He Loved Us and Sent His Son

So these last couple of weeks, as we've been doing Advent, we've not been having Advent or Christmas sermons. And I've told you that I'm never quite sure what to do and whether we should preach Christmas sermons or how far I can get traction with them. And yet last week we finished our section in 2 Timothy and I thought, well, we've got two Sundays now, one right before Christmas today and then one right after Christmas next Sunday. and then New Year's after it. And I thought, you know, instead of just plowing forward into 2 Timothy 3, verses 10 and beyond, which we will come to in due course, I thought it would be good for us to take some time, even if only two weeks, to study something pertaining to the nativity, the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ. And so as Christmas approaches, I want us to take the next two Sundays to address Jesus coming to earth. And there are many ways we could do that. But with two weeks,

To do it in, I want to do it sort of as two halves of a whole. And so what we're going to be talking about this week and next is the reason that the Father sent the Son into the world. Why did the Father, God, send Jesus? And next week, we'll talk about what our response to that ought to be. And so if I were to put the question to you, why did the Father send Jesus into the world? I think that many of us would come up with an answer. of he wanted to or because he loved us. And these are the answers that we'll consider this morning. And in one sense, when you think about the love of God and talking about it, it seems to be the thing that's talked about everywhere. We're always talking about love and what's loving and what's unloving, what love requires of us and what love keeps us from doing or saying. Love is often used to justify in Christian circles.

any and every belief or action that we might come up with. And if you were to speak against it, if you were to oppose it, you can almost certainly be assured that you'll be accused at some point in the process of being unloving, uncharitable. And so one of the things that I've come to believe is that the love of God, as it truly is, as we find it in the scriptures, is a topic that's actually been neglected. It's not something that's been taught on. There's been a lot of lip service paid to it, but the love that God has for us is something that's not spoken of. And so this morning my hope is that we will come face to face with God's love for us and that as a result we'll be strengthened and that we'll rejoice when we see what the true nature of his love is like for us. Would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord from 1 John chapter 4 verses 9 and 10. This is the word of the Lord and it is eternally true. By this the love of God was manifested in us.

That God sent his only begotten son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love. Not that we loved God, but that he loved us. And sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So I want to start by asking a question. Was God a God of love before Jesus came to earth? Yes. Does the Old Testament teach us that? Yes. The reason I start by asking that question is because I think there's a lot of teaching in America today that could be categorized as dispensational theology that would say that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament were different. Not that they were actually different gods, but that they saved.

The people in those times, those dispensations, were saved by different sets of criterion, by different rules. And in the Old Testament, that those saints, the Israelites, were not saved by grace or as a result of the love of God, but that they were saved through the keeping of the law. But then when Jesus came, finally love entered. It now has hit the scene, and now we have God demonstrating his love. And I start by asking, did God... Was God loving in the Old Testament to dispel from the very beginning that God has somehow changed the way that he deals with his people? He hasn't. He's always been a God of love. Always. From the moment that he took counsel with himself and said, shall we create these things? Yes, let there be light. And then there was light.

And then he separated the dry earth from the water and he created all of the creatures and all that is. And then finally us. It was a function of his love. And not just a love for himself or a desire to see his own glory manifested, but a love for his creation. Of which we're the pinnacle. Men sit at the top of God's creation to rule over it. As his image bearers. To cultivate. everything else that he's made. And when Adam and Eve sinned in the very beginning, he warned them previously, and he said, of all the trees of the Garden of Eden you may eat, except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die. And so then, hop skipping and jumping through, Eve sees the fruit, is deceived by Satan, takes it, sees that it's attractive and it's good for food, and she eats it, and then she gives it to Adam, and Adam eats it, and then...

knowing what they did, when the Lord came, as was his habit, to walk amongst them in the garden, what did Adam and Eve do? Well, they hid themselves. And the Lord comes and says, Adam, where are you? Well, we hid ourselves. Why? Well, because we knew that we were naked. Who told you? It was this woman. It was that serpent. And what does God do? He kills an animal, and he creates clothing for them to cover their nakedness, to cover their shame. And that you have to see is an act of love, isn't it? What could he have done? By our understanding of his words and his warnings, what should he have done? The flood, except not with Noah, right? Utter destruction, death. But that's not what you find. What you find is that God loved those sinners, newly minted sinners. He loved them.

