Love

So uh I told you that the the sermon is titled Love, and uh it's a continuance of this series, the more than words series, and I've loved this series.

Uh I love so much uh hearing about the word of God, studying about the word of God.

I love, I I love the Bible and I love my Bible.

I love this Bible right here so much.

Um it's important to me to have a Bible that that does everything that I need it to do.

And you go, well, what's the difference?

You know, a Bible says what it says.

Um there's something that's very important if you if you preach uh a message, it's very important.

It doesn't matter if I open this Bible to Genesis or Revelation, if I lay it down, it stays flat.

That is unbelievably important.

You've seen the preacher who starts to drift a little bit from his Bible, and you can see the pages closing, and he comes back and he says, and God says, kill the sheep now, you know.

And you what?

Where am I?

So it's very important that it stays laying flat.

Um, I like a Bible that's got some movement to it.

This is this is what I like to call, if you can do it like this, that's called Bible yoga, and it's just fine like this.

It doesn't hurt it at all.

It's just fine.

This is really good if you're one of those preachers that likes to kind of Bible beat people a little bit.

You can do this, you can let them know that you're angry about something.

It's really important.

This this Bible has what's called uh full yap.

Yep, that's what I said, full yap.

So what that means is that the leather covers all of the pages whenever it's closed in order to protect the pages.

I love this Bible.

I love it so much.

And I read this Bible and I read uh the individual pieces of this Bible, but I want us to stop for a moment and look at maybe the whole of Scripture, because I believe that the Bible is a story.

It's many small stories that make up a much larger story.

And as I categorize it today in the message, I believe that story is a love story, like a chick flick.

The Bible's a chick flick.

You could think of it that way if you wanted to.

Um, it's got some action scenes, it's fine, it's it's a lot of fun.

But the Bible is a love story.

It's it's God's love for us, God's exhibiting love towards us.

The Bible itself is not love, God is love, and this is the story of God's love towards us.

We get to see it and watch it as it plays out all through scripture.

And so I want to look at this story and I want to ask you to do something for me.

I'm going to share three elements that are common within this love story.

And uh these three elements are the exile, the blood sacrifice, and the mission.

Now, whenever I start talking about the blood sacrifice, or even all through these things, you're gonna be tempted to equate what I'm talking to to salvation.

I want us to not think of salvation at all in this message.

Uh we we tend to focus a lot on salvation, and what happens is then that we can miss some of the things that are callings on our life.

I want to tell you, we're we're going to a place at the end of the message where there's a call to action that we as a church, gateway church, can do something to make a difference in our communities.

So there's a call to action at the end, and in order to really capture that, we have to separate salvation for just a moment.

This is in no way a degradation of the importance of salvation, only the fact that many times we've read these same passages and viewed them only in the form of salvation.

And in order to understand what this really means for us as believers, we have to separate it for just a moment and see that there's something else that we were called to.

Our calling on this earth is not to sit around and wait for heaven.

Our calling on this earth is to bring heaven to earth.

We have a calling, a mission right here on earth.

And so I want to go through these steps.

We we live in the exile and then we go through the blood sacrifice, and then we find our mission in life.

And so I want to go through some of these things and talk about these things, but it I need you in this time to separate salvation.

I'm using Old Testament terminology here with the exile and the blood sacrifice, but it's because I want us to see this concurrent theme all the way through scripture.

And and so again, I am not uh disregarding salvation.

Okay?

Um, I feel like my phone is already buzzing with angry emails.

Okay, salvation, yes, I believe that salvation is through the blood of Christ, but something else happened in the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and we need to catch it.

So separate salvation for just a moment, and let's talk about the first phase of this love story, which is the exile.

The exile is something that all of us go through, and many of us think of the exile as the Israelites and the story of Moses and things like that, but there was an exile that happened long before that.

And let me show it to you right now.

It's in Genesis chapter 3, verse 23.

Genesis 3:23

It says, So the Lord God banished them from the Garden of Eden.

He's talking about Adam and Eve.

He sent Adam out to cultivate the ground from which he had been made.

After sending them out, the Lord God stationed a mighty cherubim to the east of the Garden of Eden.

