Whoever Believes In Him Shall Not Perish

Well, good morning, and Merry Christmas. It's a joy to be with you this morning, and I'm looking forward to this evening as well. I was telling my wife that I, unfortunately, waited until just a few days ago to really register that Christmas was upon us. And I don't mean with the preparations. I mean my heart. I don't know what it was about this year. It's generally a problem I have, but getting out of the normal routine, that is. But this year was particularly difficult for me. And so a few days ago, the Lord was kind, and I actually went, Christmas is coming. We're going to have Christmas soon. And so I did decide to preach a Christmas sermon, though I don't know that you'd call it a Christmas text.

It's what I think is probably the most common or well-known Bible verse in all of America. It's John 3.16, and we're going to be covering John 6.17 as well. My hope this morning is that God will, as we sit under his word and as we consider what he said, that he'll reveal himself to us and that he'll help us to receive his salvation with joy and with thanksgiving as we remember our Savior's birth. Would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord from John 3? Verses 16 and 17, this is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Now, this is an interesting verse. We all have our favorite verses or passages of Scripture.

And while this is a very well-known passage, sort of generally or maybe societally, I suspect that it's actually not a verse that Reformed folk like very much. Because they like to argue and fight. I was telling Joseph on the way to church today, what I was preaching on, and I said, you know, our church is this mix of people. On the one hand, you have people who are Reformed and like theology and really like to argue about things. And you know who those people among us are. And so this verse is like a good place to argue. And then there's another contingent of our church, and they tend to be more practical. And they tend to just want to know, what is the next thing I need to be doing? And they share one similarity with the Reformed people who like to argue, and it's that their heart's not particularly...

by Scripture the way you'd hope it would be. They're not sentimental. Their hearts are not moved the way they should be by Scripture. They're too practical. Practical to a fault. I put myself in that category of the two. I'm not interested as much in arguing about the exact boundaries and definition of the word world here, cosmos in the Greek, as I am just saying, well, what's the next thing we need to do to build, to grow, to move on? But both of us need to set aside our natural... and also the way that our perhaps callousness with regard to this verse. And remember that this was something that God said through the Apostle John. And it is true that all of Scripture, whether we like to argue about it or whether we find it not to be as practical as we might prefer, is profitable to us. And this verse, this passage, is profitable to us. So, our passage starts out saying, For God so loved the world.

I don't intend to argue about what the world means here and do a sort of a deep dive systematic study of what exactly is meant by this. I just want to sort of lay out the boundaries or the goalposts. And I want to do it by asking you just a few questions or observing a few things that I think we would all agree on. We all believe in heaven. And we believe that the people that will be in heaven, every single person who's in heaven will be in heaven because they believed in Jesus. Right? We also believe in hell. That it's a real place and that it will be populated.

by all of the people who didn't believe in Jesus, right? And so the argument about who exactly is being referred to with regard to the world can sufficiently be answered this morning by simply saying, there will be some who believe in the world and will go to heaven, and there will be some in the world who don't believe and they'll go to hell. And so this is not a universal statement about the entirety of mankind. Because we know that there are some who believe and some that don't. Our goal is to understand not exactly what the word world means, our goal is to understand God's motivation in sending Jesus to earth and what it means to respond with belief. Why did God send Jesus to the world? Why did he send him to us? Well, this passage tells us it's because of his love. Very simple, with no caveats.

for who exactly we're talking about or what exactly they're like or how exactly salvation works, but simply that God loved the world and that that was the reason he sent his son. This is the very simple point that we have to get down into us, not into our heads so much as our hearts, that God has love for sinners and that that's us and that we weren't always lovable or loved by him. I'm afraid we think too often that God's love is conditional. That there is some unspoken, unwritten, small print about God's love. That when we read passages like this that don't seem to qualify it in any way, we said, yes, but there are qualifications to God's love. That he doesn't just freely love us, that there's something more to it. There's something about me or something about you.

or something else at play here. It's not true. I think part of the reason we think this way is that this is an area where we differ from God. While his love is a communicable attribute, meaning it's something that we can share in and demonstrate, it's not something we're very good at doing, this thing about unconditional love, that we would just love sinners. And what we're doing, I think, is flipping things around backwards and saying, Because my love is this way, either the love I give or the love I've received works along these paths, these conditions. That must be how God works. That God loves based on conditions or based on circumstances or based on performance. All of this is because this is how we function. Now, it needs to be said, this is not how we should function. That in saying we love with conditions many times is not to say that's a good thing.