And we could continue to go through the Old Testament history and show all of the ways that God is gracious and loving and a father to his people all through the Old Testament. And yet when the people of God lived before the coming of Christ, they lived in complete anticipation of a savior, of a messiah. They had nothing to point back to other than types and shadows. He's going to be a king like David was. He's going to be a priest like Melchizedek was, right? But they couldn't take hold of what the Savior was to be. They hadn't seen him in the flesh. They hadn't experienced the fulfillment of all of these promises and all of these prophecies. And so right before, you know, this goes on for centuries and on. And then there comes a time where God removes his voice from his people.

And what I mean by that is he removed his prophets, who at that time were his mouthpiece. They spoke to God's people on behalf of God. And there was a period of time where there was no prophets. God didn't give them any people to speak. And I want you to think what it would have been like to be one of God's people at that time where your God has promised you a Savior, but now has removed his voice from you for 400 years. Not a short time, but a long time. Even more than your lifetime, generations. No word from your God. No reminders of deliverance. Having to look back at what God had previously said, waiting for it to happen in the future. It would have been a difficult time for God's people. And as a result, I think many of them were disheartened, discouraged, weary, tired of waiting. The promises had grown dull in their hearts and in their minds. They were not prominent. They weren't flashing in bright lights. God's going to be merciful to us and deliver us.

But they were dusted over. The pressures of life, of the Roman occupation, had become paramount in their life. And if you think about it, what they felt is often what we feel. Is it not true that, you know, you have these old proverbs, they're not from the scripture, but we have them, and there's truth in them, that actions speak louder than words. You ever said that? You ever thought that? You ever wanted someone to do what they said they were going to do? Stop telling me about it and do it? You ever felt that way about God? Stop telling me about it. Do it. We've waited. We're weary. We've suffered long and hard. Please do what you said you're going to do. In Galatians 4, it says, but when the fullness of time came, that time being set by God the Father, but when the fullness of time came, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, so that he might redeem those born under the law. This is the news that the shepherds and the magi,

and Zacharias, and his wife Elizabeth, and Joseph and Mary, all received. After a long period of silence, this promise is brought back to the front, and they say it's happening now in their various ways. There's this star. There's this sign. God, after a long time of silence, is coming to do now what he has promised to do from long, long ago. This is the news that Simeon, when he was in the temple and they brought Jesus into the temple, Simeon, this old godly man who'd attended to the things of God his whole life and yet was weary of waiting, Simeon says, now I've seen the salvation of my God. Now I can die. Now I can die because I've seen that God is faithful to his word. Simeon was strengthened by seeing that God did what he said he would do. And if we're honest, we're the same way. It's easy for us to to dismiss things that are only said. We want to see them done. And in sending his son into this world as a baby in a manger with Joseph and Mary, God, in his own perfect wisdom, finally acted, finally acted on what he had promised for so long. This is what it means at the beginning of our section where it says, by this,

the love of God was manifested in us. To manifest something is to produce it, to make it known, to demonstrate it. And so by this, the love of God was made known to us. It says in us, but in us, it means in creation, okay? If you were to read the King James or some other, it would say among us or toward us. The love of God was shown to us. was made known to us, was no longer a promise but now a reality through the sending of the Son into the world. The fact that Jesus came into the world is the proof of God's love for us. So I want to ask you, do you doubt God's love for you? Have you doubted God's love for you? And I don't know if there's one in here who could say, no, I don't. Maybe a young child who's still in the innocence of their life and hasn't, come to grips with the reality of sin and the darkness that we live among. Maybe they would say, I've always known love and believed it because I've experienced it through the hands of my mother and father. But those of us as we get older all have occasion to doubt the love of God. And I'm not commending that doubt to you. I'm only acknowledging that it's real, that you and I have doubts. And what's the source of those doubts?

Sometimes it's because we see our sins and we go, who could love me like if I do that? Having done this, would he love me? Sometimes it's because of difficulties or burdens in our lives, ones that cause us to despair even of life. Do you know that Paul said that his burdens were so heavy on him in 1 Corinthians that he despaired even of life? That's how hard and grinding the suffering that he was under was. Would it be that I was not even alive? This makes me lament the fact that my heart still beats and my lungs still take air. Has that ever caused you to doubt the love of God? We could go on and we could continue to enumerate or describe the types of things that happen to us and around us that cause us to doubt God's love. To say things a lot like the psalmist said, how long, oh Lord, how long will you hide your face from me? How long, oh Lord, will I be left to waste away? You ever felt like that?

