Love Through the Gospel

Some stories start at the end and say something like “you may be wondering how I ended up here”

Our story today begins at the end, the moment at the end where we stand before God “holy, faultless, and blameless”.

What we will be looking at today is how we got there, how...

God’s love is revealed by His divine plan through Jesus

In a movie, the climax is at the center of the story, the resolution of everything that has happened in the movie so far and the point of where everything will be resolved till the end. When we come to the story of Jesus coming to earth as a man we have the climax of God’s divine plan of love. Our passage today helps us see how the climax fits within the greater narrative. How Jesus birth fits into the divine plan of love God has for the people and how His people are to participate in this plan.

We see this story from the beginning to the end. We see how God’s love in His divine plan was revealed from the beginning, through the begotten, and to restore the broken.

From the beginning

Our story begins at “once you were alienated hostile” to God.

-It brings us to the beginning when mankind was first alienated from God.

- Adam’s first response was to hide, to create distance between Him and God. It’s our base instinct...

But neither Adam’s sin nor his attempt to hide was a surprise to God...not one part of God’s plan that was changed as a result of Adam’s choice...His plan was to restore through the Son from the beginning.

We just sang “Joy to the World”. It was originally a song about the 2nd coming of Jesus and not the Incarnation. But it works so well for Jesus’ birth because the 2nd coming reflects the 1st. But both of these were promised from the very beginning. The 3rd line reminds us of this as it reflects on Genesis 3.

No more let sins and sorrows grow, Nor thorns infest the ground; He comes to make his blessings flow Far as the curse is found.

Jesus comes to redeem that which was cursed in Genesis 3.

But sometimes it can feel like God’s plan just sort of came together last minute, that God made it up along the way.

What Jesus birth reminds us it that God’s divine plan has never changed, that the offspring of Eve would crush the head of the serpent.

But we can look at the time between Eve and the coming of Jesus like our own lives, we can think God has forgotten about us...

-Christmas is a reminder that God came down, that He has not forgotten about us. That His plan for our life has not changed based on our sin, based on the circumstances of the culture around us, based on how many people sit in this sanctuary.

It brings us to our 2nd point

Through the begotten

Last week we looked at v. 15-19 and this beautiful hymn about the Son of God and His character.

Paul says in v. 22 that we have been “reconciled” through Christ. To reconcile is to remove a hostility or enmity that exists. It is to restore a broken relationship.

We can have family members that we have enmity with, especially during Christmas. People who we have an issue with. They have wronged us or we have wronged them. Maybe political differences that have left it hard to have a conversation. Without reconciliation you may be in the same room as that person but a cloud hangs over everything. You are always worried that one wrong word will lead to greater hostility and anger. If you ignore the problem you can even find yourself cordial, but never as close as you should be with family. You need reconciliation, the hostility needs to be removed somehow. Forgiveness and confession needs to take place, a righting of wrongs done.

In a similar way we have hostility with God because of our sin against Him. There needs to be restoration between us, but that requires the penalty of our sin to be paid, that the accusations that are against us are resolved in some way.

Paul says that the Father reconciled us through the PHYSICAL BODY of the Son.

God took the first step forward because we couldn’t

Romans 5:8–11 CSB

But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. How much more then, since we have now been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from wrath. For if, while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, then how much more, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. And not only that, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received this reconciliation.

Why was it important that it was His physical body?

-Because through His sinless life He is able to identify with those He needed to save and take on our sin by being subject to death.

-By being fully God He does what no man or woman could do on their own.

-God takes on human sin by becoming human and taking on our issue of sin.

-And it is only by sharing in Christ’s victory over death that we may be reconciled and we are made righteous through Him. That in Christ we are holy, we have become set apart in Him. We are clothed in the righteousness of Jesus in a way that is only possible if He came as a human to earth.

CAN WE TALK ABOUT HOW AMAZING THAT IS? Before God we are holy and blameless because of what Jesus has done for us!

-Jesus, who had everything, came down to take our sin upon Him. That He did something for us no one else would, our debt has been taken.

-This is no “gotcha” scheme earlier. It can feel too easy for us because we are so used to having strings attached. Nothing is ever free, nothing is ever as good as it seems to be. Like people in the mall offering you free things

-It immediately makes us ask the question, what string is attached to God sending His Son? There is none! We are just called to enjoy this freedom found in Christ rather than be a slave to the world.

All we need to do is accept this, choose to be those in Christ rather than living as one of the world.

This leads us to the third point. God showed His love to...

To restore the broken

V. 12-14 showed us how we once lived “in the domain of darkness” but how God has “Transferred us into the kingdom of the Son He loves”. It was God’s plan from the beginning, to restore what was broken in the Garden.

V. 21 had told us about our hostile attitude towards God. We had estranged ourselves to Him and were in fact determined that we didn’t need Him. This isn’t just apathy to the truth, it is a refusal to listen to God’s claims for our own claims of truth and become enemies of God. As James says

James 4:4 CSB

You adulterous people! Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? So whoever wants to be the friend of the world becomes the enemy of God.

