[SPEAKER_00]: I want to give you a little hypothetical to imagine.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you were walking into a room that was full of strangers and on the way in the arm to the room, you're given one of these.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you were told that you had to introduce yourself on that name tag without using your name.
[SPEAKER_00]: What would you write on the tag to let people know who you are?
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe turn to the person next to you and just tell them the first thing that comes into your mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: What would you put on the name tag?
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, all right, that's enough, that's enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: So just a couple of people shout out what would you put on the name tag?
[SPEAKER_00]: What would you put, no one would put anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: Come on, Jolong, so you're a Jolong football supporter.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you live in Jolong, non-Jolong.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, non-Jolong, so that's like something that you are or something a character trait maybe, what else?
[SPEAKER_00]: Legend, yep.
[SPEAKER_00]: BADY, all right, well, I'm back that later.
[SPEAKER_00]: Come forward for prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't I I suspect that some of you struggled to come up with something there.
[SPEAKER_00]: You wanted to put more than a word, and that's totally fine.
[SPEAKER_00]: I suspect that some of you would have put perhaps your occupation or the thing that you do most, maybe student.
[SPEAKER_00]: maybe you would put something to do with your relationships.
[SPEAKER_00]: Single, married, friend, auntie, some.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or maybe you would put something about what you like to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gamer, tennis player, Carlton supporter.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or maybe if you're honest, you might put something about
[SPEAKER_00]: tired, hopeful, stressed, excited, bored.
[SPEAKER_00]: All these things could describe who you are.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we're going to open up a piece of scripture and in it the writer of this scripture puts forward a name.
[SPEAKER_00]: that he would put it on his name tag, and one that perhaps you would put on yours as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're starting our Advent series this week, and the theme this year is this is love.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the verses that we're going to be looking at over the next four weeks, come from a book of the Bible, first John, and the writer is John.
[SPEAKER_00]: I should introduce myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: My name is Darren.
[SPEAKER_00]: I put that on my name tag.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a minister here at one church.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a dad three teenage boys.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a husband.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm feeling slightly tired if I'm honest.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm also quite excited because I'm about to do my favorite thing and that is to open up God's word and to speak about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: and I'm really excited to be entering into this particular season, a love Christmas, and I love speaking about love, which is what we're talking about today.
[SPEAKER_00]: Last week, we finished our series on Romans 8.
[SPEAKER_00]: We did, I think, two months looking at one chapter of scripture.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we finished off Romans 8 by looking at
[SPEAKER_00]: love, which flows beautifully into what we're talking about tonight.
[SPEAKER_00]: At the end of Romans 8, Paul asks the question, can anything separate us from the love of God?
[SPEAKER_00]: Can anything separate us from the love of Christ Jesus?
[SPEAKER_00]: He says, shall trouble, shall hardship, shall persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, or the sword?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, in all these things we are more than conquerors, he writes, through him who loved us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then he says, he does this amazing declaration, for I am convinced that neither death or life, neither angels or demons, neither the present or the future nor any powers, neither height or death.
[SPEAKER_00]: nor anything else in all of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that's in Christ Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we finished off with this amazing truth being spoken to us last week and over the next four weeks we're going to unpack what that actual love is all about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Last week we heard that nothing will separate us from it but what is that love like?
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're going to do that by opening up first John, which is a mother letter written a few decades after Romans was written to a different group of Christians.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was written to a group of Christians in Asia Minor, which is modern day Turkey.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't know exactly where they were, perhaps, in the area of Ephesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And written by John.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, John was the same guy who wrote John the Gospel.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was one of Jesus' disciples.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it should be no surprise to us that John is talking about love.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if you read the Gospel of John, you see that John doesn't talk about himself by naming his name, John.
[SPEAKER_00]: He names himself all through the Gospel as
[SPEAKER_00]: that disciple Jesus loved, and so he, it should be no surprise to us that when we come to one of his letters, he talks a lot about love.
[SPEAKER_00]: First John, the first letter, has 105 verses in it, and he talks about love 51 times.