If you like that now, doesn't it all end up, doesn't it sort of form an army in your head that's made to convince you that God doesn't love you? Because the thing that goes on is you say, we have this idea, and it's this. If God loved me, he wouldn't put me through these things. I wouldn't suffer like this. Or if I had to suffer, I wouldn't suffer so poorly. Because sometimes we look at our suffering and we go, well, okay, so the Lord's given me this suffering to teach me something, but I'm too weak to learn it. And I'm too weak to bear it. And so why is his hand heavy upon me? I can't see the love in it. And I'm about to slip. Why would he do such things? And we conclude that because he's done such things or allowed such things, that it must be a function of, it must have some interaction with his love that he would not do this.

A loving father would not do this to his children. He would not allow them such hardships. And then you think, perhaps I've been ungrateful, and that's why I suffer. He's punishing me for some sin that I've committed in the past. Maybe he's using me, and maybe my whole life is to be expended for the sake of some good in someone else's life. And if someone else could benefit from my sorrow and suffering, then maybe it's worth it, and maybe there's some love in that somewhere. Even if I don't see it as directed to me, there is some love in there somewhere, love for other people. We often think, well, we struggle with the reality of God loving us, but we can say, I can see how he loves other people. And many times, what we identify as his love of other people is that they don't suffer the way we do. And that we read that as an indication of his displeasure with us and his delight in them. And these are dark roads to go down, aren't they? There's no light down at the end of these alleys.

but only despair. And we live in this tension every day of trying to reconcile what we, you know, our understanding of the love of God as we find it in the scripture with our experience of it in our daily life. And we can look around and see, well, he loved them and he did this for them and he gave them these things and they prayed and he removed their hand from them. That's what it looks like to me. And so these thoughts turn around inside of us. And we don't know what to make of them. And we're weak. We know we're weak and we sin and we know we sin. And then we're told that God loves sinners and we think, okay, I can't deny that. I mean, to deny that would be to just simply deny what Scripture teaches, but I don't see how. And then we come to passages. Have you ever not wanted to read 1 John, 2 John, 3 John? Just like, those aren't the books I want to read. Why? It's probably because of this very reason.

It's all about the love of God. It's like every other word is love. It's about God loving us and us loving God and us loving our neighbors and what that love means and what that love looks like and how important that love is and how necessary it is and how abundant it is. And we're sitting here going, this doesn't square with what I feel. John, do you know what you're talking about? Have you lived in this world? There are many proofs of the love of God in this world. We started out with creation. We started out with God providing covering. I said we could go through the Old Testament and we could show the love of God being expressed toward his people time and time and time again. But the ultimate example of it, the pinnacle expression of the love of God is him sending his son into this world. Everyone before that time looked forward with some level of anticipation and some level of understanding. Not as good as ours, you understand. We understand.

The scriptures far better than the Old Testament saints would have understood them. We understand them far better because we can look and see what was said and then what God did. They lived in a time where they saw what God said and they hoped for what God would do, but they weren't even sure what shape or form that would take. And so John says, by this, the love of God was manifested in us that God sent his only begotten son. into the world so that we might live through him. And I want to spend just a second talking about this phrase, only begotten, okay? We could dig in to the Trinity and we could dig into the substance and essence of God here and we could talk, but I don't think that would be the most helpful use of our time. I want to speak to you more practically about this, okay? Just one kid. You have just one. And all of your love and all of your affection

every bit of it rests on that one child. That's the one you send to die, right? You see this in the Old Testament with Abraham and Isaac. You wonder, would it have been easier for Abraham to obey the command to kill his son if he had more than one? Parents who suffer with miscarriages, those who suffer with miscarriages and have no other children often suffer worse than those who have other children. Now, these aren't happy things to talk about, but they do demonstrate to us the kindness of God in giving us children and the joy that they do bring to us. We could look at the other side and examine the sorrow of not having them or losing them. But here, what we read is that God has one son, his only begotten son, and it's that son that he sends into the world to do what? We would like to say, to save us. Yes.

