God's Comforting Word: Love (John 3:1-17)

Hello, friends.

This is Pastor Creighton.

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This is the holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to John.

Glory to you, Lord Christ.

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews.

This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.

Jesus answered him, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Nicodemus said to him, How can a man be born when he is old?

Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born?

Jesus answered, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.

That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit.

Do not marvel that I have said to you, You must be born again.

The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.

So it is with everyone who has been born of the Spirit.

Nicodemus said to him, How can these things be?

Jesus answered him, Are you the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know, and we bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony.

If I told you earthly things and you did not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?

No one has ascended into heaven, except he who has descended from heaven, the Son of Man.

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, and 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 him.

This is the gospel of the Lord.

Praise to you, Lord Christ.

So, Lord God, we pray that you would open our hearts and minds to your good news today.

Amen.

Please be seated.

My notes are over here, so I'm gonna have a location change.

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

That is the Sunday school classic, isn't it?

Rightly so, I think.

Here's my question for us this morning.

What is God's heart toward you?

What's God's heart toward you?

What does his heart beat for you?

His innermost disposition towards you?

I think that's an important question.

Because I think in our quiet moments, perhaps we're alone before the Lord, and we contemplate his attitude towards us.

I think his attitude towards us, or what we understand it to be, reflects a lot of our own to him.

See, I wonder if we think that God's heart towards us is cool and distant, we tend to be cool and distant towards the Lord.

I mean, that's true in our own human relationships, isn't it?

I wonder if we find or if we think that God is perhaps harsh and exacting or perhaps disappointed with us.

We can't help but retreat from him.

To hide ourselves behind our own fig leaves, so to speak.

Even to resent him.

This is the experience of one of my heroes of the faith, Martin Luther, who desperately wanted to do whatever it took early in his life to earn God's favor.

Luther imagined that the best way to do that was by entering into the monastery.

So years later, he reflects on this experience.

This experience of thinking that God's disposition towards him is one that is so harsh and disappointed.

He says, though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience.

I could not believe that God was placated by my satisfaction, that God was happy with my best attempts to earn his love.

I did not love him.

I hated the righteous God who punishes sinners.

I raged with a fierce and troubled conscience.

Do we know what that place is like, maybe for ourselves?

To rage with a troubled conscience?

What's God's heart towards us?

Perhaps we want to say the right Sunday school answer based on our text today, and we want to say, well, God's heart towards us is love.

But even that opens up a lot of questions, doesn't it?

With what kind of love does God love us?

Does he love us with a kind of avuncular love that pats us on the head and sends us on our way?

Does he love us with a sort of obligatory love, like, well, I guess I'm stuck with these people, so I'm gonna make the best of it.

All these things make a big difference, don't they?

Because what we understand our God's heart to be toward us is going to reflect our heart toward God.

Friends, the good news from our text this morning, the good news of God's comforting word, we're exploring these four comfortable words in our liturgy over these weeks.

God's comforting word to us this morning is that God's heart for you and for me beats with a fathomless, selfless, saving love.

That's the kind of love that God has for you and for me in Christ.

It is fathomless and selfless and saving.

God so loved the world, say it with me, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.

This is an alluring word.

It draws us toward the God whose heart is toward us.

Love divine, all loves excelling, joy of heaven to earth come down, fix in us thy humble dwelling, all thy faithful mercy's crown.

So if we're looking for peace and comfort and for assurance, we have to look no further than God's own heart toward us.

And I think this is what John 3 is all about.

I think in the first eight verses, Jesus wants to make so clear our spiritual need.

And then in verses 9 to 13, Jesus wants us to know that he alone can meet that need.

In verses 14 and 15, Jesus wants us to understand how he meets that need.

And finally, in verses 16 and 17, verse 16 being our comfortable word, Jesus wants to understand why he would meet that need.

So if you have your order of service, if you have your Bible, let's explore this passage together, even briefly, in our time together.

So, verses 1 to 8, we meet Nicodemus.

Nicodemus is a Pharisee.

