God's Radical Love For You.
Notes
Transcript
This week we’re gonna talk about God’s love. God’s love is a giving love. it is a love that is pure, selfless, it demonstrates itself through action, it is perfect love. It is my hope that as we dwell on the love of God this morning, we will find that we are more loved than we imagined and that we are spurred on in our efforts to continue loving others the way God loves us.
But as we marvel over the love of God, we need to take a moment and remember how radical his love is towards us.
There are three points to this mornings message.
God loathes sinner’s.
God love’s sinner’s.
Radical resolution at the cross.
You see if we believe that we deserve God’s love because of how lovely we are we don’t grasp the reality of how radical Gods love is toward each of us.
There was a little Scottish boy wouldn’t eat his prunes, so his mother sent him off to bed saying, “God is angry at you.”
Soon after the boy went to his room a violent storm broke out. Amidst flashes of lightning and peals of thunder, the mother looked into the boy’s room, worried that he would be terrified. When she opened the door she found him looking out the window muttering, “My, such a fuss to make over a few prunes.”595
Michael P. Green, 1500 Illustrations for Biblical Preaching (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2000), 17
Too often we think so little of God’s righteous anger against sin and sinners. Let’s be clear however, God hates sinners.
God loathes sinner’s.
A pastor once wrote that he recalled meeting a young and articulate French West African when I was studying in Germany more than twenty years ago. We were both working diligently to improve our German, but once a week or so we had had enough, so we went out for a meal together and retreated to French, a language we both knew well. In the course of those meals we got to know each other. I learned that his wife was in London training to be a medical doctor. He himself was an engineer who needed fluency in German in order to pursue doctoral studies in engineering in Germany.
Pretty soon I discovered that once or twice a week he disappeared into the red light district of town. Obviously he went to pay his money and have his woman. Eventually I got to know him well enough that I asked him what he would do if he discovered that his wife were doing something similar in London.
“Oh,” he said, “I’d kill her.”
“That’s a bit of a double standard, isn’t it?” I replied.
“You don’t understand. Where I come from in Africa, the husband has the right to sleep with many women, but if a wife does it, she must be killed.”
“But you told me that you were raised in a mission school. You know that the God of the Bible does not have double standards like that.”
He gave me a bright smile and replied, “Ah, le bon Dieu; il doit nous pardonner; c’est son métier [Ah, God is good; he’s bound to forgive us; that’s his job].”
D. A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2000), 65–66.
The Bible teaches that we were enemies of God. That we each rebelled against the righteousness of God. It’s easy to think we aren’t that bad when we compare ourselves to others. We can always find others who we are better than. It’s easy to believe we are completely lovable and God would have to be heartless to not love us. But, if the Bible is true then we were all in OPPOSITION to God and his righteousness at a certain point and had set ourselves up as enemies of God.
When Adam sinned, he was saying, in effect, that he knew better than God and did not need God’s direction. At that point God would’ve been perfectly just in leaving Adam forever. God does not owe us a thing.
In fact, God’s Holiness causes Him to be AGAINST the sinner. His wrath gets POURED OUT on sinners. His wrath toward sinners is now, his wrath and even hatred of them is spoken of 14 times in the first 50 Psalms.
Scripture is laden with texts that are inescapable and crystal clear that God is opposed to the sinner.
Consider Ezek. 5:11-17 - “Therefore, as I live, declares the Lord God, surely, because you have defiled my sanctuary with all your detestable things and with all your abominations, therefore I will withdraw. My eye will not spare, and I will have no pity. 12 A third part of you shall die of pestilence and be consumed with famine in your midst; a third part shall fall by the sword all around you; and a third part I will scatter to all the winds and will unsheathe the sword after them.
13 “Thus shall my anger spend itself, and I will vent my fury upon them and satisfy myself. And they shall know that I am the Lord—that I have spoken in my jealousy—when I spend my fury upon them. 14 Moreover, I will make you a desolation and an object of reproach among the nations all around you and in the sight of all who pass by. 15 You shall be a reproach and a taunt, a warning and a horror, to the nations all around you, when I execute judgments on you in anger and fury, and with furious rebukes—I am the Lord; I have spoken— 16 when I send against you the deadly arrows of famine, arrows for destruction, which I will send to destroy you, and when I bring more and more famine upon you and break your supply of bread. 17 I will send famine and wild beasts against you, and they will rob you of your children. Pestilence and blood shall pass through you, and I will bring the sword upon you. I am the Lord; I have spoken.”