That was the first exile.

If you think about it, that exile still affects us today.

We are in the mode of constantly wanting to be back to the garden where everything is perfect, everything is right, everything is set in order, justice is brought to the world.

And if we could just get back to that place, that garden, that original garden, we just want to be back in that place.

If we could get back to the garden, that was the very first exile.

And again, I'm not talking specifically about salvation, although uh we are born in exile.

We do need a savior to come and save us and bring salvation, but exile is a part of our life in many different ways.

Exile is constant in our lives.

Adam and Eve were in exile after the fall.

This is a separation from God's purpose in your life.

So you've had many times in your life where you are in exile.

You are separate from what God has called you to in your life.

That is to be living in exile.

When the Israelites were in exile, they were in slavery to the Egyptians.

Jonah was in exile when he spent three days in the belly of the whale.

The people who were building the Tower of Babel were in exile whenever God separated them and gave them different languages.

Joseph was in exile when his brothers sold him into slavery and faked his death.

David was in exile when he was hiding from Saul, who sought to kill him.

And even Christ himself was in a form of exile whenever he hung from the cross and said, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Feeling the weight of the sin of the world on his shoulders and feeling the separation from God.

Even Jesus going into the wilderness and fasting for 40 days and 40 nights, it's a purposeful journey into the exile.

But what's important about this is that we must realize when we are in exile, when we are out of God's purpose.

If you aren't in exile, then you don't really have a need for a savior.

You don't have a need for somebody to pull you back into God's purpose for your life.

So we need to realize, first of all, that we are in exile.

And I'm not going to spend very much time, so much could be said about being in exile and what you can do in these moments, but what we really need to understand is that when we are in exile, we are lost, we are needing help, we are needing a savior, and we go in and out of exile many times throughout our lives.

So if we were to think then of the specific case of the Israelites and the exile that they were experiencing, what brought them out of exile, what they, what the Jews celebrate continuously, even until up to this day, they celebrate the Passover.

It was the blood sacrifice and the Passover that happened because of the blood on the doorpost that brought brought, that's how they commemorated the freedom that they were given in God.

So the the next thing that we want to look at in these uh in this store love story is the blood sacrifice.

Um I felt a little bit weird about using the word the blood sacrifice.

Again, it's kind of an old testament term.

And uh, you know, I I, you know, I'm really proud of myself.

Dad has been in the hospital, we've been up there a lot with him.

Uh, one of the times that he was in the hospital, uh, they were trying to do an IV and it misfired, and blood was squirting all over the room.

And me and my brother laid our heads down on the hospital floor because it felt cold enough to keep us from passing out.

So I'm really proud of myself.

We did okay, you know, but I I I'm not gonna focus too much on the gory details of the blood sacrifice.

But the blood sacrifice was used all through the Old Testament.

Again, it was used for the remission of sins.

The blood sacrifice was used in order for the forgiveness of sins.

But if we take specifically the case of Passover, the primary focus was not the forgiveness of sins when we talk about Passover.

The primary focus of Passover, forgiveness of sins, is connected to it, for sure.

Absolutely.

It it the way that Passover foretells the crucifixion of Christ tells us what we need to know about salvation.

But there's another element of this, which is that the Passover feast was designed to celebrate the freedom that they had been given to live their lives now through God because of what he did for them.

They celebrate that they were taken out of bondage, taken out of slavery, and set free to live a life for God.

That's the primary thing that the Passover celebrates.

And Jesus' crucifixion, his death and resurrection coincides with the Passover feast.

We know all about this, and even there are scriptures to show uh what the Bible says about uh Jesus being the Passover Lamb.

For example, 1 Corinthians chapter 5, verse 7 says, Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed for us.

1 Corinthians 5:7

So let us celebrate the festival, not with the old bread of wickedness and evil, but with the new bread of sincerity and truth.

So the death and resurrection are intimately connected to the Passover.

And the Passover teaches us that through the death and resurrection of Christ, we are then set free out of bondage, out of slavery, set free to live a life that is in Christ.