And how? By dying. To give up his son. That's how his love for us is made known to us, is manifested to us. Beyond him saying it, this is what he does to prove it. He sends his son into the world. And you're left thinking, if we were to set aside God the Father and Jesus Christ the Son, and we were just to look at Abraham and Isaac, who among us could think for a second that they could do what Abraham did? And we can read the scriptures and we can look at it and we can say, Abraham's conclusion after a lifetime of barrenness is finally given a son and then is told, raise him up, love him. And as he's butting into a man, take him to the mountain and sacrifice him. And Abraham's faith was such that he went, God will give me back my dead son through resurrection. That's what he thought.

Now, which one of us would have concluded that? I'll do what God says because I think he's powerful enough to give me back my dead son. I mean, it's just incredible, isn't it? It's an incredible thought. But God gave Abraham and Isaac to his people early on because he knew of the time they'd wait and the sorrows they'd endure. And he showed them, this is what I will do. Now, did they know that's what God was going to do? In some sense, perhaps, after the fact, they said, oh, okay, God provided. The difference, of course, between Abraham and Isaac and the father and the son here is that with Abraham and Isaac, the son didn't die. There was a ram stuck in the thicket, and the ram died. Not so with Jesus. He's come into the world to die, to die. Did he need to die? No. Did he deserve to die?

No. And you're left thinking, God is not like me, or I am not like God. I don't think like him. His ways are not my ways. Because the way that he demonstrated his love for me was to send his son here to die. And you're left going, who in their right mind would do that? And I'd say that's the limitation of our understanding, isn't it? We cannot conceive of anyone loving us like that. We have no point of reference in our lives for that sort of love where we've experienced it or seen it. It may be that at some time in your life you've been in a Bible study where they've talked about the attributes of God and one of the things they'll tell you is there's two big categories of the attributes of God and what are they? One of them are the communicable attributes of God.

And some of them are the incommunicable attributes of God, right? And what is a communicable attribute of God? Well, it's one that he shares with us. It's one that we can partake in, demonstrate ourselves. And then there's incommunicable attributes of God. There are things that are true just only of him, not of us. We can't do those things, right? He's omniscient. He's all-knowing. He's sovereign. We can't do that. And so I ask you, when you look at the love of God as we've just seen it today, which one is it? Is it a communicable attribute of God or is it incommunicable? We all have been taught that it's a communicable attribute of God. And I'll tell you it is. But only if God gives it to you. Because when you look at what he did to demonstrate his love for us, you think, I couldn't do that. And yet he did. And so then we sit there and we go, why? I can't think of a reason why I would ever do something like that. Perhaps I'd give my own life.

But the life of my son? Why did he do it? Then John goes on in the very next verse and he makes a point of saying it's not because of you. He has not loved you in this way. He didn't send his son into the world because you love him. That's not why he did it. In this is love. Not that we loved God. It was not our love that motivated or encouraged or required or compelled God to love us. And I think one of the reasons that the love of God is so hard for us to understand, there's two that come to mind. One is the great cost that it was. He had to send his son. And the other reason that his love is hard to understand is that when we think of love, I don't know that any of us can really separate it from worthiness. Love and worthiness are just connected in our mind. You have to be worthy of love. You have to deserve it somehow. It's got to be some reason.

That you would love someone. And so we go looking in ourselves and we go, where's the reason that God would love me? Let me help me find it. You want so badly to be worthy, deserving, entitled to God's love. We look and we search. We create our own moral codes. This is what will make God love me. Is it? Does it? Are you more assured of the love of God when you do all of the things you've decided? you should do. I'm not any more convinced of the love of God when I do all of the things that I've decided I should do. Because you're left wondering, I'm pleased by them. Is he? Maybe he'll look my way if I just do this, say that. We work very hard to make ourselves presentable to God because this idea of worthiness is just foundational to our understanding of love. You wish it weren't so. So let me give you an example. In your home, With children, do parents have favorites? You're not allowed to ask that question. I know I'm not allowed to ask the question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. You say, I don't like it. And I say, I know you don't like it. None of us like it. And should parents have favorites? And we all say, no. They just love all their kids the same. And then I ask you, as a parent, do you have children in your home that are easier for you to love than others? And who can't say yes? Of course that's the case. Why? Why are some of your children easier?

to love than others. Can we even hear the question? Because we're so far along saying, you just can't say that. And I say, we need to understand it. I'm not trying to commend it to you or to say that you're absolved from your responsibility to love the children in your home that are harder to love. I'm not saying any of that. I'm just simply saying, our understanding of love doesn't run on the same tracks that God's love does. We tend to love the people that are easier for us to love. Maybe their sins aren't as irritating to us. Maybe they're more sensitive to us than some of our other children. They are more attentive to our needs or our ups or our downs or our desires, and they work harder to satisfy them. Maybe they're more cheerful and quick to obey than some of our other children. And so those children are worthy of our love because they're easier to love.

