we're suffering through right now.

And yet, even you bless us in the process with all the good things that we have too.

But the most important thing is that relationship between us and you and that you give that to us for free.

How you love us.

Amen.