It's actually a bad thing. It's not a good thing for us to say, well, I'll love you if, or I'll love you when. Rather, we should say simply, I love you. We even have trouble receiving love from other people if they were to say something like this. I'm listening with my own ears, which I think are like your ears. And when someone says, I love you, we go, why? It's the natural question that occurs to us. Why do you love me? What did I do? And if the answer is nothing, It just doesn't, it's like, it doesn't seem to fit. It doesn't seem to work. How can you love somebody and not have a reason why? Maybe you could give a reason why. If I asked you, why do you love your children? What would you say? You'd probably just say, because they're my children. That's it. That's the whole reason. Now, is it because they're good children? Well, they're not always good children. Sometimes they are, right? Sometimes they're not. You love them because they're your kids. And yet, every one of us, maybe we've...

not experienced it yet because your children are young, but you will, as your kids get older, be tempted to not love them because of their behavior. You'll get really irritated with them. You'll say, well, I love them, but they're just driving me nuts. If they're going to behave like that, they just need to go away. There's nowhere in Scripture that says that's how God loves us, his children. But it is a temptation that we face. And so our love, in all kinds of ways, and even in the closest relationships, ends up having conditions creep into it. qualifiers attached to it. I will love you if, I will love you when, but we don't find any of that in this passage. And so what we see in this passage is God's love for sinners. It's the highest form of love. It's a love that is not conditional, a love that isn't qualified, a love that isn't earned, and a love that cannot be lost. It's not a love that's based on the recipient of the love, on their behavior, on their performance.

On their sorrow? On their production? What are they able to do? None of that comes into view. It is a love that is motivated purely out of God's own essence in his own being. He loves because he's chosen to love. And he's chosen whom he's chosen to love. And there isn't anything that those whom God loves can do about it. To minimize it or to increase it. And if we're honest, this is the area where God's love and our love are most different. Our love is mixed with our sins and with the sins of others. It's greatly affected by those things. Where God's love is constant and steady and eternal, our love is like in fits and starts. It's just momentary. And then when we do it, we go, why do I love like that? Why do I love so little? Why do I love so small? Well, I think...

part of the answer at least, is that we haven't dwelt on or studied or learned or meditated on God's love for us quite the way we should. As I look out at you, if I was telling Joseph this morning we were talking about this, and I said, you know, I didn't grow up in the church, and so God's love was not something that I always was taught existed for me. Like I spent all my growing up years never even being talked about that at all. And one of the things that was good about that, for me, was that I learned that I was the one who made my life miserable. And I'm afraid that people who grow up in the church are taught at some level that God is sovereign and God is in control and God loves you. And somehow in the working out of those things, that person determined that whenever they don't have what they want or whenever they have a hardship or suffering, that that somehow indicates a lack of love on God's behalf.

And they don't tend to look at themselves ever and say, you know, I think this is the result of my lack of love for God as opposed to his lack of love for me. We just weren't taught that sort of thing. We were taught God is sovereign and God is love. So when things go poorly, there must be some condition that wasn't met in God's love. There are a lot of things that were bad about growing up outside the church and coming to faith in my early 20s. But one of the things that was... clear to me as I became a Christian, and it's still clear to me today, was that if God loves me, it isn't because I'm a good person. Because when I became convinced that God loved me, I was as bad as I could have been. And so it's like, if he was picking teams and saying, there's a good one, he would never have chosen me to be the good one. He would have said, that guy belongs on the other team. He is not lovable.

and yet I'm convinced of God's love for me, and so I'm left going. It doesn't have anything to do with me. And to those of you who grew up in the church or have been told from your youth up that God has loved you, I'm afraid that you haven't seen yourself the way you ought to see yourself. You haven't seen yourself in a way that makes God's love sweet to you, and that's a grief. And what I hope is this morning, you'll come to see yourself more clearly, and that you'll realize that... However clearly you see yourself, meaning however much sin you find in yourself, that you'll remember that God loves sinners and has loved sinners and loves you. And this whole idea of denying your failures or your faults or trying to make them look better than they are, trying to save face or reputation, that's not how God's economy, that's not how God's love works. And you have to work hard to root it out of yourself.

If God loves sinners, then you have to only find in yourself that you're a sinner to be qualified to be a recipient of God's love. God doesn't look out and see good people who are trying hard. There's nothing in Scripture that describes his people as being the recipients of his love because they were out there trying real hard, or at least trying real hard to serve him. Scripture describes us as being dead in our trespasses and sins. God's scripture would describe us as being enemies of God, helpless like a little baby, unable to clean himself off. And so if God's going to love us, we really do have to accept, though it's foreign to our minds, we have to accept that he loves us as sinners who don't have anything good to bring to him. And you can't ever forget it. You can't ever forget that truth.