If the whole purpose was only to save us into heaven, and there was no goal for us, no mission, no job here on earth, if the only reason, then why didn't the world not end right in that moment?

Instead, Jesus gave things like the Great Commission, He gave things like the Sermon on the Mount, He told us what it is that our job is supposed to be that we fulfill right here on earth.

So the death, burial, and resurrection is intimately connected with Passover.

But it's also connected with creation.

I want to show you that.

I think it's unbelievable.

This passage blows me away.

And I'm not gonna read all of John 20, I'm just gonna refer back to it.

But if you want to make a note, you can go back to John 20 and you can look through this, and this is unbelievably incredible what this teaches us about our life today.

So, Jesus' death and resurrection, we know by the book of John when and what days it happens.

And John even gives a nod to creation.

I'm talking about the beginning of the world.

He gives a nod to the beginning of creation right from the start of the book of John.

John chapter 1, verse 1 says, in the beginning, which is exactly the way Genesis starts.

John 1:1

Then we get to John chapter 20, and what we see there is that on the sixth day of the week, it's the sixth day of the week, Jesus is taken in front of the crowd, and Pontius Pilate says, Here is the man.

John 20 · chapter mention

Here he is.

This is the man that claims to be God, the man who is man and is also God.

Here he is, and he presents him in front of everyone.

Okay, on the sixth day of creation is when God created man and put his image into him.

So on the sixth day of the week, Jesus stands before as as human, but having God in him, having God's image, being fully man, fully God, and here he's presented before them on this sixth day of the week, and on the sixth day of creation is when God put his image into man.

Okay, on the at on the end of the sixth day in Genesis chapter 2, God said, It is finished.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

At the end of the sixth day that Jesus is hanging from the cross, he says, It is finished.

The correlation back to creation is powerful in this moment.

We remember that on the seventh day when God created the world, God rested.

We remember that it was the seventh day Jesus had already been placed in the tomb, and it was an entire day of being laid to rest in the tomb.

So on the seventh day, God rested in creation.

On the seventh day, then Jesus is in the tomb, laid to rest.

And then it says the first day of the week, which in the creation story would be the first day of a brand new creation.

It would be the very beginning of all the possibilities that God laid out of what he wanted to accomplish on this earth.

The very first day was that first day of the week after God rested on the seventh.

And it was on that first day of the week that Mary Magdalene comes and finds the tomb empty.

And we say, if we can only get back to that garden, if we can only get back to that garden, that perfect place, that that place that's so wonderful, where there's relationship and communion with God.

If we can only get back to that place, who does Mary Magdalene think Jesus is when she sees him?

He's the gardener.

He's illustrating right here in this moment that he has overthrown the one who was currently ruling the world.

He has taken back his garden, he has set back his reign and his rule, and he gives it back to us and says, Now go finish what Adam and Eve couldn't finish.

Go do what I called you to do, to make your creation look like mine, to win souls to God, to do what is right in this place.

I have given you the garden back.

But as far as it is with creation, God owns this place yet again.

God owns this place and he took the keys back.

There's nothing that we can do to change that.

But what he has called us to do is help bring his kingdom of heaven down to earth.

He even asked us to pray that way, and so we remember these things, then that this is the garden.

We are now in the new holy land.

It's his land, and he has called us to do something, which brings us to the third element of this story, which is the mission.

Christ calls us into mission.

He saved us from our sins and set us into a mission that we are here to accomplish on earth.

I I don't have time to read it, but I think most of you would probably be familiar with the passage in Matthew where uh one of the chief scribes, somebody who knew scripture very well, asked Jesus, What's the greatest commandment?

And it was a test.

And Jesus says, the greatest commandment is to love God and love others as yourself, is to love God and love others.

And he says, all of it, all the scriptures, all the law, all of this can be summed up by saying, Love God and love others.

So this is the mission.

But then I started thinking, it's not really good enough for us to just know that we should love others.

I'd like to know how this is gonna happen, how this is gonna take place.

And I found this passage of scripture that uh I've never really understood very well.

And as I started reading through this, it began to come together.

And so let me just show it to you.

It's John chapter 16, verse 8.

John 16:8

It says, And when he has come, he is the Holy Spirit in this case.