He's educated, he's pious, he's got a lot of influence in the Jewish community, and he comes to Jesus because he recognized there's something about Jesus that meets with the kingdom here.

There's something going on that God is doing in and through Jesus, and Nicodemus is curious.

He goes to Jesus and he recognizes, Jesus, you're pointing us toward the kingdom with the signs that you do.

But Jesus wants to leave Nicodemus and the reader with no illusions.

Unless one is born again, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.

And this is a confusing phrase for Nicodemus.

So Jesus in verse 5 explains what he means by being born again.

Unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.

The church has long understood that these words reflect God's work through baptism, through water, and through the regenerative work of the Holy Spirit, transforming us.

So, in a real way, in other words, he's saying, Nicodemus, you need to concern yourself less with taking your taking the initiative to follow the signs into the kingdom, doing the good work that you think is going to get you into the kingdom.

You need to be concerned with God's work in you to draw you into the kingdom.

You need God to do for you what you cannot do for yourself, to transform you by his Holy Spirit and to draw you into everlasting life.

This is our spiritual need.

Apart from Christ, we cannot enter the kingdom by our own striving.

So, verses 9 to 13, Jesus wants to make it clear that he alone can meet that need, because he is the unique revealer of who God is.

Nicodemus is very confused by what Jesus is saying here.

How can these things be?

And Jesus answers him that you speak of, pardon me, we speak of what we know, he says, and we bear witness to what we have seen.

And then he goes on to say that if I tell you earthly things you don't believe, what if I tell you heavenly things?

Jesus is saying that he uniquely knows and has seen the kingdom in its fullness in God's glorious presence, because he alone is the Son of Man who has descended from heaven to earth.

Following the signs into the kingdom or speculating about the things of God is our best attempt, as human beings, to ascend to the kingdom, to ascend to heaven.

Jesus is saying that's the wrong momentum.

I alone am the one who has descended from heaven to earth, to make a way into the kingdom.

I alone can bear witness to the things of the kingdom, because I know for myself, and therefore I'm the only one who can draw you into the kingdom.

I alone can accomplish that.

And how?

This is where I want us to zoom in, verses 14, 15, and 16 and 17.

How is Jesus going to do that?

Well, he opens up this interesting illustration from the history of God's people, uh, Israel, in the Old Testament.

Not exactly um uh not exactly the most uh uh uh uh well-trodden path in the Old Testament.

It's kind of obscure and it's kind of confusing uh what's going on with these bronze serpents here.

But we find ourselves in Numbers 21, verses 4 to 9.

Numbers 21:4–9

Here God's people, Israel, have been led out of bondage and slavery in Egypt.

They're being led by God into the promised land, but for the moment they're wandering in the wilderness.

And the people become impatient and they speak against God, they grumble against him, which is a lot less like uh, you know, like speaking to your HR representative to submit a complaint.

It's more like an absolute insult to the God who's brought them into freedom.

Just like ongoing giving God the finger throughout their wilderness travel.

And God is unbelievably patient with this people.

So God's people are stubbornly putting up a barrier between themselves and God's saving grace towards them.

They are stubbornly putting up this barrier and resistance to God's saving love towards them.

And when God's people put up a barrier between themselves and God's grace, they find that disorder and destruction and death results.

And for God's people, Israel in this moment that takes the form of these fiery serpents, come into the camp of Israel and uh wreak havoc.

They wreak death.

So the people of Israel recognize we've put up this barrier, we've distanced ourselves and withdrawn our trust from the God who's saving us.

We need his help.

So Moses, as their leader, petitions the Lord.

What are we gonna do?

And the Lord says, Here's what you're gonna do.

You're gonna craft a bronze serpent, you're gonna lift it up on a pole, so that when folks get bitten by these uh venomous serpents, they can look to that bronze serpent in the middle of the camp, and they can be saved.

This is not superstition, it's not magic, it's God's means of deliverance through an exercise of trust.

This is God setting up a means by which people will look and receive God's saving grace, his saving love towards them.

