[SPEAKER_00]: Well, during this Advent season, we have been looking at this theme, this is love.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we want to explore, continue exploring as Darynded last week, what is love?
[SPEAKER_00]: What is this love that we are exploring that we can experience?
[SPEAKER_00]: It is talked about in our world, in our secular culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, and has been for years and years.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, let's think Elvis, he couldn't help falling in love, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The righteous brothers need it, your love.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've got Whitney Houston, who she would always love you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, be on say, well, she's just crazy in love.
[SPEAKER_00]: This term, this love, this thing that we constantly hear about, we know about, we experience, but there is so much more for us to learn.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gary Chapman was, uh, became famous for his five love languages and many of you,
[SPEAKER_00]: May know about the five love languages he was explaining particularly to people in relationship that the way you give love is often the way that you receive love and see that love is being given to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Quality time, words of affirmation, physical touch, receiving gifts, acts of service.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean the best way of explaining how the love languages works is in my own relationship, my
[SPEAKER_00]: One of my primary love languages is acts of service.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where my husband's love language is physical touch.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, when I get up in the morning, I will be very busy.
[SPEAKER_00]: My aim is to do everything I can to set my family up for the best day possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I will be packing lunches.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will be getting their breakfast ready.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll make sure that they're done the washing and that if it's folded and it's the right type of uniform that they want, not the wrong type of uniform that it's exactly how they want and what they want.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my mornings are very busy as I strive to serve my family to give them the best day possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: When my husband gets up in the morning, he gets himself ready.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when it comes in to the kitchen, he'll come and he'll give me a big hug.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he'll say, you just look so beautiful how to give you a hug.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I will say, thanks.
[SPEAKER_00]: When really I'm thinking, I have so much to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when I walk into the kitchen, the first thing in the morning, and I see that my sink is empty, because my husband has stayed up late to do the dishes from the night before, and I think, I have the best husband in the whole world.
[SPEAKER_00]: How we give love is often how we see it being given back to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is so helpful for people in relationships.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's helpful to know how to communicate really well within the different relationships, whether it's a spouse, a partner, whether it's your children, friends, whatever it might be.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, as Christians,
[SPEAKER_00]: As Christians, when we really want to explore what is love, all these things are helpful and useful and they can help in our day-to-day, but if we do not base our whole lives with the foundation of God's love, then we are missing out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what is this love?
[SPEAKER_00]: What is the love that we receive from God?
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the source of love, the ultimate love that we can fully understand and appreciate.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're gonna read about this from one John 4 verse 10.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is our whole text for today, strapping, packs a punch though.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is love.
[SPEAKER_00]: not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son as an attorney-sacrifice for our sins.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's read it again, because it's such a short verse, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is love, not the way loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an attorney sacrifice for our sins.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first thing we notice when we read this verse and a very important thing for us to understand is this love that we are talking about is God initiated.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is God initiated.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is not through anything that we have said, not through anything we have done.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not how great we are or how well we've worshiped or how much time we've given or how much money we've given to the food pantry.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't actually is not determined on any of our action.
[SPEAKER_00]: before you took a breath, before you took a step, before you even said a word, God loved you.
[SPEAKER_00]: He initiated it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't wait for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't see if we were worthy already.
[SPEAKER_00]: He gave his love to every single person.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he has been doing so ever since the beginning of time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, if we go all the way back to the start of the Bible, all the way back to Genesis, we read He created the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: What an incredible gift of love that He gave to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: This incredible world that He put us in to enjoy and to see its beauty and to be a part of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But not only that, He gave us all the resources that we needed to flourish.
[SPEAKER_00]: Perfectly aligned, incredible so that it would hold all its seasons and hold everything that we would need to be at our best and to flourish.
[SPEAKER_00]: from there, he chose Abraham.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've lost the clicker, who was told that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky.
[SPEAKER_00]: Was Abraham perfect?
[SPEAKER_00]: Did he do all the right things?
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, no, no, no, no.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was righteous, but he was far from perfect.
[SPEAKER_00]: but God loved him and he chose him to build a nation from his descendants and the purpose of that nation was God to love them so much that the rest of the world would be able to understand the love of God through what he did for this chosen nation.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's how much God loves us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And were they perfect?
[SPEAKER_00]: Did they do the right thing?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, no, they didn't either.
[SPEAKER_00]: They worshipped other gods.
[SPEAKER_00]: They would see what other nations were doing and leaning to what they were doing instead of following the rules that God had given them, time and time and time again.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the Old Testament is longer than the New Testament because time and time again, the Israelites, God's chosen people would constantly,
[SPEAKER_00]: turn away from God.
[SPEAKER_00]: He would offer them grace.
[SPEAKER_00]: They would come back.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then they'd worship other gods and he would offer them grace and they would come back and this was a constant thing that went over and over and over.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what did God do?
