Sunday Sermon
sunday evening 13th April 2008
The verbs of Jh3v16.
Loving, giving and believing.
The first two have to do with what God does and the last with what we do.
With any action there are consequences. With every action there is a reaction!
God’s loving leads to his giving
God’s giving leads to our believing
Our believing leads to our living life to the full and eternally now.
And that is the whole point of the Gospel. The Good News
is that we can have life.
Life is available for everyone. This whole chapter is a chapter about life. Getting new life. Getting eternal life through Jesus. And the process of getting this eternal life is seen in verse 16
1. The love of God. “the love of God is the silent presupposition of the entire ministry of the Word made flesh” Milne p77.
Eternal life springs from the Love of God.
And here we are thinking particularly of the love of the Father.
Very often people have a problem when thinking about God the Father.
The picture that people have of God the Father is that he represents the harsh judgemental side of God!
But this is not true!
God is Love - all of God is love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
It is from the Love of God that our eternal life springs.
It has to be this way.
Such a gift at such a cost could never be given grudgingly!
If you have eternal life today it is because God loves you. That is it!
Eternal life is pure gift. Undeserved. Unearned.
The love of God, leads to our eternal life.
Application:
You have life because God loves you!
Your life is now and for ever.
Eternal life is not about when you die, but about how you live now.
Every day live life to the full in the confidence of knowing that God loves you!
2 - God’s loving leads to God’s giving.
(giving - a reference to incarnation as well as crucifixion)
The course of divine love, the highest form of love, is to give.
Love reaches out - it cannot be contained.
Even in our own experience the more we love the more we give.
How much God loves can be gauged by how much He gives.
And what does he give? His one and only Son.
There could have been a million things that God could have given us.
But the point of giving us his Son is that He is giving of
Himself to us.
John 10v30 - “I and the Father are one”
Hebrews 1:3 The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being,
Colossians 2:9 For in Christ all the fulness of the Deity lives in bodily form,
And that really is all that children need and want from their parents.
Not so much their gifts or their money but themselves!
And that is what God gives us. He gives us himself!
Because he loves us, he gives himself to us!
Just like in marriage - the highest expression of love between two people - what we give to the other is ourselves!
God Gives, and He gives Himself, in His Son to us!
Application:
1) God’s love shown in His Giving of Himself is the primary way that we are to love.
We are to give of ourselves.
Giving of self requires the greatest sacrifices:
a) our time is given up in the service of others.
b) our desires / rights are given up in the service of others.
2) we are to “love the giver rather than the gifts” - but here we see that the Gift is the Giver! We are to love God because he gives Himself - love the gift and the Giver, it is the same thing.
3. Believe
The final verb that we are looking at moves from God’s action to our action.
What are we to do with this great God who loves us and gives himself for us?
We are to believe in him!
Nothing more nothing less. We are to believe.
We are to believe that God love us, we are to believe that by believing in Jesus we get eternal life.
Believing means accepting something as true.
You are called to accept that this is true.
Believing that this is true will lead to eternal life.
And that is what the Good News is all about. Eternal life.
A Christian has eternal life. Our to use the Matthews equivalent - life in the Kingdom.
Application : the effects of believing.
1) if you believe you will start to love God.
Seeing his love and his giving will lead to your loving Him.
Thus every day we need to remind ourselves of the things we believe:
God loves us God gave us his Son!
That is what the life of Faith is all about. We trust these facts! We believe.
2) being steeped in the facts we believe, we will be transformed.
Spiritual transformation is not about rules and regulations,
Not about trying harder …….
Sometimes rules and regulations etc are good. They help stoke the fires of love. Indeed for most of us spiritual disciplines are necessary but they are secondary.
The whole point is that we are in a relationship of Divine love.
He loves us, we love him. From that everything else flows.
Love needs no laws, love always does what is right and good.
Love gives freely, sacrifices freely, lives freely,
Belief leads to love, love leads to transformation, transformation is eternal life.
Full, satisfying, happy, peaceful, joyous, Life. Life in the Kingdom now and forever