We talk a lot at our church about obedience and about serving God and about what it looks like to glorify God and what he requires of us. But you have to keep burned into your minds that none of that makes God love you. It doesn't make him love you. He already loves you. And when you fail, you're still loved. And when you seek to serve him by faith, you're a child of God, loved by him. And when you saw an opportunity to do or say or be something, And your sins got in the way. God's love never even blinked at you. So, we could argue about whether the world refers to the church or to every person or to the corners of the earth and every tribe, tongue, and nation. But I would rather that you saw that it was the love of God that brought Jesus Christ to earth. And that when he came to earth, he didn't come making distinctions based on the quality of the people that he found.

Do you find that it's easy to look at other people and to despise them? Someone said, yep. Some kid said, yep. Honesty. Out of the mouths of babes and infants. Yep. We do it, don't we? And it's most common with the sins that we don't commit ourselves. It's always in the areas where we feel righteous. The areas where we think we could bring something to God and say, isn't he pleased with me because of... No, he's not pleased with you because of. This idea that we would look on other people and that we would naturally be placing ourselves either as better than them or worse than them is not at all how God looks at us. He doesn't look at us and say, I'm so glad that my people are so much better than the people they live among. I'm glad they're on my team. I'm glad I picked well. When you have things in sports, when you have drafts, it's a big deal.

Every year the kids got out of college and then they get drafted. And it makes my head hurt to think about the analysis, the depth of analysis of skills, qualities, rankings, what the team needs. Tim Dukeman, we talk about this at small group every once in a while, it makes my head hurt. Because Tim likes that kind of stuff. And so he talks about all the stats. And I can't keep up with him. And Tim, that's not even his job. It's just his hobby. Some of you are like that. You have to be careful not to think that God is like that. If we want to choose our running backs and our quarterbacks based on the statistics, then fine. But you better have it burned into your brain that God doesn't pick his people based on their statistics. Because if you do think that way, you'll start keeping track of your own statistics. And that is a miserable life. Because you might be tempted to think that when I say you'll keep track,

that you'll put yourself up at the top. And some people do. And inevitably, at some point in our lives, all of us will think of ourselves as being a first-round draft pick. But there's a flip side to it, and it's straight out of the pit of hell. And it's that you will be a miserable, terrible, no-good, worthless son. And I would submit to you that you'll spend more of your time feeling that way. And it's not because God sees you that way. It's because you've entered into a negotiation with God. based on your performance that he doesn't subscribe to. If God were to keep tallies of sin between his people and an unbeliever, who do you think he would be more scrupulous with? Who do you think he would hold to a higher standard and expect more of? I'm convinced it would be of his people. And the reason is they have a lot of things that unbelievers don't have.

They have instruction. They have Scripture. They have the Holy Spirit. They have many advantages to the unbeliever with regard to their performance. And yet, when we look at how the mileage actually bears out between the two of them, are there any sins that God's people are just exempt from and they don't commit? Have you ever looked around at an unbeliever and thought, I think they're a better person than me. I think they do Christian stuff better than I do, and they do it without faith. How does that work? Whatever sins they commit, they commit in ignorance. But whatever sins we commit, we commit with volition. No Christian should ever want God to be keeping track of them and loving them based on their performance because he's given us everything, says Peter, pertaining to life and godliness. And how have we done with it? Not as well as we should have. And yet.

God's love remains with his people. Why? Because it pleases him to populate heaven with sinners that he saved from hell. We wouldn't do it. We couldn't do it. But he's purposed to do it. And that's why he sent his son into this world. Because it was the only way it could be done. So what's he require of us? What condition does he require of us? What is our part? Belief. And even that's a gift from God. Believing is not something that you do because you decided to do it. Belief is something that occurs in your heart because God's given you the gift of faith. So even what God requires of his people, he gives them the ability to do. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. If you think about it for a minute, it seems like a steal. It almost seems too good to be true.

That all that would be required or looked for in us is belief. That you can inherit and receive eternal life simply through believing in Jesus Christ. All of our efforts, they won't get us one step closer to heaven. All of our grief and our sorrow and our feeling bad about ourselves won't get us to heaven. All of the good stuff that we try to do, all of the efforts that we make, All the time that we spend, all the sacrifice that we make, all the money that we give, won't get you to heaven. Will not even get you closer to heaven. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. With regard to God's love, it does not matter. It really does seem like our salvation should require something a little bit more. Some sort of continuing, like, okay, belief at the beginning, but then all this other stuff, that's required.