[SPEAKER_00]: What any of us would do, just forget about them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just let them go, do their own things, suffer their own consequences.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, he is powerful and mighty.
[SPEAKER_00]: He could have smite them, burnt them to a crisp going, you didn't notice me then, do you notice me now?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, he could have done absolutely anything to this whole nation that he had shown his love for generations and yet continue to reject him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet what did he do?
[SPEAKER_00]: He gave his one and only son.
[SPEAKER_00]: to show them yet again how much he loves them and for us to know their story, for us who knows that we are just as fallen as they are and to be reminded that just like God gave his one and only son for them, he does it for us as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And while we can hear it, and we might hear it every Christmas, we may even hear it multiple times throughout the year, because this is our gospel message, this is what we live and die on as Christians.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it is hard for us to understand and we'll often fall back into the wrong thinking of going, no, I have to achieve something to be loved.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because that's our world, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We're constantly trying to achieve to accomplish, we have to work hard to earn anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to work hard in our relationships.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to work hard in our careers.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to work hard in our families, in our neighborhoods, in our jobs.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wherever it is, we're always striving to achieve to therefore receive something of great value.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not that we loved Him, but God loved us, not through anything we have earned, not through anything that we have accomplished.
[SPEAKER_00]: He loved us first.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it is so hard I know as particularly as an acts of service person, I find this really hard to get my head around.
[SPEAKER_00]: The other weekend, we were invited out for dinner to a friend's house and they invited a couple of people and once we worked out all the details of where we were going to go to their house and they were going to cook us a meal.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so once we worked out all the details, of course one of the first questions I asked was, what can we bring?
[SPEAKER_00]: And they wrote back and said, no need to bring anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is so lovely, that is so generous.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is so not gonna happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you don't turn up without something, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And the other people that had been invited, they jumped on it straight away as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: They like, will bring dessert.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, will bring drinks and after dinner snacks, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because you can't come without having something to offer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, can I just say that if you are invited to someone's house for dinner, please offer to bring something that is good social etiquette, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: However, we must not transfer that social etiquette onto our understanding of God's love.
[SPEAKER_00]: God has not asked us to bring anything before He has shown.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's love.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not seen the quality of our offering before He has offered us love.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has not waited for anything that we could say or do.
[SPEAKER_00]: He first and foremost, before we even had an opportunity to love Him, He loved us.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Cambridge Commentary says at this, the superiority of God's love does not by merely in the fact that it's being divine.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is first in order of time.
[SPEAKER_00]: God's love comes first, and therefore necessarily spontaneous, ours is at best only love in return for love.
[SPEAKER_00]: God loved us first.
[SPEAKER_00]: We didn't earn it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't have to accomplish anything to receive it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is there in its mind-blowing amensity for every single one of us.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is love.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not that we loved God, but that he loved us.
[SPEAKER_00]: and sent his son as a returning sacrifice for our sins.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's look at this returning sacrifice.
[SPEAKER_00]: that this verse mentions.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of translations actually use the word propitiation, but because it's so hard to pronounce, we're going to go with a bit of both, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a turning sacrifice.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is to give something, to sacrifice something in order for someone else to be freed.
[SPEAKER_00]: For us to fully understand this, let's go through a bit of a process.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first process is we have to acknowledge that sin is evident in our world.
[SPEAKER_00]: That sin is evident.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you've grown up in church, you might often hear about sin, and we talk about sin, and we're aware of sin, but there is a real movement in our world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, sometimes we falter and but ultimately we are good.
[SPEAKER_00]: We need to acknowledge that actually sin is evident, not just in our world, but in each one of us.
[SPEAKER_00]: As part of my sermon preparation, I will walk up and down the lane that I live on to practice and pay my sermon.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as I was heading out of our driveway with this sermon in mind, I noticed that our newspaper had been delivered.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I picked it up to put it on my later box to bring in to my husband once I had finished practicing because I'm an acts of service person.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'll take that in for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's in its plastic sleeve and all kind of sealed up, but all I had to do was look at the front page of our local newspaper and see evidence that sin is alive and well in our world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it almost distracted me from what I was doing because of what I was reading.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it reminded me that there is so much hurt and so much pain and so much evil that happens in our world by ordinary people like you and me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And our sin may not be broadcast on the front of a newspaper.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we know too well that so often we will think judgmental thoughts that we will be greedy, that we will be selfish, that we will be hateful, that we will do the wrong thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is evident in our world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I know a lot of people say, well, if God is so powerful,
[SPEAKER_00]: But the thing is, is that yes, our God is love.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yes, our God is light.
[SPEAKER_00]: And our God is so many great things that he is also a God of justice.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our God is just.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you imagine if in all the bad things if something was done to you?
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you imagine if God just went, I will just sweep that under the carpet?