And if you've ever seen uh the uh the symbol for medical aid, you think of that pole, the serpent wrapped around that, or two serpents, that's an allusion to this text right here.

It's saying, if you need relief, come our way.

So this is what Jesus is picking up on here.

That in the midst of Israel's great spiritual need and resistance to God's saving love, God by sheer grace sets up a means of deliverance for them in the very form of what's cursing them.

Right?

He set up a bronze serpent, and they're being persecuted by serpents.

Well, here's where Jesus understands his mission to intersect with this image.

Verse 14 and 15.

As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him should have eternal life.

God in this moment in the Old Testament has set up a means of deliverance in the form of the curse.

Jesus has taken the curse on himself in our very sinful human flesh, to be lifted up and borne upon the cross, so that ever whoever would lift up their heart to him in trust and in faith can rest assured that they will be delivered from death and sin.

And what plagues us, Jesus has taken the curse onto his very self.

And this is what I was reading in my morning prayers this morning, that God did for us what we could not do for ourselves, Romans chapter 8.

Romans 8 · chapter mention

He sent his own son in a body like the bodies we sinners have, that in that body God declared an end to sin's control over us by giving his son as a sacrifice for our sins.

He did this so that the just requirement of the law may be fully satisfied for us, who no longer follow our sinful nature, but instead follow the Spirit.

God has done for us what we cannot do for ourselves by lifting up Jesus on the cross, bearing our sin and our alienation and our death on himself.

Now the question remains, why?

Why would he do that?

We recognize their spiritual need.

Perhaps we recognize that Jesus alone can meet that need, and Jesus has come to be the one to bear that spiritual need on himself, but why?

And this is what makes John 3.16 so key.

It's like a concentrated form of the whole good news of Scripture.

God so loved the world, there is no other reason that God would do this for us, but his fathomless, selfless, saving love towards us, his agape willing our greatest good, even at his greatest expense, and not sparingly, not reservedly, he so loved the world with an unfathomably, unfathomably deep love.

How great the Father's love for us, how vast beyond all measure.

And the object of God's love is the world, which in Greek is this word cosmos, and we probably recognize that word even in English.

This is not just God saving those who we might expect to be saved, the successful, the pious, but for all who are in spiritual need, all who look to Christ for their salvation.

The Father out of love is willing to give his Son to be for us the means of deliverance.

This agape love takes action.

It gives.

And the son is a little bit like, what the heck?

The father out of love gives the son, but the son out of love for us is pleased to be given.

And the Spirit in love draws us to the Son.

Our triune God of love is interested in our redemption and drawing us towards Him in eternal life, that whoever believes in Him should not perish.

Which isn't to say dying of physical death, but dying the greater death of condemnation that we read about in verse 17, to die with a barrier between us and the sovereign, saving, selfless love of God towards us in Christ, to put up that barrier and resist God's grace, to put up that barrier and withdraw our trust from Him.

God wills instead that we would have everlasting life, a restored relationship with Him, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.

So what then is God's heart towards us?

God's heart towards us is one of great love, of fathomless, selfless, saving love towards us, abundant love.

And that's what Luther discovered for himself.

When Luther discovered that God does for sinners out of love what they can't do for themselves, he writes that I felt like I had been born anew, and that the gates of heaven had been opened.

Friends, this is God's love for you.

This is God's love for me.

This is God's love that draws him and draws us and allures us to his very self.

And just as another hero of the faith of mine, John Calvin, writes, our minds cannot find calm repose.

In another word, they can't find comfort unless we arrive at the unmerited love of God.

This is what we're about, friends, aren't we?

Here at New Song, proclaiming God's love for a world in desperate need, we can receive that love for ourselves afresh, even today.

As we trust in his promises, as we come to this table, which reminds us that God has given everything for us and provided a means for our salvation in Christ.

Come to him in faith.

Come to him with assurance that God treasures you and loves you and draws you to his very self in Christ.

Amen.

Thank you for listening today.

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May God bless you and keep you today and every day.