Heaven Come Down – So Loved

This podcast is presented to you by Pastor Jason and Liz Burns in Access Church in Lakeland and Bartow, Florida.

For more information, visit Access.tv.

You ever gotten a case of what I call the Sew Loves?

Like you ever fall in love so hard, so fast that you do some ridiculous, audacious kinds of things.

And anybody ever have a case of the sew loves?

And it always sneaks up on you.

You're not expecting it.

I I got to college.

I got to my third year of college.

I casually dated a few people, but nothing really was sticking.

And then I meet this beautiful Italian girl.

She was the homecoming queen, everybody.

And uh and I I just I got so in love.

Like I fell head over heels in love.

If you would have bought stock in Hallmark in those days, you would be a rich person now.

Because I bought every romantic card they ever wrote ever, and I gave it to her to the point where she at one point, sometime into our relationship, said, Hey, I need you to know you don't have to buy me every card.

But but I did.

Why?

Because I was so in love, so in love.

And you think you can't possibly love any more than that.

You you fall in love and you get married and you think, how could it possibly get better than this?

And then your your love creates a baby.

And our love created this little nine-pound two-ounce or six-ounce baby boy named Joey.

And when he came out, it was one of the most beautiful things I ever almost saw.

And and when I say almost saw, I mean I saw part of it, and the next thing I know, there were three nurses standing over me because I literally passed out when my son was born.

Like, like, it's one of the funniest moments of my whole life because I I come to that, I now have a baby.

I didn't have a baby when I passed out, now there's a baby, it's in one of those like chicken warmer kind of things, you know.

And like, and he's there and they're they're offering me a drink, and my wife's like, hello, anybody remember me?

I was like, babe, this is a hard day for both of us, and uh, that did not go well.

But I go over to that little incubator thing that he's laying in, and I look at him, and I just started crying.

I said to my wife, he's so beautiful, he's so perfect.

I love him, I love him, I so love him.

You create this space in your heart that you didn't even know was possible.

And then and then like your kids start playing sports.

And I don't know if you you had parents like mine, but my parents were the parents that showed up to all my sporting events, and my mom is like one of the most quiet people you'll ever meet until her boy is playing sports, and then she just like loses it.

There's this new gear, and I swore to myself when I was in high school that I would never be like this, and then I saw my kids playing sports.

The first time my son Joey hit a shot in basketball.

I I have a really bad video because I was videoing it, but then I lost my mind through my phone and just like started crying because that's my boy.

I gotta yell for him.

I have been threatened to be kicked out of games by referees for yelling at them.

Why?

Because that's my kids and I so love my kids.

And then I I I had two boys, and I thought, like, you can't love any more than that.

And then um, and then we had a little girl, and and she has my whole heart, and I'm gonna be honest, and my whole wallet.

Come on, any dads know.

Like, like for Father's Day, check this out.

For Father's Day, she got me these socks, and I'm wearing these socks today that have her face on them.

Why?

My wife just whistled for me.

So love.

Why?

Because I so love my daughter, and love will cause us to do some crazy stuff.

I feel like Mr.

Rogers up in here.

Love.

Love will cause you to do some ridiculous, audacious, inexcusable, unimaginable kinds of things, won't it?

Today I want to teach you the Christmas story from a verse that you probably know, but you've probably never thought of it as a Christmas verse.

It is arguably the most known verse of the whole Bible.

Even people who are not really Christians or church people tend to know it or have heard it.

It's John 3, 16.

This is the Christmas story.

It says, for God so loved the world.

He didn't just love it.

So loved, obsessed with it.

He so loved the world that he he gave his one and only son.

That whoever, who, whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Like God so loves the world that he had to show it.

In the book of Romans, Paul gives us this beautiful picture.

I want you to see this.

The book of Romans, chapter 5, Paul says, you see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person, someone might possibly dare to die.

But I want you to see this.

But God demonstrates, he demonstrates his own love for us in this, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

I want you to see this one thought.

First of all, that love is only love when it's demonstrated.

And God saw the problem of humanity.

God saw the world that he created to know him and love him, and the world had turned on him, and God could have said, you know what, you've made your decision, my hands are off the wheel.

But God so loved the world.

Now, if you if you read this verse through that lens, God almost has kind of a weird obsession with us, doesn't he?

It's like there's verses that say that God watches over you while you sleep.