[SPEAKER_00]: So almost every second verse, he's talking about love.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some verses actually, it's like two or three times.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the passage we're gonna look at today comes from chapter four.
[SPEAKER_00]: And from verse 7, right through the verse 22, 21, he talks about love constantly.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the highest concentration of love references in first John.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to read it to young and read from the NIV version, but I encourage you if you've got your phone open and up, have a look at it in one of the other translations as well, because they're all slightly different, they all bring out different nuances.
[SPEAKER_00]: But before we do, I just want us to stop and I always get you to do this, just to stop and take a deep breath and be still for a moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we open up God's word, I am wanting to encourage you to open yourself up to the Holy Spirit.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a Jesus said, in Matthew, where two or three are gathered in my name, I will be there also.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am there.
[SPEAKER_00]: So just open yourself to him now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Holy Spirit, we just want to open ourselves to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus, we acknowledge that you are here because we're gathered in your name.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you're not just watching us.
[SPEAKER_00]: you're not just passively sitting there, you are working.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, as we read these incredible words, these ancient words, we use speak to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: We do something in us, work in us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, I'm gonna read from verse seven.
[SPEAKER_00]: And John starts off by using the NIV, it says, dear friends, but in some of the other versions, it says, beloved, beloved.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is one of his favorite terms.
[SPEAKER_00]: He actually uses it five or six times throughout this letter.
[SPEAKER_00]: So dear friends, beloved, let us love one another.
[SPEAKER_00]: For love comes from God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whoever does not love does not know God because God is love.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is how God showed His love among us.
[SPEAKER_00]: He sent His one and only son into the world that we might live through Him.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dear friends, since God so loved us, we ought to love one another.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one has ever seen God, but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I could read on further for the next ten or so verses he continues to talk about love.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the context of what he's talking about here is loving one another.
[SPEAKER_00]: He actually says it in these 15 or so verses three or four times, love one another.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he gives us an example of how to love one another and he grounds it in the source of love, God.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so over these series, we're going to talk about God's love.
[SPEAKER_00]: But as we talk about God's love, we need to keep in the back of our minds that he's talking about that as an example for us to follow, to love one another, the way God loves us, which is a pretty big ask when you think about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So God is love.
[SPEAKER_00]: Love is there in those words a lot and if we zoom out a little I'm going to put all the words from 7 to 21 on the screen You can't read it all it's too small, but there's all the different instances of the word love in that He used the word love 27 times and he uses the same word for love in all of those times He uses a garpee
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, Greek has a whole lot of different ways of giving the word love, and I think Jesse's going to talk about this in a couple of weeks when he preaches, so I won't spoil it, but he talks about a garpay love all throughout this, and a garpay love is a really interesting word, and Jesse will probably tell you about it even better than I will tonight, but it really means love in action.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's love that's not a feeling, it's an action.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's a big part of what John is talking about.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's encouraging us to love one another in action, not just in our feelings.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because that's the way that God loves us.
[SPEAKER_00]: The problem when we read a verse versus like this is that there's a number of problems.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first problem is that we only have one word for love.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Greek has a whole lot of different words for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we use the same word to describe all kinds of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the things I love is clinkers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyone else?
[SPEAKER_00]: Got a favorite color?
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, debate starts.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love cleankers.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love putting a cleanker into my mouth and letting the warmth of my mouth warm it up.
[SPEAKER_00]: and the chocolate starts to melt.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no chocolate like the clinker chocolate and it begins to melt and I have this way of eating clinkers.
[SPEAKER_00]: I like to get the chocolate off first and then I wait with anticipation for that moment, the teeth crunch through it and every time that happens, I think today the day my tooth will break.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that new sensation of a new taste comes in, I love clinkers, and I could quite easily demolish a family pack of clinkers all the time in one go.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love the Carlton Football Club.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know, I know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have fond memories of my first ever gamer football in 1979 that guy there on the screen is Bruce Dull, the flying dormant they used to call him and I remember distinctly going to wavily park out on the other side of our Melbourne for where I lived.
