The Promise of Love

Advent Candle Lighting

Advent Reading: Matthew 1:18-25

Matthew 1:18–25 (ESV)

18 Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been betrothed to Joseph, before they came together she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. 19 And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly. 20 But as he considered these things, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: 23 “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us). 24 When Joseph woke from sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took his wife, 25 but knew her not until she had given birth to a son. And he called his name Jesus.

Introduction

So this is our final Sunday in our Advent series and we have been taking the approach that Advent, or Adventus is about the coming of Jesus. Certainly this time of year we emphasize Jesus’ coming into our world as a baby in the manger but Advent carries further than that.

It is about how his coming into our world and accomplishing his mission allows him to come into our lives and change them dramatically. Both in the here and now and when Jesus comes again to bring the children of God to be with Him for all eternity.

The first week we talked about the Promise of Hope. How when we look back at the manger it shows God’s faithfulness to his promises and it gives us hope for how God provides for all of our needs, here and now and then for our eternity.

Then we looked at the Promise of Peace. That Peace with God came in the presence and sacrifice of Jesus. Because of His sacrifice, we can have peace with God and that works out in peace with one another in the Church and even a sense of peace in midst of the troubles of this world.

it we can even have peace when we face trouble in this world…because in this world we will have trouble.

Then last night we talked about the Promise of Joy. How even though most of the messages of Joy that we encounter are temporary and seasonal, the Joy that the Bible talks about is a celebration of the victory that has been won on our behalf, and it can be held onto no matter what we are experiencing in a temporary season of life.

This morning we are going to finish our Advent series with the Promise of Love. So take a look at this video as we prepare ourselves to learn together of Love as God has designed it.

Video: The Promise of Love

JOSEPH, JESUS’ ADOPTIVE FATHER

Jesus’ adoptive father Joseph may be one of the most mysterious characters in the nativity story. Which is so interesting considering how important your Father was in their time and culture. Most of what we know of him is presented here in this account from Matthew. Matthew wrote his gospel or biography of Jesus with a Jewish audience in mind so he opens up with a genealogy that points to the Jewish heritage of Jesus through the line of his earthly father. The first verse gives us the overview...

Matthew 1:1 (ESV)

1 The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

And then Matthew brings us back in with all the details. Going from Jesus back through David to Abraham…those are some big steps. So he fills in the gaps beginning in verse 2.

Matthew 1:2–3 (ESV)

2 Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, 3 and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram,

and on and on until we get to

Matthew 1:15–16 (ESV)

15 and Eliud the father of Eleazar, and Eleazar the father of Matthan, and Matthan the father of Jacob, 16 and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ.

Notice that glaring distinction. For 42 generations it was “so-and-so the father of so-and-so” and then we get to Joseph and he is identified not in his role as a Father but as the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born. Because Joseph wasn’t Jesus’ biological father, he was his adoptive father. And just like every other adoptive father, Joseph had to choose to be Jesus’ father. And what a choice it was.

In Joseph’s day when a young unmarried woman was found with child it was such a disgrace that a man in Joseph’s position would typically go out of his way to publically shame the woman and her family. He could go so far as having her executed for her unfaithfulness. But this is where we see some of Joseph’s character on display.

Matthew 1:19 (ESV)

19 And her husband Joseph, being a just man and unwilling to put her to shame, resolved to divorce her quietly.

And we find here in Joseph, the adoptive father of Jesus, something of the character of our heavenly Father. Joseph found himself in this position where his desire to be faithful to the law that God had given him was coming into tension with his desire to be faithful to the love that God had given him for Mary.

So Joseph looked for a way to be faithful to both law and love.

But as he was searching for that way, the messenger of God (angel) came and gave him a more complete picture of what God was doing through Mary’s pregnancy. That far from being something to bring shame, it was the greatest honor imaginable. He would be the adoptive Father of the Son of God.

GOD THE FATHER

And what we see displayed imperfectly in Joseph, the adoptive father of Jesus, we can find perfectly displayed in our Heavenly Father. Because God is always perfect in His love and in His law.

This is something that many people today are very confused about. They don’t see how a loving God could be so concerned with people being faithful to His law. Why doesn’t he just over look our disobedience to his commands. Can’t he just forget about it or just forgive it? Wouldn’t that be the loving thing to do? But that shows a flawed understanding of God.

A.W. Tozer famously wrote “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”

So on this Christmas Sunday, I want to share with you something that has helped me to stay clear on what love is as God has given it to us. It is a statement that when you first hear it will probably sound strange to you...but stick with me through the explanation and I think it will be a help to you too.

The statement is this: Our God is not loving… and I know that may be disorienting for many of you so I will follow it up with something that should begin to bring clarity. This is a true statement all by itself, but I admit that it probably doesn’t communicate the complete thought. So let me add...

