The Advent of Love

Intro

John 17:24–26 “Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, although the world has not known You, yet I have known You;

and these have known that You sent Me; and I have made Your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.”

Those Given to Christ

Now let’s just setup the context of this text before we get too far. We were just in John 17 a few months ago. If you remember, I talked about how this chapter in the gospel is the true “Lord’s Prayer”. Not the prayer that we pray, but the pray that He prayed as He took some time to pray to His Father in heaven for us. So in the grand scheme of God’s love, we must begin with an understanding of who will experience God’s love, and that is those who are given to Christ, or better put, His disciples.

The love of God, while for His whole creation, is only experienced by those who are following Jesus. Let’s consider something. God’s love is unlimited, relentless and infinite. We do not tell the love of God where to go or how to work. We live in a world today with an ever increasing twisting of the love of God, in many ways limiting it, but in every way directing it. We create our own standards for what love must accomplish and we fail to rightly compare any form of human love to the ultimate standard of God’s love. In part because we don’t fully understand God’s love, and in part because we create our own expectations of God’s love. It is not “love is love”, but “God is love”.

God’s love is for everyone. God’s love is for His entire creation. But God’s love is only going to actually be realized by those who have placed their faith and trust in Jesus Christ. Now, facets of His love may be experienced by all people. We see this with common grace. The love of God has been gracious to all mankind in that there are things that we can enjoy and experience in the world around us. We can taste, we can feel, we can see, we can hear, and we can also love. But the truest love of God is experienced in the fullness of His presence, and those that He has given to Jesus, those Jesus prays for in this chapter of John, will get to experience the truest and full love of God.

So when Christ was born, He was born in and out of God’s love for His creation, but that love is only experienced fully by the one who responds to the effectual call of grace and professes saving faith in Jesus as Lord and Savior. The full love of God is available to all, but it will only be experienced by those who have met the qualifications of the new law in Christ.

Admit you’re a sinner, that you’re in need of a savior, recognize Jesus as that Savior who died for your sins and raised again to bring you into new life, confess Him as Lord and Savior, and then live your life to the glory of His name as He leads you by the power of His Spirit.

If you’ve done those things, if you are now adopted as a child of God, then the advent, or the coming of love in Christ’s birth means for you that God has poured out the fullness of His love for you and that He will bring you back to Himself to experience the fullness of His love in His presence for all eternity.

So we’ve now established where we need to begin: the love of God is experienced in its trueness and fullness by only those who have been given to Christ, those who can be called His disciples.

The Foundation of Love

Now, let’s look at a statement Jesus makes at the end of verse 24: You loved Me before the foundation of the world. The love of God for Himself and the love of God that sent the Son to be born of a virgin, to die for our sins, and to rise again so that He might raise us to new life as well…that love began before time itself and before the world we live on was made.

One thing that this should make pretty clear to us - God’s expression of love never needed an object beyond Himself. His love in it’s fullness is eternal with Him and in Him, before anything that exists outside of Him came to be.

If God is the same yesterday, today and forever, then He is the same in eternity outside of time. So when time came to exist, the love that is in Him and the love that He is was established before time and therefore has not changed with time and has not been changed by time. So if God loved Christ before the foundations of the world, and Christ in verse 26 prays that the love the Father has for the Son would be in us, then the very love of God that we can experience is the same love that He has for Christ before anything beyond God existed.

An important reminder for us in this is that the love of God was founded and defined before we even sinned. Before Adam and Eve committed the first sin, God’s love was established for and through His Son for a world lost in sin. Before there was sin, there was a plan already in place, plan A, that would send the Son of God to the cross to be put to death as the atoning payment for sin, incurring the wrath of God upon Himself. And let’s not diminish this love by forgetting that part of that love is revealed in Christ taking on human flesh. Taking on our hunger, thirst, exhaustion, reliance on sleep, food and water to survive, being tempted and tried, maybe even the joy of getting up and feeling a part of your body that you never knew existed, but now you know exists because it hurts. The moment He was born, He took on all of our suffering.