[SPEAKER_00]: I grew up in Estiden.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my first game was Asadan vs. Carlton went with all these Asadan fans and I remember seeing Bruce Dolan thinking, wow, that guy is amazing, I remember distinctly sitting at the top of the stand and looking through this cloud of smoke because people used to smoke at the football and there'd be this cloud of smoke and you couldn't even see the other side some days because the smoke was so thick.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember watching Bruce Dolan demolish Asadan.
[SPEAKER_00]: We won by 21 points, and I decided that day I was going to follow Carlton.
[SPEAKER_00]: I saw them win the premiership that year, they beat Collingwood.
[SPEAKER_00]: I saw three or four premierships in the 80s, and then the pain set in.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I love Carlton.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love writing with fountain pens.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love living in Australia.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love this church.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love my family, my three boys, my wife, I love them.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I use the same word to describe how I feel about clinkers as my family.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is one of the problems that we have when we come to a passage like this we think love.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another problem I think we have when it comes to passages like this God is love and thinking about God's love for us is that we are automatically think about our experiences of love.
[SPEAKER_00]: And our experiences of love are not like the way God loves.
[SPEAKER_00]: We tend to love things and people that are lovely.
[SPEAKER_00]: that are loveable.
[SPEAKER_00]: We tend to love things because we want to have them, like clinkers.
[SPEAKER_00]: We tend to love things and people that are deserving of our love.
[SPEAKER_00]: We tend to love things because of what they give to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's sort of like a transaction.
[SPEAKER_00]: You love me, I love you.
[SPEAKER_00]: We tend to associate love with our feelings.
[SPEAKER_00]: And our feelings come and go, don't they?
[SPEAKER_00]: Our love sometimes comes and go too, depending on our mood, whether we're feeling sentimental, our circumstances, it's easier to love it certain times than others.
[SPEAKER_00]: And sometimes we even talk about love as if it's out of our control.
[SPEAKER_00]: We fall into love.
[SPEAKER_00]: It happens to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we love in a certain way.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when we hear that God is love, sometimes we can kind of project those things on to God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another problem that sometimes we have, and I talk to someone this morning about this is that, sometimes we get hurt in love.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes we experience imperfect love.
[SPEAKER_00]: whether that be in our families, in romantic relationships, in friendships.
[SPEAKER_00]: I spoke to someone this morning who every time he hears God is love, he thinks of his broken love.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's painful for him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, when we come to a passage like this, it can be difficult to fully enter into it because we bring our experiences of love along with us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes we read a passage like this and it's just a nice concept or we feel sentimental about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes we read a passage like this and keep it at Lamb's length.
[SPEAKER_00]: When we hear that God is love and he loves us, we go, yeah, I don't feel that lovely or loveable.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we keep God at Lamb's length.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes we kind of hear God is love and he loves me and we go, yeah, that's great, but where's the catch?
[SPEAKER_00]: What's the condition?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because that's how we've been loved.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes we expect that love to disappear because of the way we behave, we don't feel we deserve it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we can read these verses with all kinds of baggage, I guess, is what I'm saying.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our definitions of love sometimes cloud out God's definition.
[SPEAKER_00]: So tonight I kind of want to acknowledge all that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I want to encourage us all just to put it aside for a moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: to wipe off the whiteboard of our definitions of love and just to put it aside for a moment because I think there's a better definition of love and it's God's definition.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think John really paints a great picture of what that love looks like.
[SPEAKER_00]: John doesn't ask us to look inside ourselves to find out what love is.
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't ask us to think about our experiences of love.
[SPEAKER_00]: He actually says, look at the source of love.
[SPEAKER_00]: Look at the source of love.
[SPEAKER_00]: In verse 8 we see that God is love.
[SPEAKER_00]: He makes this declaration.
[SPEAKER_00]: He says it again in verse 16 just a few verses later.
[SPEAKER_00]: So twice he says this God is love.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you know this is the only two times in the whole of scripture that these words appear?
[SPEAKER_00]: John is the only person who says God is love.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not inconsistent with the rest of Scripture.