Our God is not loving, Our God is love

And I am not trying to confuse you with semantics this morning, but I am trying to help you to have the right things come into your minds when you think about God’s love. Especially as it works together with God’s law. Because even the Christmas story is being told right now in ways that violate this important truth.

So what do I mean when I say that “God is not loving” ?

Well when someone says that “God is loving”, what they are opening themselves up to... whether they know it or not... is that there is some standard, measurement or scale out there of what is LOVING and what is NOT LOVING. Let’s say it looks like this. Everything in upper circle is “LOVING” and everything in the lower region is NOT LOVING. Well since God is loving we put him in the “LOVING” category.

And you might be asking, “What is wrong with that? Certainly we wouldn’t put him in the Unloving category would we?”

My point is that asking ourselves which category God should go in is the problem. The categories themselves are the problem. To have an outside scale of what is or is not loving and then try and fit God in it is very dangerous. We should never try and fit God into categories that we create. That puts ourselves in a position of being the judge over God.

This is happening all over our world right now. People wrongly applying the idea that God is loving so he would only do things that are loving…as we have defined loving. And then they define loving in ways that directly violate God’s law and commands.

You see God is under no obligation to meet our standards of what we think love is and looks like because GOD IS LOVE. The chart should look like this... because God is the standard. He is the measure. He is the scale. Everything that God does is LOVE and anything outside of that is NOT LOVING.

I know that is heady stuff, but hear me Church - this is the root of how so many people are getting off track when it comes to God’s love, especially in how it relates to God’s law. Because God is the standard of love, we can know that whatever he does or commands us to do is loving.

So let’s look at where we can find these things laid out for us in Scripture. A great passage on Love in 1 John 4, we will start in verse 7 where it says...

1 John 4:7–8 (ESV)

7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

Love is not just something that God happens to do well, it is something that He is and then as He works in and through us so that we become more like Him. We become more loving.

So He is the origin of all that there is to know about what it means to love, and He is the necessary foundation for everything that we believe about love. He is the source from which all love flows and standard by which love is measured. He is the beginning and the end of love. Apart from Him we cannot truly know the depth of what love is.

But here is where God’s love is shown in the Advent of Jesus. Because God is perfect in both His love and in His law.

God is Love, everything God commands in His law is to maintain the integrity of His Love. This produces a big problem for us... because we, everyone of us, have rebelled against God’s love. We were designed to live in a perfect love relationship with God but we rebelled against His laws that were designed to maintain his Love and chose our own way.

But like Joseph’s love for Mary, God’s LOVE for us drove him to provide a way to satisfy the requirements of his LAW

Continuing in 1 John 4, we read...

1 John 4:9–10 (NLT)

9 God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. 10 This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.

If we were to apply our standard or measure of what loving is, we would have no hope. Because we would never see a Father sacrificing his son for enemies who have rebelled against Him as loving. Some critics of Christianity have even come to label this act as “Cosmic Child Abuse”. They argue that a “loving” Father would never sacrifice His son like this.

But thankfully God is not their version of “loving”. He is love. And God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. When Jesus came into the world as a baby, He was born to die. It was the plan from the beginning. This is what the angel told Joseph, Jesus’ earthly Father before he had even been born.

Matthew 1:20-21

20 ”...Joseph, son of David, do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. 21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

The word “sin” was used as an archery term meaning “to miss the mark”. We have missed the mark when it comes to God’s love. We have missed the mark when it comes to God’s law. But because of God’s great love for us, He sent Jesus to make a way for us to experience His love for all eternity.

The Promise of Love during advent is that the baby born in a manger was sent by our God of Love to satisfy the requirements of His law. Jesus not only came into our world, but He lived a sinless life in midst of all the temptations of this world and then He willingly went to the cross to take the punishment for all of us who have given into those temptations and so missed the mark in our sin.

And not only that, but Matthew tells us that

Matthew 1:22-23

22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: 23 “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us).

Jesus is God with us, so Jesus is love with us. When we want to know what Love truly is, then we don’t look to our standards, we look to Jesus. His life, His ways, His ministry, His sacrifice. His love. And through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, Jesus works in God’s love in his children.

In his Christmas devotional, Paul David Tripp shares these encouraging and hope filled thoughts :

“...if God was willing to send his Son to restore our relationship of love with him, you can be sure that he will not let anything separate us from us from his love. You see the Christmas story is the worlds best love story. It’s about a God of love sending the Son of his love to live a life of love and die a death of love, so that all who believe in him would be welcomed into the arms of his love forever and ever. Embedded in the Christmas story is a promise of unbroken love for the children of God.”

John 3:16–18 (NLT)

16 “For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. 17 God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him. 18 “There is no judgment against anyone who believes in him. But anyone who does not believe in him has already been judged for not believing in God’s one and only Son.

As you consider what you believe about Jesus, let me invite you to listen to the words of this song and take them to heart. What might God be trying to awaken in your heart this Christmas.

Special Music: While you were sleeping

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