When he has come, he will convict the world.

Other translations say he will prove the world wrong.

He will prove the world wrong in the area of sin and of justice.

Justice is a better translation for this word righteousness, but you can use either one, and of judgment.

Okay, so then he describes here how the Holy Spirit is going to prove the world wrong in these areas of sin because they do not believe in me, of justice because I go to my Father and you see me no more, of judgment because the ruler of this world is judged.

Okay, so let's let's go one by one then to all of these things.

The first one that he mentioned is sin.

This is not stating that this is the work of the Holy Spirit, but the work of the Holy Spirit is through the saints, it's through the body, it's through the church.

This is not stating that we will never sin, that we won't sin, or that no matter how we sin, we will live a holier than thou lifestyle, looking down on those who sin, which will then convict sinners and make them realize that they need to change something.

What this is really talking about is that they have sinned because they have not believed that He is God.

And so then you have to ask what our role in this.

Our role is, obviously, we will still sin while we're here on earth.

Our our role is to strive with the help and the power of the Holy Spirit to remove sin from our lives.

And we ought to look pretty amazing when you compare us to the way that the world lives with death, chaos, and destruction.

And when we don't look that much better, we're not very good of a witness to people around us.

We're supposed to strive as much as we can, relying on the power of the Holy Spirit to remove sin from our lives so that when people look around and they see death and destruction and chaos, they can find a safe harbor in the church and in Christians.

That's what we're called to do with sin.

Let's look at the next one.

The next one is justice.

In the area of justice, it says that uh they uh justice because I go to my father and you see me no more.

This proves the righteousness of Christ.

It proves that he could die, that he could rise again, and that he was accepted back into his father's presence because he had not sinned.

So it proves the righteousness of God, but it also gives us a mandate for justice here in the world.

And the primary thing we need to remember about this whenever we're talking about justice is that we are called to do justice, to help bring justice here to the world.

This means seeing those who are hurting and lost and need something, caring for the poor, caring for the widow, caring for those who are hungry.

These are the things that we're supposed to do.

We're supposed to bring justice.

And I feel strongly on this issue because I see it so often in my generation when we go to battle for these social justice issues.

And the primary way that we do that is through protest.

When we protest what we're against, or we try to make a difference with what we say, and you can look at our lives and they're falling apart, and you realize who will listen to somebody whose life is falling apart?

Who will trust that we solved all the world's problems whenever we can't solve the very basic problems of our life?

You see, the church is called to do justice, not just talk about it.

You see, belief is for your salvation.

Doing the work of God is for your witness.

Belief gets you your salvation, that's fine.

But what you do in the earth, that is what brings you your witness.

And so what we do in the form of justice matters.

And then the third element here that we're looking at is uh judgment.

Judgment here is to say that uh we we we we as a church don't need to judge any longer because the ruler of the world has been judged.

If you look back at the scripture, it says of judgment because the ruler of this world is judged.

Here's what Christ is saying the ruler of the world was Satan.

I went down to where he lived, I conquered him, I overtook him, I took all of his rights and all of his power away, and now you don't need to judge anyone because I've already done the judgment and I have sentenced the ruler of the world to death.

And so it's not our place.

The conviction of the Holy Spirit is strong and powerful, it's not our place to be judgment, it's not our place to be judgment in others' lives, it's not our place to tell them what they're doing wrong or how they could change or how they can improve.

Our job is not to judge, our job is to love.

You see, holiness is more about what you do than what you don't do.

And if you want to talk about us being a witness in the world, we must remember that it's very important what we do.

It's important what we don't do, but far what speaks far volumes more to people is what we do as a church.

And so we as a church have got to heed this call to action, to step out and to walk the the goodness of God out, to walk out this process on earth.

The Bible is not the story of God rescuing his people from this evil world.

The story of the Bible is God in his great love rescuing people for this world so that those people can go rescue more.

People.

We haven't been rescued so that we can sit around and wait for this place that we one day hope to be in.

We've been rescued so that we can turn around and rescue others.

We've been rescued so that we can step into this calling.