[SPEAKER_00]: The rest of Scripture says it without using the words.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I find it really interesting that John comes up with these words.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because John is the disciple that Jesus loved.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what he says.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have this beautiful picture of John and Jesus at the last supper.
[SPEAKER_00]: where John leans up against Jesus and it says that he's head rested upon the breastbone of Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was leaning so close to Jesus, he would have been able to hear His heart beating.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they have this conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a beautiful tender picture of love, of a friendship.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if I'm fascinating that the disciple that was so close to Jesus that he could hear His heart beat is the one that came up with the idea of God is love.
[SPEAKER_00]: A beautiful picture.
[SPEAKER_00]: Notice that John doesn't say, God is loving, although God is loving.
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't say, God has love, although God has love.
[SPEAKER_00]: He says, God is love.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not just a description of God and what he's like.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a description of what he does.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's God's essence is love.
[SPEAKER_00]: John uses the exact same phrasing to describe two other things about God.
[SPEAKER_00]: In John chapter 4 verse 24 he says, God is Spirit describing the essence of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: God is Spirit.
[SPEAKER_00]: In first John verse chapter 1 verse 5 he says, God is Light.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in the same way that God is spirit and God is like God is love, it's at the heart of who he actually is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that if we really lean into this definition of love, it changes everything about reading this passage.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it changes everything about the Christmas story as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if God is love, then we don't get to decide what love looks like he does.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if we've cleared the whiteboard of our definitions of love, versus nine and ten, are where God picks up the whiteboard marker and draws us a beautiful picture of what love is actually like.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he doesn't draw a heart emoji, he doesn't draw a bouquet of flowers, he doesn't write about sentimental things or what he feels like.
[SPEAKER_00]: He draws something really tangible.
[SPEAKER_00]: He draws a mission.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the description that John writes about God's love.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is how God showed His love among us.
[SPEAKER_00]: He sent His one and only son into the world that we might leave through Him.
[SPEAKER_00]: When God wants to define love, He didn't write a dictionary definition of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He sent a person.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's so different to the way we love.
[SPEAKER_00]: God's love isn't a feeling.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or it's not just a feeling.
[SPEAKER_00]: God feels, and we see like in Zephania 317 at the scribes, God taking great delight in us.
[SPEAKER_00]: God singing over us, because he loves us so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's feelings.
[SPEAKER_00]: God does feel for you, but it doesn't just stop at a feeling.
[SPEAKER_00]: Verse 9 says, this is how God showed His love among us.
[SPEAKER_00]: The New King James Version says, in this, the love of God was manifested toward us.
[SPEAKER_00]: He showed it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The word there means to make something visible in the Greek.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is how God revealed His love for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's how He made it known to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: How did He make it known to us?
[SPEAKER_00]: He sent His Son.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we could translate this verse.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is how God's love shows up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or this is how God's love becomes invisible.
[SPEAKER_00]: He sent his son.
[SPEAKER_00]: This word sent is actually in verse 9 and in verse 10 as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a verb and it's an action.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's something that he actually did.
[SPEAKER_00]: The word in Greek is a apostello, which is where we get the word apostle.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Jesus was the first apostle, and it means not just to send, but it's to send someone on a mission with the authority of the sender.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Jesus was on a mission with the authority of God and He had a purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what that word means.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is how God's love becomes visible.
[SPEAKER_00]: He sent His Son on a mission.
[SPEAKER_00]: Love isn't love unless it does something.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you ever had a crush on someone, I think we probably all have it one time or another.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had a crush on a lady.
[SPEAKER_00]: I felt a twinge of something as I looked into her big blue eyes.
[SPEAKER_00]: She got my name wrong on the first time I met her, but I still something about her.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought a lot about her over the next week.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that was just a crush, it wasn't love.
[SPEAKER_00]: It didn't become love until I did something about my feelings, until I took action.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we went on a date, and we had conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I summoned the courage to say, hey, kind of like you, I'll get a crush on you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as I took action, and as she took action in response, that's where love happens.
[SPEAKER_00]: God doesn't have a crush on you.
