Our First Love: God the Father
Notes
Transcript
Our Goal
Our Goal
Good Morning and welcome, again! We thank you for joining us this morning on the first Sunday of The new year. I love the excitement that comes with the new year. People’s eagerness to reset and restart, or continue progressing, New challenges and new resolutions. Some of us may have even gotten new clothes and saved the new clothes for the new year. But in all the busyness of the new year buzz, there may be a tendency to be fixated on looking forward so hard that we may forget to look back or look around at the present. As a team, one of the questions we have to ask while planning is, “where is the church and what would be helpful?” We wanted to remind the church and ourselves of timeless truths that will serve as a firm foundation, and in so doing, ultimately remembering our first love.
And that’s what we want to consider this first series of the year. For some this will continue to fuel the fire in our hearts, for other it will rekindle the fire and for others it will ignite it all together to learn about our great and glorious God.
Ultimately, we know that in order to fall in love, stay in love and grow in love, we need to grow in knowledge of the subject of our love. Like any of the relationships we have with people, the more we know them the deeper we love. So in this series we’re going to look at the person’s of the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit), Scripture (the specific revelation of God and how we get to know him), and the church ( the community we experience God in).
This week we are going to look at God the Father.
First Love
First Love
‘But I have this against you, that you have left your first love.
Jesus had just shown appreciation for the church of Ephesus, their patient endurance, intolerance of evil, their testing of false apostles and calling them as such and overall faithfulness. Yet, Jesus calls them out on this , that they have forgotten their first love.
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
This is one of my favorite secitons of scripture. We read of God’s expectations straight up. The imagery used here is reflected in 1 Corinthians 6, “do everything to the glory of God.” Jesus also reminds us of this great command in Matthew 22 by quoting it directly when asked what the greatest commandment is.
As Christians, orthodoxy teaches that God is one god, but three persons. That is really as simple as it gets. There are different analogies that people use to explain this mystery, but pretty much any example falls apart into a heresy when you break it down. In this age of so much instant information it can be difficult to be at peace with not fully understanding, but, as augustine of hippo said, “If you could understand God fully, would he really be God?”
As I said earlier We will be focusing on God the Father this week.
Father
Father
He is aptly named father. He is our creator. In Genesis 1 we can read about how God created the world and everything in it by the power of his Word and Spirit. We experience in Exodus how as Creator he bends nature to his will and how ultimately nature reflects his glory and power so that no one is left without excuse as the book of Romans says.
He is our provider and sustainer. He didn’t just stop providing for mankind after the fall. We can look at our own lives and experience it. We can look at the people around us and see it as well, believer or unbeliever alike. The Father supplies everything we need. We see it in the OT, How God provided for Israel. Safe passage, Mana, quail, water and leadership. Israel asked and the Father provided. They asked for a mediator and they found it in Moses. Later they asked for a human king and he provided one. The unbeliever asks for nothing, yet God sustains them.
“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
God the Father is our creator, sustainer and our provider. Something that I believe we can all agree on is that God is holy, it’s something that we’ve discussed before on Wednesdays, but I’ll jump in for a bit.
In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him stood the seraphim. Each had six wings: with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called to another and said:
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory!”
And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke. And I said: “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”
This shows us how holy God is. How holy is he? 3 times holy. In scripture things are repeated to emphasize something and the fact that it was repeated it 3 times shows the completeness of that thing. God is emphatically and completely holy. He is not only set apart as our creator, but He is also morally perfect. This moral perfection means two things, that when commands obedience to his commands that means perfect obedience, and when he does sometihng or plans to do something, he does so perfectly.
We are given this command to love the Lord our God entirely, yet we do so half heartedly. We can be forgetful. That’s the beauty of his holiness, it informs he other attributes. What do I mean by that? I’m glad you asked. That means that his faithfulness is perfect, his provision is perfect, his love is perfect.
As an example, God the father set out to care for and bring israel into the promise land. He did that despite them and their opposition. God in Genesis 3 promises a redeemer who is to come and he does that in Jesus Christ. God the father sets out to reconcile the world to himself and he does that.
This is where we see the depth of his fatherhood...
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
being justified as a gift by His grace through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus;
whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate His righteousness, because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed;
for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
Who know what a forbearance is? It means to refrain from exercising a legal, especailly in paying a debt. Some of us that have had school loans, or any other loans for that matter, have had a chance to stop payment for a period of time during financial downtime. But the debt never went away. Likewise, God was appeased with the sacrifices of israel, but never satisfied. As the book of Hebrews says,
The old system under the law of Moses was only a shadow, a dim preview of the good things to come, not the good things themselves. The sacrifices under that system were repeated again and again, year after year, but they were never able to provide perfect cleansing for those who came to worship.
So the payment of those sins and our sins, though forborn, eventaully had to be paid in full, that’s what we find in Jesus Christ. He has paid it foreward for all eternity. His sacrifice has afforded us community with God the Father and has shown us his true character and love.
We see this time of forbearance come to an end in this verses:
But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.
Christ did not die to make his father loving, but because his father is loving, the atoning blood is the outflow of the very heart of God for us. CH Spurgeon
God the father is both Just, holy and rightfully demanding as he is merciful, gracious and the justifier of those he calls to himself. We, in Jesus christ can cry out “abba, father!” and be heard. Abba is an aramaic word for father that expresses a deep intimacy. It is not father in the darth vader sense it is father, the one who knows and loves me, the one whom I know and love. We can claim this intimacy because of jesus christ. We can have faith that we are adopted because our adoption is sealed in the blood of Jesus, because of the work of God the son. We’ll look more in depth into God the son next week. but as matthew 11:27 shows us,
All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.
But as a final thought, Kobe Bryant was a prime example of what it looked like to remember your first love. In his 3 minute short that won him an oscar, he expresses this relationship. Then in one of the last interviews he had before his passing, he talked about how basketball was his obession, everything he did was to grow in the knowledge of basketball or was to be used and applied in basketball. My challenge is this, Let us live in this new year remembering our firs love, let us live obsessed with God and let us bring this relationship and love to others to further the knowledge. When we trully love someone or something, everyone around us knows, lets do that in the name of God, relying on christ in failure and triumph, relying on the Spirit for strength, searching the scriptures for inspiration and looking to the church for encouragement and sustenance.
We love because he first loved us.
How deep the Father’s love for us,
How vast beyond all measure,
That He should give His only Son
To make a wretch His treasure.