And I'm I'm drawn continuously back to the story of Thomas.

I relate so well to the story of Thomas that some people call him doubting Thomas.

And I was thinking about I one thing that I've struggled with so much in thinking about the story of Thomas is that he actually got to see the marks on Jesus.

And Jesus says, Blessed are you that have seen, but even more blessed are those who have not seen.

And it kills me because I'm thinking, what could we do to show the marks of Jesus?

And then I realized something.

I was thinking back to many years ago, 11 or 12 years ago, I went and visited a pair of missionaries in Guatemala, and they were living high up in the mountains of Guatemala where there was no running water, no electricity.

And so we went there and we stayed with them for seven days, and we videotaped what they were doing and we watched them.

And I asked him, How did you know what to do when you got here?

And he said, I knew that it wouldn't work if we just came in and started a church.

I knew it wouldn't work.

So instead I came in and I said, What do you need most?

And they said, We need a school because if we can't raise our kids in school, then they can't go back to the city and work or get a college education, and we'll never turn into anything unless we have a school.

And so he said, Okay, and he started a school.

His wife nearly died in a plane crash, taking off from the little grass field that they have right there.

She was burned and had skin grafts over most of her body.

Right before we had been there, uh a worm had bored its way into his skin and he had had this terrible infection.

And they lived there raising children with no running water and no electricity.

And he sacrificed and started this school and gave his life to running this school.

And then one day they said, Why do you do this?

And he said, It's because of God.

And they themselves started a church.

And I was thinking about that story and what I experienced there, and I realized that anyone who was doubting there got to see the marks that he bore and giving love to them.

Especially in his wife, they can literally see the burn marks that she carries for the rest of her life.

And when they see the marks, just like Thomas, they'll believe.

You see, we as a church, we have to go out and take up our cross.

We have to go out, and it might leave marks, but we've got to do something to show our love to the world.

Because that is our witness.

And I was thinking about this situation with dad and what has gone on, and I was realizing in that moment that he had lost so much of his blood that if they hadn't had bags of blood right there ready to give to him, then there's no question that he would have died.

And so the kindness and the generosity of somebody giving blood is what saved him.

And as Christians, you already know where I'm going.

It is Christ's blood that takes our place, that gives us life.

And so I could see this very real moment where it was a real life circumstance where blood was used to save my dad's life.

And I could relate it back to the love of Christ.

Would you bow your heads and close your eyes with me, please?

As I was praying for this prayer time that we're about to have, we'll end the service in the way that we do every service where the prayer team comes down to the front here and you can come forward and receive prayer.

I want to I want us to, we we'll pray for anything.

It doesn't matter what it is, but I want to focus in on two areas.

Number one is if you need to hear the calling of God on your life, if you know you're ready to step out and do something to help bring the kingdom of heaven to earth, if that's what you want to do, agree with somebody in prayer.

Agree with somebody in prayer and pray that God will reveal what specific mission He has for you.

And then the second thing that I think this is what most people are gonna need prayer for in this moment is that we saw the power of prayer over this week.

And if you have any medical need, any any need with your job, your finances, your health, whatever it is, if you have a need, why not come forward and agree with somebody in prayer?

I can tell you overwhelmingly, no matter what would have happened this week, I felt the power of God's presence because of the prayers that were being lifted up.

Why not come forward and agree with somebody in prayer?

At every campus, there will be prayer ministers at the front of the campus, and whatever prayer need you have, we want to pray with you.

So we'll go back into one more song of worship, but if you need prayer, after I pray, you you stand up.

When everyone stands up and you come forward, no matter what your prayer need is, let us pray with you today.

Father in heaven, your grace abounds.

Your love can't be stopped.

God, you break through walls, you break through time, you break through every hurdle, God, to get to our heart.

We receive the love that you have for us today.

God, we're overwhelmed by the price you paid so that we could be your sons and daughters again.

And so, Lord, I pray that in this moment you would draw every single person who needs prayer.

Lord, everyone who needs prayer, God, I pray that as we pray together, Lord, the power of prayer and the power of your mighty hand would show itself in every prayer need that comes forward today, Lord.

We pray all these things in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.