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't, he doesn't just have feelings towards you.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did something, he took action.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't just put words to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It actually did something.
[SPEAKER_00]: He took it out of the realm of crush and feelings.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he did it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He did something.
[SPEAKER_00]: He sent his son.
[SPEAKER_00]: God's love is more than a feeling.
[SPEAKER_00]: Number two thing that's different about God's love is that it's not transactional, it's not give and take.
[SPEAKER_00]: We often love things because they give us something back.
[SPEAKER_00]: These verses cut that off at the knees.
[SPEAKER_00]: God doesn't love us like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't love us because we love Him.
[SPEAKER_00]: The verses say that he loved us first.
[SPEAKER_00]: He loved us before we did anything.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't love us because we were lovable.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't love us because we behave a certain way because we're perfect, we're not, I'm not.
[SPEAKER_00]: He loved us anyway.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't love us because we followed the rules.
[SPEAKER_00]: He loved us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not as we should be as we are.
[SPEAKER_00]: The guy I love the rating of, his name is Brennan Manning and he's written a number of books
[SPEAKER_00]: He wrote this, do you really believe that Jesus Christ loves you?
[SPEAKER_00]: Not the person next to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: He does.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not the church, he does.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: He does, but he that he loves you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Beyond your worthiness and that and worthiness.
[SPEAKER_00]: Beyond your fidelity.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Audio.
[SPEAKER_00]: Beyond your fidelity, or your infidelity, that He loves you in the morning and in the evening rain, without caution, without regret, without boundary, without limit.
[SPEAKER_00]: No matter what's gone down, he can't stop loving you.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the Jesus of the Gospel.
[SPEAKER_00]: He loves you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tim Keller puts it this way, God doesn't love you because you're serviceable.
[SPEAKER_00]: He loves you simply because he loves you.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the only kind of love that we can ever be securing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, it's the only kind of love we can't possibly lose.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is grace.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is God's love.
[SPEAKER_00]: He loves us even when we don't ask for the love.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the third thing that's different about God's love is that he doesn't hold back.
[SPEAKER_00]: We tend to hold back in our love.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if you've ever had that moment where you don't know if you should tell the person if you love them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because we don't know whether they're going to say it back.
[SPEAKER_00]: We kind of hold back.
[SPEAKER_00]: We worry about how we will look when we say those types of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're worried about being hurt, particularly if we've been hurt before.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're often guarded with our love.
[SPEAKER_00]: We kind of are hesitant about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't want the pain that sometimes might come, but this isn't how God loves.
[SPEAKER_00]: He literally ran straight into the pain.
[SPEAKER_00]: Brennan Manning the guy I quoted earlier, he says that God's love is ferocious, and he talks about how, when you see a lion going after it's prey, it's ferocious, it's got eyes only for the prey.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now God doesn't want to tell you a park like prey, but he goes after you in that same sort of way.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's love for you is ferocious, it's single-minded.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, first John chapter 3 verse 16 says this, this is how we know what love is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus Christ laid down His life for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not guarded.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not hesitant.
[SPEAKER_00]: He laid down His life for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's nothing safe about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: He ran directly into the pain.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is gritty.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is costly for him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He saw something broken in the world, us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, I will do everything to fix it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will give everything to fix it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Real love isn't, I love you because you make me happy.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's, I see your brokenness.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm willing to sacrifice to fix it, to heal it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Verse 9 says, He sent He's one and only son.
[SPEAKER_00]: We kind of hear that and kind of gloss over it, I think.
[SPEAKER_00]: But as a Greek word there that has some really interesting kind of layers to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It means that Jesus, His son, was unique, one of a kind.
[SPEAKER_00]: The languages are only used in the Bible to describe Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was one of a kind, and it also has a layer to it that it means that God actually gave something of himself to it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So God gave something one of a kind unique and something of himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: He sent,
[SPEAKER_00]: one of a kind, something of himself to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: He put everything on the line.