And if we give in to those temptations or those realities, those realities are a result of the fall. They're not to be cultivated. They're not to be grown up and justified. I'm just telling you, they exist now because of the fall. We prefer some people to others. But if I had used our neighbors, you wouldn't have felt it as acutely. That's why I use children. We look on those kids and we say, they're more worthy or deserving of my love because they do what I say. Because they don't talk back. Because they're cuter. Because they're the girl. Because they're the boy. We have our ways, don't we? Worth. What they deserve. It's in us. Those things are not in God. Time and again, he tells us, whether we're dealing within the church or in society, he says, I'm not a God of partiality. So don't show preference to the rich.

don't despise the poor, for there is neither male nor Greek, male nor female, but all are one in Christ. Equality of love. And the reason he tells us there has to be equality of love is because that's how his love is and that's not what we are inclined to do or to accept. And so when it comes to the fact of God's love for us, not his love for the world or his love for other Christians, but his love for me, We have to understand what are the mechanics of his love. It's not favoritism. He doesn't like you better than somebody else. You're not better than they are. They're not better than you. And so we should leave aside all of our thoughts and all the trappings of worthiness and all the things that we try to do to impress God. We don't think in these terms. Maybe some of us do. We think clearly in terms of pleasing and impress. I'm going to do this because then God will love me more.

But I think many of us, we don't think that concretely about it. But we have some sense of displeasure. I'm sure we've all had it in our homes with our own parents. I wonder if they'll be pleased with me, more pleased with me, if what I'm afraid is that too often when we make up these rules for why God should love us, it's not him that we're trying to impress. It's us. Or it's one another. We've left him out of it. We've left his way of loving and his way of pouring out his love on the shelf. And we've taken up some other way, some other economy of love that's based on worth and value and worldly things. And we do it to console ourselves and to build our own pride up against our neighbors and many other reasons. But God's not pleased by any of it.

And you say, there it is. You did the wrong thing and God loves us less for it. And I say, no, no. If you have kids then, you understand that when your kids sin, it doesn't make you love them less. It's just a grief to you, right? You want better for your children. You've provided better for your children. You've taught better for your children. And it's a grief to you that they lay aside all of the blessing they've received for something else. But you don't love them less because they're your children. In Romans 7, Paul said, I know that nothing good dwells in me. Print that out and put it on your wall. We would do so good to remember that because so often that's like the wind that blows our house of cards down. There has to be something good in me. But the Bible says there's not. And you say, but there has to be. And I say, but the Bible says there's not. Paul said there wasn't anything good in him.

Are you more holy than him? Which one is to stand up and say, you know what? I'm better than he was. And you're left wondering, why would Paul say such a thing? Like, doesn't our whole understanding of God and his mercy in the gospel just fall apart if we admit that there's nothing good in us? I say, no. That reality, that truth, that's the flour in the bread. You can't make the bread without it. You just can't. You know, you can go on the internet and you can look and see for, well, I don't have baking soda. What can I put in as a substitute? I don't have eggs. What can I put in as a, you know, I don't have flour. Can I make bread? No. At least not any bread that anyone's going to want to eat. Sorry for you gluten-free people, but, you know, it's not as tasty. Maybe healthier, but we're not here to talk about that. So, you need flour to make bread.