Paul goes even further in Romans 1:28–32 “And because they did not think it worthwhile to acknowledge God, God delivered them over to a corrupt mind so that they do what is not right. They are filled with all unrighteousness, evil, greed, and wickedness. They are full of envy, murder, quarrels, deceit, and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, arrogant, proud, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, senseless, untrustworthy, unloving, and unmerciful. Although they know God’s just sentence—that those who practice such things deserve to die—they not only do them, but even applaud others who practice them.”

-We went as far as not just doing evil, but “applauding” evil and those who do it.

In our state of sin, we aren’t “mostly good”, the picture Scripture gives us is those who are dead in sin.

But in Christ we see we are “holy, faultless, and blameless before Him”. Both in our current state but also one day when we are before God that in Christ we are without sin. There is no accusation that Satan can bring against us. We have a “new self” in Christ.

-Before Adam sinned we were “not able to sin”, then we were “not able to not sin”, but now in Christ we are “able not to sin”.

-But we can’t be bent on trying to save ourselves, by trying to do enough to earn salvation.

What Paul says is that they are to remain grounded and steadfast in the faith” and to “not shift away from the hope of the Gospel you have heard”.

This “shift” is far easier for us to do than we realize. Like someone caught in a tide that doesn’t realize they have shifted until they look to shore our faith can become a counterfeit by these cultural currents that pull us away from the truth.

-How do we keep from shifting? The language Paul uses is that of standing on a strong foundation. That if we are “well-founded” in the truth of the Gospel that Christ will keep us stable and that His church will hold us.

-We may also recognize we are in a current and feel like we can’t get out of it, that we can’t stop sinning.

But in Christ we are a New Creation, we no longer have to be who we were before. Sin is the imposter in our lives. What this means is that we must continue in the work of our salvation, that we become like Paul, “servants” of the Gospel.

We hold to the faith by excelling in the work of the Gospel

There are many Christmas movies that give us this idea of “fate”, where we will have this moment in life where everything will come together for us. We will by fate find the person we will find our soulmate and our lives will be amazing after that. Or the working city girl goes home and after a series of events quits her job and opens a bakery in her hometown. Or someone just needs to find the “Christmas spirit” of giving and once they are a good person everything will be right.

But I think life is a little more like the movie “It’s a wonderful life”. In it George Bailey wonders what his life had amounted to as his business he had worked his whole life for is on the brink of closing and none of the dreams he had in life had come to fruition. He grows frustrated with his kids, he becomes angry at the familiar world around him. But as the angel Clarence appears to George he reveals to George all the choices he has made throughout His life that have impacted the people around him for the better. It was in fact George’s consistent acts of faithfulness that had mattered to those around him, not the great ambitions he may have had.

We can also try to define our lives by our ambitions, by what we are able to “achieve” in life. We can think that is where God is showing us our salvation. But God shows us His love in the brokenness of our lives that He restores. By the challenging circumstances that God redeems for His good.

Like what 1 Corinthians tells us.

1 Corinthians 15:58 “Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the Lord’s work, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.”

By excelling in the Lord’s Work we remind ourselves of the Gospel, that we have been saved, that God’s divine plan will not fail in our lives.

Christmas proves this to us, God sending His Son is a reminder of God’s love through the Gospel. That our Savior came not in a castle but in a stable, not as a great king but as a servant of many, not as one who had an easy life but who went through the same pain as us and sympathizes with our weaknesses. God’s love toward us is seen in that love came down.

We would much rather have the Hallmark movie Christmas, but we know our lives aren’t like that. Nothing ever goes the way we want to because of the impact of sin, because we are broken, our families are broken, we deal with hurt. But God’s love is shown in that He restores. That our labor here on earth will not be in vain because one day we will be presented before the Father, in Christ, “holy, faultless, and blameless”. That is the wonderful truth that we should hold onto.

Will you enter in to God’s story?

There are many reasons we do not enter in.

-We may not believe in this story

-We may reject the story

-We may feel doubt or anger towards this story because of circumstances in our life

-We may believe the story but not feel like we are a part of it

-Or you are here and you do believe and God is telling you to invite others into this story with you

C.S. Lewis said Jesus entering our story is like Shakespeare writing himself into Hamlet. That it would at the same time be “Shakespeare and one of Shakespeare’s creatures”. God, the author and creator, has entered and revealed His love to us through Jesus as a human.

Christmas is our reminder that God has entered into our story. That God revealed himself into our broken lives.

That God’s plan for you began before you even know it, His love for you started before the world began. Christmas is your reminder that God never forgot about you but that He sent His Son FOR you.

Today I pray that you will believe this truth. That whatever doubts you have, whatever challenges you face, whatever hurt you feel during Christmas. You will remember that God entered into your story because He loves you.