You ever had someone looking at you while you sleep and you wake up and you see them?

Like he watches over you.

And if we were to just be honest and we were to take the picture of God who so loves us, and we were to try to compare it to any American or earthly feeling, we might say this: God kind of comes across as a groupie.

You know what this term is?

A groupie is the person who gets so obsessed, so in love with someone else, and it's usually a celebrity or an athlete or someone famous, and they're so in love with them, and they convince themselves that it is meant to be that someday they are gonna meet that person and fall head over heels for that person, and that person is gonna see them and fall head over heels for them.

That's what we we think, don't we?

And I don't know if you've ever had a crush on a celebrity, and it's someone you'll never meet, you may never even see them in real life in person, and even if you did, they're probably not going to love you back, but we twist our minds to think that they're gonna love us.

Some years ago, I had a man come to me after one of the services and he said, Pastor Jason, will you pray for me?

And I said, Oh yeah, I'm happy to pray for you.

And um, as a pastor, you get to do some wonderful, amazing things.

You get to have some amazing moments of prayer with people, you get to celebrate people who have been praying for something, and then they get the answer to the prayer.

And this man comes up to me and he says, I need you to pray for two things.

And I said, Okay.

Now, for context, this was a man that looked to be about 45 years old.

Life, you could tell, had really weathered him a lot.

And he's in his mid-40s and he comes and he says, Will you pray for two things?

I said, Let's pray for two things.

He said, Number one, I'm praying to make the NBA.

And I said, Okay, what's the second thing?

And he said, Um, there's a celebrity, I'm not gonna tell you who it is, Jessica Alba.

There's a celebrity that he says, I'm in love with her, and I've written her letters, and I'm praying she gets it and writes me back and will fall in love.

And as a pastor, it's kind of an awkward moment.

It's kind of like when your son says to you, Dad, what if I'm a starting quarterback in the NFL someday?

Like, like you want to encourage them, but you also gotta tell the truth, right?

So I said, How about this?

How about we just pray that whatever God's will is will happen for you.

That was my kind way of saying, bruh, it ain't gonna happen.

Neither of them.

You're not gonna make the NFL.

Ain't no chance you're meeting that girl, and if you do, there will be a restraining order.

Come on, like, like, not gonna happen, right?

You understand what a groupie is, and a groupie often loves someone who will never love them back.

Like one of the pictures we have of God is that God knows everything.

So God knows that there are some of his creation who, even though he loves them with unfathomable perfect love, they'll never love him back.

Remember the verse?

It says, For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever.

It's like he loves everybody, he doesn't just love the ones who love him, he doesn't just love the ones with perfect church attendance and with a good prayer life, and those who are disciplined in reading the Bible, and those who serve and those who give.

Like we live in a culture that is devalued and diminished the value of the word love.

We say I love all kinds of things, like I love my wife, and I love my kids, and I love tacos, and those are close, but not the same.

And and I want you to hear this.

God doesn't just love whoever, he doesn't just love whoever.

I want you to see what it says.

It says he so love.

He's so can't help himself, it's obsessive, it's just who he is.

And it says that he so loved the world.

Now that's another interesting thing.

Because in a in a universe so big, so vast, so grand that science will never get to the end of it, all of it screams of his glory.

Scientists claim that there's more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on earth.

Try to get your mind around that.

Okay, and in the middle of all that, there's this little planet with perfect conditions for life.

And there's you and me, and there's another 8 billion or so people that make up the world, and he loves the world.

And it's easy to see the picture of God, that he just loves this big picture of the world, but really what that means is he so loves not just the world, he loves he loves you.

And hear me, he can't help himself.

And this is the Christmas story.

The Christmas story is that God so loved the world that he would do anything for the world.

And to help us understand this, in the Old Testament, there's this really interesting story.

Chances are, if you're not like a Bible reader, you maybe have not heard the story.

This is not a it's not a famous story, but some scholars say next to the birth of Jesus and the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, this is the clearest picture of God's love in the Bible.

In 750 or so years before Jesus is born, we meet a prophet, his name is Hosea.

Hosea is a young man, he's following another relatively famous prophet named Amos in the Bible.

And Hosea comes on the scene, and as a prophet, he's one of the more known people in the country.

People know who he is, people know what he stands for.

He is a man of God.