And you need an understanding of your own sinfulness that agrees with what Paul says here, which is, I know nothing good dwells in me. And then you have to face up to the fact that God loves people who don't have any good dwelling in them. None. Nothing to speak of. No good anywhere. And I don't know if you're like me, but I suspect some of you at least are, where your heart is just angry at what I'm saying. And you just want to say, no, you can't say, well, that was true before I was a Christian. But not now. What do you have that you didn't receive from God? If there is good in you, and there is good in God's people, how'd it get there? Who put it there? Where'd it come from? What do you have, says Paul in 1 Corinthians, that you didn't receive? And again in James 1, every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above.

coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow. And so if your heart rises up within you and you say, no, no, there's good in me, and I say, praise God. Praise God. It's only there because of his kindness and his mercy and his love. That's the only way anything good gets into us. But left to ourselves, there is no good in us. There is nothing to commend us to God. In 1 Corinthians, they argued about, meat sacrifice to idols. It's holy to eat it. It's okay to eat it. No, no, no, it's not. It's idolatry to eat it. And Paul addresses, you know, explains the whole thing. And then at the end of it, he says, food will not commend us to God. We are neither the worse if we do not eat, nor the better if we do. And so he takes their work, their thing, this is going to please God. We're going to do the holy, righteous thing. And he says, it won't commend you to God.

Eat it or don't eat it, your standing before God is not affected by it. And that's like having the blankets pulled off of you on a cold winter morning. Because you're left with, what am I to be covered with? How will God love me? Why would God love me? You remember at the beginning I said we were going to look on the reason, the Father's reason for sending his Son into the world. And if I were to put it to you as a question, you would say, well, because he wanted to. And then you would say, well, but why did he want to? And you would come to the fact that because he loves us. And all of this time we've spent between then and now is me just trying to get you to look at and consider the love of God as it is. And you should be thinking by now, I don't understand the love of God. I don't understand why he loves me. There's nothing in me that's lovable.

And many of us, you know, Satan will take that thought and he'll roll it around in your head and it'll grow and it'll become this thing and you go, there's nothing that's lovely in me and you just go and you feel terrible and awful and you're down on yourself as though that will please God. And it doesn't. It doesn't. Here's the thing. If you died for your own sins, it won't be a sufficient payment. You'll still go to hell. You ever thought about that? Like, how come if I'm the one that sinned, how come when people die and like shed their blood, As a result of their sins. How come they can't go to heaven? It's because there's still a debt. Their blood's not sufficient to pay for it. They still owe God. At the end of that transaction, when they die, they're still in his debt. So why does God love us? Well, because he does. Because he chose to. He told us as much in Romans. In chapter 9.

It says, God loves sinners because he chooses to. And it's not because there's some sort of tiered system of sinners where some are worse than others or some have better potential than others. Some come from better stock than others. Here we are, all from Adam. Whether we're young or old or married or single or black or white or whatever, we have Adam as our father. He loves sinners because he chooses to. We are not presentable to him in any way before he loves us. There's nothing that commends us to him. So what is the substance of the love of God for his people? What's it look like? First, generally, it looks like his son being sent into the world. That's what our passage tells us, right?

But then he tells us at the end of verse 10, he loved us and sent his son. And then he tells us what his son had to do. The particular definition of his love. That he would be the propitiation for our sins. And here we go with a big, confusing theological word. Propitiation, right? What's it mean? It means sacrifice. That's what it means. It's a good word. We don't use it in our daily life and I'm not trying to commend the word to you and say you should start using the word propitiation and start talking about expiation in your daily conversations on Facebook. But it's a particular word that means atoning sacrifice or payment of sin by death. And so we could summarize this passage that we've been studying like this. We could say our debtor took such pity on us because of how much he loved us.

That he sent payment to himself to satisfy our account with him forever. And the payment that was required was the blood of his son. And he sent the payment for us to himself. Son, leave aside your glory and all of the comforts of heaven. Go to earth to those poor sinners and die for them. In their place. Because we love them. Because we love him. That is the gospel, right? In a nutshell, the righteous for the unrighteous, the just for the unjust. Jesus in our place. And you're left wondering, how could he love like that? How does that love jive with my sorrows and my sufferings and my hardships and my weaknesses? What I'll tell you is, you shouldn't trust your own understanding as much as you do. In Proverbs 3, it says, Do not lean on your own understanding, but in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your path straight. And so as you see that there's a conflict in your life between your perception of your own sufferings and your own sorrows and your own hardships and your own doubts about God's love for you, you should look in the mirror and say, then the problem here is that I lack something because I am convinced that God absolutely loves me.