And you know what? That love hasn’t changed once. That sin that is just hanging over your head? That moment in your life where you just felt like you’ve fallen too far? His love for us in sending His Son was planned and perfected before the foundation of the world. And before the foundation of the world, He knew all the choices you’d make. He knew what would cause Him grief and what would bring Him joy. And His love for you never changed. Now, we can go around in circle and come back to the realization of that love conversation. We need to know Jesus as Lord and Savior if we are going to actually experience the love of God truly. But we’ve already hit that point fairly well. The point here is simple. God loved you before you sinned, when you sinned, and after you sinned. And because He loves you He doesn’t overlook your sin, but invites you to experience forgiveness.

One thing that often trips people up and has actually caused people to walk away from their faith is a question over what God’s love looks like. They wonder, “how could a loving God send people to hell?”, but that isn’t the right question. God doesn’t send people to hell, but because of sin and because of disobedience toward God, everyone is already destined for hell. So He’s not drawing His love away and sending people to a place of eternal separation. Rather, in His unchanging, eternal love, He is extending to His creation a means of escape from this reality. In His love for us, He sent His Son to die for us, no matter what we’ve done, so that we might find our salvation in Him. He doesn’t overlook our sin because of His love, but invites us to experience forgiveness.

And one last thing on this love that was founded before the world began - this love is not based on us. It’s not based on a performance, it’s not based on our worthiness. We cannot do enough good in our lives to earn the love of God. His love is freely available to us and we experience much of His love every single day. We don’t get to heaven based on what we do, based on our good, but because God is good. In His goodness and love, He sent His only Son to become a man, live a perfect life and die a cruel and painful death all that so the sin we could never rid ourselves of could be forgiven. The love that God has for us is not dependent on what we do, but on what Christ did.

Before the world began, the love of God was fully satisfied within Himself. And He chose, from the beginning and through to the end, to extend the love that He has for the Son to us. Not because we are good, but because He is good.

Let’s look at one more thing in this text.

God Known = Love Known

Let’s just read verses 25 and 26 once more.

John 17:25–26 “O righteous Father, although the world has not known You, yet I have known You; and these have known that You sent Me; and I have made Your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.”

There’s a word repeated here again and again. Five times. Known. And what I understand by this is boiled down like this - those who know the love of God know God. And this works both ways, but it only works if one of the ways works. If we know the love of God, then it is evidence that we know God. But if we do not know God, then we will not fully know the love of God. We may experience aspects of His love, but if we do not know Him then we will never experience the fullness of His love. Namely, we will not know the love for us through the gift of His Son that leads us to salvation.

If we take a step back in chapter 17 to verse 3, see what Jesus says here;

John 17:3 “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.”

Eternal life is only experienced by those who know God and Jesus who He sent. And it is because Jesus knows that God that we can know God, because He has made His name known to us before and will make it known again and again, so that we might know Him. And the love that He makes known to us is not God’s love for us, but His love for Christ that extends through Christ to us, that we might know the love of God and be found in Christ.

Imagine that for a second. We know that Jesus lived a perfect life. From our standpoint, we can safely say that Jesus is super easy to love, right? The Father wouldn’t have any problem loving the Son who lived a perfect life. We’re a different story. But read that last line of verse 26 again;

so that the love with which You have loved Me may be in them, and I in them.

The love we receive from God isn’t based on who we are or what we’ve done, but on who Christ is and on what He’s done. That’s a weight-off-the-shoulders thought right there. You’re not going to earn the love of God. We just can’t do it. Instead, the love of God for Christ, established before the foundations of the world, extends through Christ to us in the gift of God made flesh and the atoning of our sin through His death on the cross.

When we think about love around Christmas time, may we rest in the blessing of knowing God and being known by God. May we rest in the fact that His love for us never waivers because His love for Christ never waivers. May we rest in the love of God knowing that, since before the world began, He loved us through His Son, loves us because of His Son, and will love us to the end as we spend our infinite days in the presence of His love for all eternity.