Now, something interesting is you read through what the Bible calls the prophets, the major and minor prophets, very often they wouldn't just prophesy and speak something about God or from God.

They would literally live and experience what they were talking about.

So you read stories like Isaiah, and he has some unique prophecies, but he also lives them.

Same thing happens to Hosea.

God is trying to show through uh Hosea's words, but also through his experience how much he loves humanity.

And so one day God speaks to Hosea and He says, Hosea, I want you to do something ridiculous.

I want you to marry a prostitute.

He's like, Come again?

What?

What?

If you want some interesting words, Google search Hosea 1, verse 2 and read all the different translations of it.

Hosea 1:2

There's some colorful words for this woman.

He says, I want you to marry her.

Her name was Gomer.

Bummer of a name.

Come on, somebody.

She was not so loved by her parents, but he gets this name, Gomer.

And he goes and he marries her and he takes her as his bride.

He marries her and knows she's been with so many other men that her only perceived value to the world was what she could sell from her body.

And he marries her.

And this is supposed to be the picture of God's love.

He marries this woman of ill repute, and for a few years it seems like everything's good.

They have a boy and then a girl and then a boy, and everything's going good and fine for them, but then one day Hosea wakes up in the morning and he looks to his side and his bride, Gomer, isn't there.

Well, maybe she just ran for coffee and she doesn't come back for breakfast.

Maybe she just needed a morning off and she doesn't come back for lunch or dinner, and one day turns into two, and he has this nervous breakdown and he starts looking for her and he can't find her anywhere.

And word gets back to him that she's left him to go back to her former lifestyle.

Imagine that.

It's enough to get left in your marriage, but like God was involved in this.

God said to marry this woman.

He would have never married her or chosen her on his own, and then she leaves him.

And now Hosea is a single dad.

He's doing single dad life stuff.

He's taking the kids to school, making sure they're fed, making sure they have all their needs met.

And some time passes, and then one day God speaks to Hosea again.

Hosea chapter 3, it's interesting.

Hosea 3 · chapter mention

It says this says, The Lord said to me, Hosea, go show your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another man and is an adulteress.

He's essentially saying, I want you to find her, chase her down, get back to her, and when you find her, I want you to love her and I want you to marry her all over again.

Recommit your vows, do it again.

The verse goes on.

He says, Love her as the Lord loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods and love the sacred raisin cakes.

This is them saying that, like, there are these people who God said they used to love me, but now they've settled for the things of this world.

So scholars kind of fill in some of the gaps in the story and they believe that Hosea goes out looking for his wife.

Can you imagine how humiliating this is?

He would have to go to whatever the red light district or the brothel of his community was.

This was certainly a place that no man of God should ever be caught.

And he's there.

Humbly and embarrassed, and he's like, hey, uh.

Have you seen Gomer?

My wife, have you seen her?

Certainly he asked around, certainly he ran into some men that would use the services of women like this.

He says, hey, uh.

Have you seen Gomer?

And the guy would be like, oh, um.

Yeah, but she told me you guys weren't together.

I'm girl, I'm I'm so sorry.

And he searches everywhere.

It is embarrassing, excruciatingly painful.

And eventually he finds.

But she's not with a man.

She's standing on some sort of a platform being sold.

To men for their desire.

And he sees her there.

And I can imagine that he went up to the person holding the sale and he said, Hey, I know this is weird, but like she's she's not yours.

She's my wife.

And he goes, I don't care who she is, she's for sale today.

Imagine that moment.

Verses go on.

So I bought her for 15 shekels of silver and about a homer and a lethock of barley.

I I didn't know exactly what this meant or how much this would be worth, so I searched it.

15 shekels of silver would be like roughly$250.

So it's not like some massive amount of money.

And then a Homer and a letholic of barley is like some sort of uh some sort of uh agriculture, some sort of vegetation.

And so what it kind of implies is that whatever it costs, he didn't even have enough money.

He's just giving what he has to buy her back.

And imagine standing at this auction for your wife, and people are bidding on her, and you're having to spend money that you don't have to buy back someone who was yours in the first place.

This is the picture of God and humanity.

The story goes on.

Then Hosea goes from like telling the story to getting prophetic.

He says, Then I told her, You are to live with me many days.

You must not be a prostitute or be intimate with any man, and I will behave the same way towards you.

This is what our new covenant and our new life is going to look like together.