The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Eze 5:11–17.
You would have to skim over a significant portion of the Bible in order to avoid comments like this from God. Simply put God hates sinners.
Now, some, if not all of you, are going, but God loves the world
Well, your right…
God loves sinner’s.
As we look at the world and see things we just can’t stomach with our Christian minds, we mustn’t forget that God so loved the world.
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
God loves everyone, no matter how foul or nasty. God’s image, no matter how hard it is for us to see inside a person, God sees it and loves each person. He does so unconditionally. Take the worst person in the world, and God has love for that person. God loves the unborn humans inside of a woman’s body. God loves murderers, thieves, liars, sexually immoral, slanders, etc...
The Bible is clear when it says God so love the world. Not God so loved the “saved world” or his chosen people, or the good people he said the world.
Jesus sat with the tax collectors and prostitutes, probably some murderers and that's who he ate meals with at times. Now I don’t think he was Jesus and the 40 thieves, I believe that some of those people who stuck around Jesus were converted they came to believe in repentance and were convicted in their hearts, but it is safe to say some left the table and were not changed.
What we do know is he came for the sick, not those who think they didn’t need a physician. He came for the wandering sheep, he came for the lost. God loves the world, God is love.
So how is it possible for God to hate any of us and love any of us at the same time, cursed and blessed, condemned yet forgiven?
Thats the final point of the message there is...
Radical resolution at the cross.
I’ve heard it said that while rage and fury towards sinful people wells up in God, it does so within a God who is already filled with Love.
Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
God is love and always has had as a central attribute “love”. That is why we cannot simply say, God loves good people and hates bad people. God loves ALL people YET because of His holiness and justness, He will not allow sinful humans to be in His presence in an unrepentant state for all of eternity in fact His holiness and perfection REQUIRES of Him that He be opposed to, and hate sin and evil and sinners who ultimately will not repent. His wrath is toward the sinner and sin alike. God is against the sinner but at the same time for the sinner. Scripture tells us God wishes all would repent and be saved.
I like how D.A. Carson, a NT scholar puts it,
“Do you wish to see the love of God? Look at the cross.”
“Do you wish to see the wrath of God? Look at the cross.”
God’s wrath towards sin and God’s love for us put Jesus on the cross. Jesus was slaughtered like an animal. His body was torn to pieces. In fact, the prophet Isaiah said, “it pleased God to CRUSH Him for our inequity.”
Could God just forgive us all? No, his holiness does not permit it.
Could God just leave us without a way back to him? No, his love would not permit it.
God would’ve remained holy and just to leave Adam and the rest of humanity to an eternity without him. He would’ve remained holy and just to consign us all to hell. But he didn’t do that because God is love and his love is a perfect love.
And he loves you beloved.
Illustration: There was a couple who was fighting and began to see a counselor. During their visits the husband, in exasperation, cried out to his wife and the counselor I’ve given you everything I’ve given you vehicles a beautiful home expensive clothes children vacations...
Before he could go any further his wife cut in and said something to the effect of “you haven’t given me everything, you haven’t given me yourself.”
What she got at, is at the heart of what God has done for us by giving us Jesus. God gave us himself, when he gave us Jesus.
If you ever doubt, and begin to wonder, does God really love me? Think about this. God gave Himself to you.
Think about what God decided to do on behalf of you. In eternity, before time began, God thought out what would happen if he created us and gave us a free will. Yet before time began the plan was mapped out in its entirety and God went forward because He loves us. Knowing we would sin and knowing that he would send Jesus and that Jesus would suffer, He went forward with the plan because He loves us. When Satan tempted Jesus, here on earth, to take a different route, a route other than suffering for us, Jesus went forward because He loves us. When Jesus himself was vexed to the point of sweating out blood in the garden and prayed to his father in heaven that if there would be some other way, he didn’t give up, he went forward because He loves us. When they mocked him on the cross and said come on down from there, when death was a breath away, he went forward because He loves us.
God made away by sending Jesus to die for our sins, oh he absolutely loves us.
He absolutely loves you.
Romans 5:8 (ESV)
but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
He died for us. Because He loves us.
God loves the sinner, God hates the sinner, yet praise God for His radical resolution at the cross.
God’s love is a self-giving love. it is a love that is pure, intentional, and it demonstrates itself through action; it is perfect love. And it is for YOU beloved.
This week, let’s praise God for his perfect and radical love towards us and do our best to love others the same.
Would you pray with me?
Benediction:
English Standard Version Chapter 13
14 The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
amen.