[SPEAKER_00]: He held nothing back and he did it for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he did it for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when we allow that to really sink in and to realize that the God of the universe who created everything, actually felt that for you and did that for you, it changes so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: It changes what we think about him, but actually changes something in us as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Notice how John talks to the people in this letter.
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember what I said at the start, and the NRV says dear friends, but in a lot of the other versions, it says beloved.
[SPEAKER_00]: This word beloved is a really powerful word.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't think it's a cute, kind of little word of greeting that John just says off the cuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think he's thought about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is how he addresses the people he's writing to.
[SPEAKER_00]: He uses it over and over again in 1st John.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's actually the same word that God called Jesus when Jesus was baptized.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mark 1 verse 11, the heavens opened up and the Father said, you are my son.
[SPEAKER_00]: whom I love, my beloved.
[SPEAKER_00]: It actually says, the beloved.
[SPEAKER_00]: So God called Jesus beloved, and it's actually the family name of all who follow Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all of our names.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the name that John puts on your name tag, beloved.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll find it again fascinating that John, the disciple Jesus loved, that's how he called himself, actually gives us the name beloved.
[SPEAKER_00]: For a long time, I used to read that little tag, John, the disciple Jesus loved as a kind of a bit arrogant.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have a thought about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: John keeps calling him so it does it like seven or eight times in the Gospel of John.
[SPEAKER_00]: The disciple Jesus loved.
[SPEAKER_00]: Was he kind of lording it over the other disciples a little bit there where he kept saying it?
[SPEAKER_00]: I used to think, yeah, it's a bit arrogant, John.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a bit of a humble brag.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I actually don't think it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: The more I thought about it, the more I realized that John was an arrogant.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was, I think, astonished.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, John, he was a fisherman, just a humble teenage fisherman when he met Jesus, working class guy.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the one who's described as the son of thunder, which kind of means he had a bad temper.
[SPEAKER_00]: John wasn't the perfect one.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't always act the right way.
[SPEAKER_00]: He didn't have a good temper.
[SPEAKER_00]: John was one of the ones who fell asleep in the garden of death so many.
[SPEAKER_00]: He ran away when Jesus was arrested.
[SPEAKER_00]: John had failings, and yet he didn't see himself as any of those things.
[SPEAKER_00]: He saw himself as a beloved one, that the disciple Jesus loved.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus loved for him was how he identified himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: We tend to define ourselves by all kinds of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: We define ourselves by what we do,
[SPEAKER_00]: by our jobs, by our careers, by our relationships.
[SPEAKER_00]: We define ourselves by our achievements, and sometimes by our failures.
[SPEAKER_00]: We define ourselves by our strengths, sometimes internally by our weaknesses.
[SPEAKER_00]: We define ourselves by all kinds of things.
[SPEAKER_00]: But John wants us to define ourselves to name ourselves beloved.
[SPEAKER_00]: Brennan Manning puts it this way and I think this is an invitation for all of us today.
[SPEAKER_00]: Define yourself radically as one beloved, by God.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the true self.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every other identity is an illusion.
[SPEAKER_00]: The more I've thought about the gospel, this is what it keeps coming back to for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: We need to define ourselves this way as beloved.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wake up every morning this week, and remind yourself you are beloved.
[SPEAKER_00]: It will change the way you live your life when you really live into this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not just a quick fish, so this is a lifetime of learning.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we need to continually remind ourselves of all throughout our lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is why I think Paul and Ephesians praise this prayer for the Ephesians.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he praise this prayer, which I think is a really great prayer for us to pray as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: He says, I pray that you being rooted and established in God's love in love may have the power together with all the Lord's holy people to really grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.