And here's the prophecy part.

He says, For the Israelites will live many days without king or prince, without sacrifice or sacred stones, without ephod or household gods.

Afterward, the Israelites will return and seek the Lord their God and David, their king.

He uses the name David because to this point he doesn't know of Jesus the Messiah because he hasn't come yet.

He says they will come trembling to the Lord and his blessing in the last days.

He has this experience and he uses it as a moment to prophesy over what would happen.

Friends, look at me.

This is the Christmas story.

And we hear the story and we think, well, who am I in the story?

Well, God is represented by Hosea.

He's Hosea, he's the one who pursues.

In fact, the name Hosea means salvation.

It's this reminder that God will do anything to find us, chase us down, love us, no matter what we do, and turn on him.

God is that.

That's who he is.

And I want you to see this.

If God is Hosea, that means that you and I we're Gomer.

We're the ones who've turned on him, run from him.

Every time he's loved us and pursued us, every time he so loved the world, which is you and me, every time he does that, so often we tend to kind of go our own way.

And I want to show you the Christmas story in four statements from this story.

The first one is this write this down.

God's love rescues us.

That no matter what you've done, no matter how far you feel from God, no matter how much sin has devastated your life, you cannot outrun the love of God.

It rescues us.

Romans, the book of Romans, Paul says this, Romans 5, 8, but God demonstrates his own love for us in this.

While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

It's only love when it's demonstrated.

God rescues us.

Second thing I need you to write down from the story is this is that God's love covers us.

Imagine being Hosea in the story, and you find your wife.

She's standing on an auction block, probably naked, and he finds her, he comes to her, and he says, You're coming home with me.

And when he covers her, it's not just covering her nakedness, it's covering everything about her, all of her shame, all of her guilt once and for all covered, and he brings her home.

Third thing I want you to see about your God, because it's a really big deal, is that God's love chases us down.

If I'm in that situation and my wife has been so unfaithful and left, I want nothing to do with her, but Hosea humbles himself and he walks the streets.

He goes to the red light district looking for the one who betrayed him.

What does the book of Luke say about Jesus?

Luke chapter 19 says, For the Son of Man, Jesus.

Luke 19 · chapter mention

He's talking about himself.

He came to seek and save the lost.

Lost people have to get found.

It's the mission of Jesus.

And the fourth thing I want you to see is this it's God's love restores us.

I can't imagine what the story was for Hosea and Gomer.

But scripture says that he remarries her.

This is, friends, the Christmas story.

That no matter how far you feel from God, Christmas is the reminder that God so loved the world, which means he so loved you that he would do anything for you.

I can't imagine.

When he saw the brokenness of the world, which was personalized.

When God saw you, me, and all of our sins, and all of our faith.

He said, I'll I'll do anything.

I'll bankrupt the riches of heaven to pursue you.

And I'll rescue you.

I'll chase you down.

Save you.

And all you have to do is take a step towards Him.

And all of that.

All of Christmas becomes a gift to you.

Here's how I want to end today.

In a moment, we're going to celebrate baptisms at all of our church locations.

And today's going to be a party, everybody.

We're going to celebrate.

But before we do, I want to invite you all across this church.

Would you do this at all of our locations?

Would you stand up with me?

Would you stand?

It's going to be a little different today.

We're going to pray.

And for some of you, Christmas is something that you celebrate, but maybe it's not something you've experienced.

That the God who so loved you came to save you.

So in this moment, if this is you, we're going to pray together at all of our locations.

Would you bow your head and close your eyes even though you're standing?

If you would say, Jason, I don't know if I'm right with God.

Maybe this means you've never started following Jesus, or maybe you just feel like you've backed up and fallen away.

If this is you right now, would you just lift your hand, have one moment of courage and lift your hands to heaven saying, Jesus, I need you to save me.

Thank you.

Wow.

Wow.

If this is you, would you pray this with me?

In fact, I'm gonna invite our whole church family to pray together.

At Access, no one stands alone, no one prays alone.

So all across this place, would you say these words after me?

Say, Jesus, I give you my life.

Save me, change me, make my life new.

I believe you're the Son of God who gave your life for me.

Today I give my life completely to you.

Jesus, I love you.

I'll follow you the rest of my life.

In your name, Jesus.

Amen.

Come on, church fam, let's put our hands together and let's celebrate with those.