It's almost like you could think of belief or faith as being like a down payment that God gives us, but then we've got to do all the right stuff with it or we'll get it taken away. That's not how it works. Have you ever cried out in your heart or maybe out loud, I believe, help my unbelief? Have you ever felt, why do you say something like that? Why does that sentiment well up in your heart? It's because you feel miserable about yourself. You're just like, I'm no good at this. I'm a no good Christian, but I believe. And I think it's the most Christian thing you can say. I believe, help my unbelief. It's all there is, is my belief. If we were to look at my life, it wouldn't commend me to you. But I believe, help my unbelief. When will you outgrow that? You won't. In fact, as you grow as a Christian, what you will do is you will grow into that. You will grow into that sentiment. I believe, help my unbelief. Because your knowledge of yourself, as God works in you, and as your spirit...

awakens you up. You will see more of the ways in which you fall short. And that's what I mean by growing into, I believe, help my unbelief. It's a humble statement. And it becomes a cry and a plea for God's mercy that we maintain our whole lives. We never get beyond it. I believe, help my unbelief. The only thing that I can point to as giving me any... confidence that God would have mercy on me is that I believe in him. My life doesn't testify to it the way that one might hope. I wouldn't want to take this body of evidence into the courtroom and say, for these reasons, you should accept me. What can I come with except I believe? Whoever believes in him shall not perish. Don't believe the lie that belief is for other people. Whoever, whosoever, anyone who's done anything.

If they believe in him, they will not perish, but they will receive eternal life. Nothing you've done, nothing you will do as a Christian, none of the sins you're yet to commit. And some of us probably have much worse sins in our future than we do in our past. Things that are coming up that are going to be way worse. How can you say that? Well, it's been my observation that we don't stop sinning or that we don't stop the big sins. when we become Christians. That the real temptations don't stop once we become Christians, but actually that the temptations and the cost of failure get higher. And that even in those situations, the man on the cross can cry out, have mercy on me. Forgive me. The publican can go in, have mercy on me. The prostitute can clean Jesus' feet with her tears and her hair. And he receives them. He receives them.

So am I promising you that you're going to commit worse sins in the future than you have in the past? I don't know the future. I don't know the future. Mine or yours. But I know that we have to be ready to cling to Jesus Christ until we die. And that the closer we get to meeting him, probably the harder Satan's going to tempt us. The older men that I know, the men who I know that are in their 60s and in their 70s, aren't having any less of a struggle in keeping the faith. What do they have to cling to? A whole life of church attendance, family worship, serving, loving, caring for the people. What can they bring to God? I believe in your Son, Jesus Christ. That's what they can bring. And by God's grace, that's what they will bring, and that's what we'll bring. You might also think that belief is not enough because we think too small of what belief is.

intellectual assent to the truths of the gospel, that I'm a sinner and God is holy and that through Jesus I can become a Christian. What's meant by believing in Jesus Christ is that all of your life, all of every square inch of it, and especially the parts that you think you've got figured out, that all of that gets submitted in faith to the authority of God for instruction, for rebuke, for correction, for training in righteousness, all of a sudden, everything you thought you'd done well, the things you thought, well, at least I didn't, it all comes down to what does God say to me in this situation? What does God require of me in this situation? I thought I was doing well. Turns out I wasn't. Okay, what am I going to do with that? The natural inclination that all of us have and that's been bred into us from Adam and then propagated, by ourselves and by our society is, you can't tell me I'm wrong. You really can't tell me I have to stop something or start something. If we're honest, that's really what our lives boil down to is, we don't want anybody telling us what to do. And we'll tell them they don't understand. And here's the thing, they may not understand. In fact, I'll grant that they don't understand. And yet God does. And if God's given us his word and he's given us...

pastors and elders and Titus 2 women, we shouldn't punish them for telling us what to do. We shouldn't grumble and complain and make their lives miserable. The Bible tells us don't do that because it'll be bad for you. I've talked about that stuff, that before. That like if you want to grow and you want to be discipled, don't punish the people who are supposed to do the work by grumbling and complaining at them. They won't do as much of it with you and it won't be their fault to believe in Jesus Christ. It means to submit your whole life to him. Not at one point, but for the rest of it. And there will be times in your life where you will be dug in about something. And it will be at that point the question will arise, will you submit this to Jesus Christ? Will you submit this to his word? Or will you say, you don't understand, my life and these circumstances are different, and those things that apply for everyone else and every other normal circumstance don't apply here.