[SPEAKER_00]: I will just turn a blind eye to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: How hurtful that is to the victim?
[SPEAKER_00]: How hurtful that is to the one that is feeling the pain and grief from those actions?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not a loving just God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our God is a God of justice and He hates sin.
[SPEAKER_00]: Therefore, He knows that our sins have consequences and the wrong requires a payment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, this as the writer of John was writing to the church at the time, saying, this is love, not that you loved God, but that he loved you and sent his son as an attorney sacrifice for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: They understood what that meant.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the Jewish people had been living under the mosaic law.
[SPEAKER_00]: Moses's law, which had been handed down from God through Moses, we couldn't read about it in our Old Testament, Leviticus, outlines a number of different sacrifices that people can do to a tone for their sin.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this was a regular thing that they would do.
[SPEAKER_00]: They would offer a sacrifice, usually a small animal or a grain sacrifice, whatever was required.
[SPEAKER_00]: They would bring that to the temple as a sacrifice to a tone for the wrong that they had done.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the Jewish tradition there's the Day of Atonement, young Pupyampuk Kapoor, which is the day that they offer a significant sacrifice for the whole, for the whole nation, for the whole community.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the high priest, only the high priest, was able to go into the holy of Holies into the special place in the temple where the Ark of the Covenant was placed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And on the top of the ark of the covenant called the mercy seat, they would sprinkle this blood of one of the animals that they had sacrificed.
[SPEAKER_00]: To attone for the wrong of the people.
[SPEAKER_00]: This understanding of needing a sacrifice to attone for their sins was something that was familiar to the Jewish people.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you know what, it was actually familiar to the Romans and the Gentiles as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: They all had gods or goddesses that they would worship and part of their worship was to go and sacrifice to these gods.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing is though, is that their sacrifice would be a way of appeasing the god or the way of offering something to their god or goddess in order for the god to do something for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They would offer a particular sacrifice in the hope that their God would see favor upon them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They hadn't been rain for a long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: They would offer their God sacrifices.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a way of saying, we are giving you this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you please send rains so that we can grow our crops and flourish?
[SPEAKER_00]: We are giving you this so therefore can you respond and give us something in return?
[SPEAKER_00]: So this verse and the understanding of God's love, that God initiated it first before we had anything to offer, turned the current culture on its head, that we wouldn't even have anything to offer, but that Jesus Christ came.
[SPEAKER_00]: as an attoning sacrifice.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not something that we had done, not any words, special words that we had spoken, not any incredible gifts that we had offered.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the God loved us first.
[SPEAKER_00]: So much so that the God of justice would sacrifice his one and only son.
[SPEAKER_00]: in order for us to be freed from our sin and have a close relationship without Heavenly Father.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you might be like, Linda, seriously.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's Christmas time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Peace, joy, love, present, food, like.
[SPEAKER_00]: We should be talking about all these happy things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why are we talking about sin and blood and sacrifice?
[SPEAKER_00]: You cannot have the cradle without the cross.
[SPEAKER_00]: We cannot fully understand this incredible gift of love that God gave to us through Jesus Christ without understanding it through the cross, through the sacrifice that Jesus made.
[SPEAKER_00]: And down did this perfectly with this image that he showed last week of Jesus,
[SPEAKER_00]: Not in swaddling cloths, but in burial cloths, laid in a tomb, as an artistic depiction that we cannot have the cradle without the cross.
[SPEAKER_00]: James Boyce, a theologian, says it this way, if God had merely sent Jesus to teach us about himself, that would have been wonderful enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: It would have been far more than we deserved.
[SPEAKER_00]: If God had sent Jesus simply to be our example, that would have been good too, and would have had some value.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the wonderful thing is that God did not stop with these, but rather sent His Son, not merely to teach or to be our example, but to die the death of a felon, that He might save us from sin.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the gift.
[SPEAKER_00]: that is love.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is a love that has been given to us before we even deserved it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Before we even had any opportunity to give anything back to God, God gave us everything through Jesus Christ, not just as an example, not just as incredible teaching,
[SPEAKER_00]: Not just as an example of how we should live and speak and interact in this world, but as an atoning sacrifice for you and for me, so that we can live our lives free from the burden of sin and in full acknowledgement of the love that God has for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: I heard this great analogy this week, and it's about a spacecraft.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is to help us understand what Jesus has done.
[SPEAKER_00]: When a spacecraft enters back into the Earth's atmosphere,
[SPEAKER_00]: It has to go at such a high speed that it creates so much heat around it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like 1,600 degrees Celsius.
[SPEAKER_00]: It creates this heat and therefore so much material cannot withstand that heat.
[SPEAKER_00]: My hair straightener heats up to just over 200 degrees and if I touch it, it really burns, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Now there are people in this craft.