And I don't know how. Certainly don't feel like it. But I know that he does. And the reason I know that he does is because he was pleased. Both the father to send and the son to go was pleased to come into this world and die for me. And who would I die for? Remember in Romans where it says that for a good man, someone might dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us and that while we were yet sinners. while we were his enemies, while we were dead in our trespasses, that's when he loved us. And you might think, Dave, you're slipping off into this place where we tell people who just don't have any interest in obeying God that God loves them, and we're doing them a disservice by telling them that. You know what Luther said about that? He said, if you can't be accused, if your preaching and your teaching and your gospel can't be accused of of cheap grace. You're giving it out to people and lying to them and comforting them with things that aren't true. He said, you're not preaching the gospel. Yikes, right? Here's Martin Luther, that great reformer saying, you aren't preaching the gospel unless people could take the things you say and misunderstand them in such a way as to believe that God loves them just how they are. He says, that is the gospel. That is what the love of God is.

And so you think, well, what if people don't believe? What if they misunderstand what's being said? What if they abuse the scripture and the love of God? And the result is that they use it as a justification for ungodly living. What I'd say to us is, in his infinite wisdom, God will deal with that. And you don't have to worry about it. Isn't that nice? That not every question that gets asked is yours to answer. Because you're not God. If someone uses his grace and his mercy and his love as an excuse for sin, say, I know that God loves me and he wants me to do this wicked thing. He will deal with that. He is able to deal with that. Wouldn't I be lying to them if I didn't tell them? Say, yeah, tell them it's sinful. And tell them that God loves them enough to get them out of that stuff.

And that if they won't be out of that stuff, then they're rejecting the love of God. Because God loves sinners. Ones that haven't repented yet. Ones that aren't perfect. Ones that never will be until he makes them that way. That's who he loves. They suffer. They have sorrows. They do all kinds of wicked things. And God loves them. Because they're his children. Because he wanted them to be his children. He willed them. Into existence. You and me. We're here because God willed us into existence. In whatever circumstances, we came into being. Some of us came from loving homes where parents were married and loved God and wanted to have godly children to raise up for the Lord. Some of us didn't come from anything that could be described that way. And yet, here we are. By the will of God.

to be recipients of his love. That's good news. That's good news. And so as we go into Christmas, I've told a number of people lately, I said, Christmas is a hard time. Everyone's supposed to be happy, but no one is. It's like people are more angry now, more grumpy. My wife was out at the stores yesterday finishing up Christmas shopping, and she's like, people are just, like, I'm never doing this again this late in the year. That's what she said. We're going to get our Christmas shopping done early. Okay, we'll try next year. Why are people so grumpy? Why are we so grumpy? We can look at the world and be like, why are they so grumpy? Why are you so grumpy? We're ungrateful. We've lost sight of the love of God. We just lost it. And so my goal this morning was to put it right back in front of you. And sometimes when we come to church, I say, okay, we have to look at an ugly thing about us or a difficult thing that God says. But today I say to you, there is...

The love of God for you to wrestle with. And you've got hardships and you've got sorrows and sicknesses and difficulties and you may well be to the point of despairing like Paul was. And here is the love of God. Come in the flesh and in the person of Jesus Christ and you're going to celebrate him. You're going to, aren't you? Then do it with joy. Give gifts because you love Jesus Christ. Spend money on good food and fellowship. Because you love Jesus Christ. Because he's loved you. And whatever you think about your own weaknesses and failures and sins, they exist. And they're to be put to death. But the energy and the strength and the faith that you need to put those things to death is rooted in the love of God for you. You won't find strength anywhere else to fight your sins. How compelling and how motivating would it be, is it, to have a God who looks at you and sees your sins and it...

better than you do, and is more angry with them than you are, and yet loves you with a sort of love that you can't comprehend or demonstrate, except in these little bits and pieces, perhaps. So yes, do battle with your sins. Yes, strive for holiness and godliness because God loved you. Now, did you think I was going to say because you love God? Yeah, well, we will talk about that next week because that is the response, actually, is that The reason we, you know, teaser, the reason that we strive for holiness and seek obedience is because we love God. But as John says, we love because he first loved us, okay? This is love, not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent his only son. So stop for a second, stop for a week, and set aside, I'm supposed to love other people, okay? Set it aside and say, God has loved me.

Wicked and wretched and terrible and messed up and unholy as I am, God has loved me with perfect love. And he doesn't look at me and go, I wish I could trade that one in. He loves you. In all of your weaknesses, he loves you. And in all of your sorrows, he loves you. And he will bear you through them. And he will receive you into his presence with great joy. That's love. That's the love of God. And that's what we ought to be meditating on and considering this week. Let's pray.