Have you ever said that? You don't understand. I mean, is there any one of us who hasn't said that? Last week? It's like the refrain. You don't understand what I'm going through. Do you believe in Jesus Christ? Will you submit those things to Him? If I don't work on them and I don't control them, if I don't do all the stuff I'm doing, then it won't work out. How has that worked for you so far? How does all the fretting and worrying and faithlessness that goes along with it? What has it produced? Peace? Joy? Rest? Thanksgiving? Probably not. Because even when things go well and we've been all wound up about it, we end up looking at it going, well, that only worked because of all of the things I did and it barely worked out. So what I need to do is redouble my efforts even more in the future. It's really a rat wheel. It's awful. You'd be much better served to believe.

in Jesus Christ and to trust him to do what he will with our lives with our bodies with our relationships and with our futures verse 17 God continues and he says God did not send the son into the world to judge the world everything I've been talking about up to this point I haven't used the word judge and that's been on purpose but now I want to flip it and say actually what we do is we live our lives based on judgments And it's very important here that you realize that when Jesus came to earth, he wasn't sent to judge. And we should praise God for that. Because if he did come to judge, what would his judgment have been concerning us? What would his judgment have been concerning you? If he had come and he had looked at the things that you're clinging to, the things that you want, the things that you think, well, at least I'm doing this. If he had come as a judge and evaluated that according to his standards,

What would his ruling have been? Would he have said, there's one of mine? No, what would have resulted would have been destruction. So one of the things that we learn from this verse, that God didn't send his son into the world to judge the world, is that our salvation is not the result of judgment, but rather love. You remember Job wanted to enter into a judgment, wanted to question the judgment of God, wanted to plead his case. It was very foolish of him. And in time, he repented. We should not want God to enter into judgment with us. Not apart from the mercy and the blood of Jesus Christ. It won't go well for us. We won't get what we think we deserve. And so our salvation is not the result of the judgment of God, but rather the love of God. All of us, Scripture says, fall short. There's none who seeks after God. No, not one. And so our salvation isn't built on God looking and saying,

They've done well enough. Our salvation is built on God looking and saying, that one's mine. That one there is mine. And I love them. One of the other things we learn from this passage is that we ought not to be judgmental of others. You remember earlier I asked about, I said, do you pass judgments on other people? Do you despise them? Do you look at them and boast and say, well, at least I'm not like them. At least I understand, fill in the blank. This theology, that political strategy, this financial scheme. We shouldn't be judgmental of others ourselves. God didn't send Jesus into the world to judge the world yet. And he didn't mean to accomplish a bunch of little judgmental Christians who walk around and know just what everyone else is doing wrong. We ought to love the world just as God loved the world. Now there's a difference between judgment and discernment. I'm not arguing that you should have no...

awareness of right and wrong, good and evil, or anything like that. I don't know how to explain in a few minutes the difference other than to say, if you're a cynic, and whenever you see people struggling, you kind of look at them and you go, yeah, that's not the fruit of discernment, but of judgment. If there's no place in your life where you can point to having seen someone less fortunate or someone whose sins have ruined their lives and your response has not been, compassion for them, then that's not discernment, that's judgment. If you, on the other hand, can point to a place where you've seen somebody completely make a mess of it, and your response was, what can I do to help them? How can I love them? What can I say? Lord, give me words to say. I don't know what to say, and I'm scared to say them when I figure them out. Then that's the fruit of discernment and the fruit of the love of God. Well, I didn't say the right thing. That's okay. It's okay. You're not God.

None of us are God. I'm not God. You're not God. If you get angry at people when they sin because you've been offended by what they've done to you, I mean, seriously, where would you be if God did that with you for one minute? It's really not that big of a deal when you get sinned against. It's just not. And that's not to say that sin doesn't matter or that God doesn't care. But if we could take ourselves a little less seriously, actually a lot less seriously, it would be good. That someone could sin or fail or make a mess, and we would say, you know what? There I am. Just like them. I mean, maybe the sins are different. Maybe I didn't do it just now. There I am. Like, I get it. I know why your life's a mess. Same reason my life's a mess. Here we are, a bunch of sinners. I just might commit other sins than you do.