[SPEAKER_00]: and to know that love, that surpasses knowledge, which is a bit of an oxymoron if you think about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's saying, I'm praying that you will know something that you can't really know.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is something we're gonna continue to wrestle with throughout life, that you may be filled with the measure of all the fullness of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is his prayer for the Ephesians and this I think is a great prayer for us to pray for one another and for ourselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: God, we teach me to understand what it really means that you love me because if you understand God's love for you, it changes everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think this is what we need to take into Christmas this year.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because so often, we kind of define Christmas's tints all and beautiful lights on trees.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when we bring God into it, it's a cute baby and a manger.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's sentimental stuff so often.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Christmas is so much more than that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a hallmark card or a sentimental season.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a rescue mission.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's Jesus sending He's one and only son into the world for you, and I think it's really such a powerful thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to finish with this.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are some really early nativity scenes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if you've noticed the really old nativity scenes.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's something that is in all of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: that we kind of gloss over, we don't really see to often, because we have this sanitized view of the nativity scene.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when you look at the way these paintings are painted, look at Jesus in them, look at the manger he's lying in, the early church, they painted pictures of Christmas with Jesus in a coffin.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus is in a coffin and he's wrapped in burial clothes in these pictures.
[SPEAKER_00]: The early church didn't make a sentimental kind of picture of the nativity.
[SPEAKER_00]: They did not want to separate the cradle from the cross.
[SPEAKER_00]: They believed that he came to die.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's pretty confronting to think about it this way.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't put this on our Christmas cards.
[SPEAKER_00]: But this is Christmas, God sending His Son to die as an attoning sacrifice as we see in verse 10.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so this year I want to encourage you every time you see an activity scene to look a little deeper and to see it for what it truly is.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is a rescue mission.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is love in action.
[SPEAKER_00]: The invitation is to see the manger as proof that God's love is more than a feeling.
[SPEAKER_00]: The manger is proof that God's love isn't transactional, he's not looking for anything back.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not dependent on you.
[SPEAKER_00]: The manger is proof that God doesn't hold anything back.
[SPEAKER_00]: in how he loves you.
[SPEAKER_00]: The invitation is to look at the manger and to look at it with astonishment, not sentimentalism, to look at the gift that he sent into the world born to die so that we might live and
[SPEAKER_00]: And that leads us to what we're going to do next.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have our community and experience tonight.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so, community is this exact thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's symbols of the rescue mission.
[SPEAKER_00]: We take bread and cup, bread and juice, bread and wine, and the evidence of the sacrifice that he made.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bread reminds us of the body that was born into a manger,
[SPEAKER_00]: and that was ultimately broken for you and for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: The cup reminds us of the blood that was poured out to close the distance between God and you and me.
[SPEAKER_00]: That you might experience life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so tonight, we're gonna encourage you to come forward if you'd like, and to take these elements and to remember him.
[SPEAKER_00]: But also to remember that you are beloved.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are symbols of your belovedness, as well as remembering him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's pray together.
[SPEAKER_00]: Heavenly Father, we come before you tonight,
[SPEAKER_00]: And we thank you for these incredible words.
[SPEAKER_00]: So often we shortchange these words.
[SPEAKER_00]: We look at our definitions of love, which are way too small.
[SPEAKER_00]: And tonight we want to acknowledge that your love is so much more than feelings, it's action.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not transactional, it's given freely to us even when we don't even acknowledge that we need it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you didn't hold back, you hold button, nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: God, I pray tonight that you would help us to understand your love for us more.
[SPEAKER_00]: Help us to understand how wide your love is for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why didn't have to embrace us no matter how far we've drifted from you, no matter what we've done, your love is so long.
[SPEAKER_00]: long enough to last from eternity past to eternity future.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your love is so deep, deep enough to reach into our lowest moments, despair and pain and hopelessness and insecurity.
[SPEAKER_00]: And your love is so high, high enough to scale the walls of our pride
[SPEAKER_00]: I ought to pray tonight as we take these symbols of that love that you would just break through a little bit more and help us to understand it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Help us to know it a little more.
[SPEAKER_00]: God, we take this bread and we take this cup and we thank you for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We taste the evidence of your love tonight.
[SPEAKER_00]: We receive it as the rescue mission that it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: and we receive the name Beloved in Jesus' name we pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: Amen.
[SPEAKER_00]: When in courage you can come forward and take the bread and the juice in your own time, this is open to anyone who would like to remember Jesus and to remember that they are beloved tonight.
[SPEAKER_00]: Please come forward in your own time.