[SPEAKER_00]: They need to be protected.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what the very clever rocket scientists and engineers do is they create a thermal protection system which is putting certain things on the spacecraft and their purpose as the spacecraft enters back into our atmosphere is literally to disintegrate.
[SPEAKER_00]: to burn up, to melt, to disintegrate, and as it melts, the vapor from those parts take the heat away from the spacecraft so that it can come through our atmosphere and land safely.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus Christ took the heat for you and for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: He suffered the most horrendous death so that you and I could live in the best possible way to experience the love of our Heavenly Father and to live a life where we could just ask for forgiveness and he has already forgiven our sins.
[SPEAKER_00]: What an incredible sacrifice that we have that we remember at Christmas time because that's when Jesus first entered into the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: but we cannot fully comprehend everything that he did without acknowledging the sacrifice that he made for you and for me on that cross.
[SPEAKER_00]: Matthew Henry commentary says it this way.
[SPEAKER_00]: None of our words or thoughts can do justice to the free astonishing love of a holy God towards sinners.
[SPEAKER_00]: In our humanity, we cannot profit or harm him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though he might justly crush us in a moment and we would deserve it.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, we would deserve God's vengeance through the worst punishment, and yet we didn't suffer that punishment.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were saved by it.
[SPEAKER_00]: God saved us, even though he could have by his almighty word, created other worlds with more perfect beings if he had seen fit.
[SPEAKER_00]: Search the whole universe for love, in its most glorious displays, it is to be found in the person and the cross of Christ.
[SPEAKER_00]: Does love exist between God and sinners?
[SPEAKER_00]: Here was the origin.
[SPEAKER_00]: not that we loved God, but that he freely loved us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if we can start to get an understanding of that incredible unconditional love,
[SPEAKER_00]: You're never going to fully comprehend it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our simple minds cannot possibly get our heads around this incredible love.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if we start to, and if we have it as the foundation of our lives, then it will truly change how you see yourself and how you see the people and the world around you.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we are given this such incredible love that we haven't earned, that we don't deserve, that we haven't done anything to accomplish, but we have got it fresh, new, every single day, more than we can ever comprehend.
[SPEAKER_00]: What does that mean for how we are to respond?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because there's nothing that we can give back to God, that he doesn't already need or doesn't already have.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's nothing that we can do for God that he's gonna make him love us more.
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't require that from us to give us this love.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when you have that love in you, you can't help but respond in return.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like the moon.
[SPEAKER_00]: The moon actually has nothing within its surface that gives off light.
[SPEAKER_00]: The only light we see from the moon at night when it's shining brightly in the sky, it is what a reflection of the sun.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the light that we get from the moon, a reflection from the sun.
[SPEAKER_00]: God knows that we cannot be Jesus Christ here on earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: God knows how fallen and how much we struggle.
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't ask us to be the Son.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if we can start to glimpse and understand the love that He has for us,
[SPEAKER_00]: Then we can be just like the moon and reflect his love back to others.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't have the capacity.
[SPEAKER_00]: Others are sometimes too hard to love for us to give love.
[SPEAKER_00]: But through the Holy Spirit we have in our lives, as God's love is given to us each and every day.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can reflect his love, his grace,
[SPEAKER_00]: His mercy back to the people that we are around.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an attoning sacrifice for our sins.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: and so powerful, and so mighty, it is too much for us to fully comprehend.
[SPEAKER_00]: But God, as we hear of your love, as we are reminded of that incredible gift of Jesus Christ to each one of us, the sacrifice that He made so that we can live in freedom under the grace of your love.
[SPEAKER_00]: When we start to comprehend that, when we start to have that as our foundation, each and every day, we can't help but give you praise and worship.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can't help but love others as you have loved us.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can't help but being different to the world around us by getting being generous, being forgiving and being loving.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not because anyone deserves it, or they have given us anything in return.
[SPEAKER_00]: But because of your great love for us, we can but return it to you by loving others around us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Holy Spirit, remind us of this incredible love of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Help us to remember each day.
[SPEAKER_00]: that while we are not perfect, while we are so fallen, while we have so little to offer, God loves you.
[SPEAKER_00]: He treasures you.
[SPEAKER_00]: He sees you as so wonderful and so perfect that he sacrificed his one and only son to show you his love, to be the sacrifice that we needed.
[SPEAKER_00]: in order that we can go out into this world and reflect his love to those around us.
[SPEAKER_00]: In all our business, in our Christmas season, help us Holy Spirit to keep coming back to that love, to be reminding others that that is the reason for the season, your love, your grace, your incredible sacrifice.
[SPEAKER_00]: so that we could live under that love in your freedom and in your grace.
[SPEAKER_00]: We thank you, thank you, thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: We pray these Jesus in your gracious name.
[SPEAKER_00]: Amen.