But here we are, and what are we going to do? Am I going to help you and love you? Am I going to care for you and bear with you? Or am I just going to tell you all the stuff you did wrong and how it's all your fault and how really I shouldn't even have to help you because if you just do what I did, you wouldn't be in such a mess. We all do it, and none of us should do it. We ought to love sinners the way God loves sinners in sending his son into the world. Sometimes I read the things Jesus says to the people, and I'm just like, why do you stick around with them?

I mean, they're so dumb and sinful and wicked. I'm glad he does. I'm glad he does. So he wasn't sent into the world to judge the world. Not that time. At Advent, we celebrate. It's sort of like halftime. We're like in between the two halves of his coming. He's come once, and at that time, he was not sent to come as a judge. He was sent to come as a Savior. When he comes again, he will not come as a savior. He will come as a judge. And then it'll be too late. And all the things that we might want to argue, it's not going to work and there's not going to be any time left. This go-round, Jesus came to save all who would believe in him. Next time he's going to come with a sword coming out of his mouth to execute judgment on all who didn't believe in him. And it will be the most awful thing.

that it will make the flood seem like a kid's story. Now, none of us were there for the flood, but we'll all be there for this. So are you ready to meet him when he returns? What does it look like to be ready to meet him? Well, one of the probably the most scary passages in Scripture is a foretelling of that day, where it says that on that day, many will come to him and say, Lord, Lord, did we not do all this stuff? And Jesus' response to them will be, depart from me, you who practice lawlessness, for I never knew you. That's a warning that we should not pass over. And that's not a warning meant to make you doubt the mercy or the kindness of God. It's a warning that's meant to rest on us, to be a help to us, to see to it that we are believing and continuing to believe, that we're not getting hard-hearted.

That we're not getting boastful and looking at other people and saying, well, I'm just glad I don't do that. You can know if you have faith in Jesus Christ. It won't be because of all the good stuff you do. If that's the indicator, then you're in for a rough ride. But if you believe in Jesus Christ, then you should be able to point to times and places in your life, daily life, where you do battle with your sins. And the only reason that it makes any sense for you to do it, Whether you win or lose in that day, the only reason that you persevere in the fight is because you love God. How many of our marriages are still intact because of that very reason? All of us have great marriages. There's never been problems or temptations. It's never been really hard. We all have good marriages, right? Some of you are too young to even know what I'm talking about. I'm telling you. One of the things that was really instructive to me was I was at a birthday party years and years ago. Surprise birthday party.

The guy whose birthday it was, he's had a hard life. He's a Christian. He's had a very hard life. And one of the things that was said, there was lots of funny stories told about him, and they were really funny. But at one point, someone stood up and they said, you know, what I want to do is, and I'm really paraphrasing here. These are not the words. What he said was, I want to praise God that for all of the hardships that you and your wife have been through, That it's a testimony to God's faithfulness that you guys are still married. Because you've had every opportunity to throw in the towel. And you haven't. And that's what we should rejoice in. Decades and decades of God's faithfulness to you through all of this hardship. And you would think that the people sitting there, that the man and his wife would be offended. Or certainly at least that their parents would be offended. And you know what? They weren't offended. They nodded their head and said, yes, that's right. And praise God.

So you can know if you believe. You should be able to point to the things in your life. You may not have all the stuff you want and your life may still get harder. It doesn't matter. I'm sorry. It doesn't matter. What matters is whether you believe in Jesus Christ and whether or not you'll stick with him through the valleys. Or whether you'll say, you know what, this is more than I bargained for and I'm out. If we quit, if we shrink back, then his second coming, when he will come as a judge of the world, becomes a very terrifying thing. If we persevere and if we believe in him, and sometimes that's all we have left is our belief in him, it's the only comfort to be found, but it's enough comfort, then we'll be prepared for that day. And we'll rejoice when that day comes, whether that day comes through our death or that day comes because he returns. We will rejoice because we'll enter our rest and our toil will be over and our joy will be made complete. The last thing I'll ask or say is,

If you believe, you should tell other people about what you believe. You should tell them about what you believe. You should tell them about the God who saved you from the things that you deserve. You can tell them about all the messes that you've made. You can shatter their image of how good you are and give glory to God by saying, I'm not any really different. I'm not any different than you. Apart from the grace of God in my life that I want to be in your life. And if that's too uncomfortable, if that takes too much time, then I want you to repent of that this Christmas. I want you to repent of that. And I want you to try. And your efforts will not earn you salvation, and your efforts will not make you feel good. You won't think, I'm so good at this. I'm so glad. What I can tell you is you will feel more like a Christian doing that than you will with all your other schemes.

about how to honor God. Simply telling other people about the mercy of God that you found, there's nothing better. Let's pray.