I John 4:10 & John 3:16 December 07, 2016 A+D
Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our Father, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
+ Amen +
Our text this evening comes from both St. John’s Gospel, and his first Epistle:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” John 3:16 NASB and “In this is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” I John 4:10 NASB.
This is our text.
A man once planned a date night with his wife. It’s a date they had to plan for some time, waiting for a hole in their calendars just to find a free evening together. She’s been working long non-stop weeks and now finally they find a precious hour together. He wants to show her that none of that matters, that he loves her, and what matters is this moment. He has executed a perfectly orchestrated plan of choosing, wrapping and presenting the perfect gift. It cost him dearly. He sacrificed a great deal to buy the present and execute this plan. He knew this gift would make his love for her abundantly clear. The husband pulls a box out of his coat pocket and slides it across the table to his wife. The beloved bride looks at it quietly. Tentatively, she picks it up, slowly tears off the paper in anticipation, opens the gift, and sits momentarily stunned, eyes wide in shock, then watery with tears. For a moment, it is as if time stops. No words need to be exchanged in this brief instant. His eyes tear up as well, and the charge in the air is almost electric. She regains her composure and asks, “What is this for?” He replies, “It’s just because I love you.”
She is completely taken aback. Frozen. Her lip trembles, a tear rolls down her cheek. She stands up. All heads turn their way. She throws the gift to the ground and says “I’ve been seeing someone else, all this time!” and storms out of the restaurant...
What is he to do? Imagine what must be running through his mind right now. The pain. The sorrow. Should he wash his hands of the whole thing, and be done with her? Move out of the house? File for divorce? Never speak to her again?… Make her pay for what she has done to him by making her life miserable? What does she deserve? What she has done is inexcusable. It is unforgivable. Sorrow and pain turn to anger and wrath. Yes, she will pay for what she has done.
Sounds like a bad romance novel, doesn’t it? Can such a scene actually play out like this? Yes it does – every day. It’s playing out right now!
You are the bride! God the Father is the husband, and it is He that orchestrated this special moment with His bride, the Church. And the gift did indeed cost Him dearly. You see the gift is Jesus. So great, so incomprehensible was His love for His creation, that He had His plan of Salvation perfectly chosen, orchestrated, and gift-wrapped in the form of a human baby; pure, innocent and fragile; swaddled and laid in a manger. That gift was presented to us in perfection. The Son of God who by speaking created the world is now inextricably intertwined in the body of a man like us with all his divinity within, brought low that he might redeem his creation. The perfect God-man was presented to us on a cross, unwrapped before the whole world in Jesus’ humiliation, suffering, and death on our behalf. The perfect sacrifice, given at the highest cost, in love, as a free gift for all.
Hear again the richness and depth of this simple verse of scripture as it tells us about this gift: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”1 Here, in one verse, we have the entire message of the Gospel so eloquently and lucidly put that if we had no other Scripture one could be saved simply by believing it.2 Martin Luther said these words flow like milk and honey, “words which can make the sorrowful cheerful and the dead alive, if only the heart firmly believes them.”3 And like the ever-faithful Husband that He is, He continues to offer this free gift to us in perfect love, even when we, in our sin, reject it. We don’t know what love is, in our state of unfaithfulness.
Jesus taught His Father’s will like this: “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as your self.’”4 We cannot truly love God without help. In our fallen condition, truth is lost to us. Love is a foreign concept, other than love of self. In our selfishness, in our sin, we lose sight of the great gifts of God, and we reject them like the wife in our story. When we put other things before God, we throw this precious gift to the ground. We throw the gift of love to the ground when we think it’s OK to sleep in on Sunday morning and skip church. We reject the gift when we put ourselves ahead of our families and neighbors. We stomp on the gift when we put the worship of all our stuff ahead of God’s will. And we fail to realize that the gift is to be shared. Like the miracle of the five loaves of bread and two fish5 there is enough for everyone to be satisfied.
So what is God to do with His wayward Bride? John writes in our epistle this evening, “In this is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins”.6 This then, is how we are shown how to love: by example. The greatest example of all. From the beginning, when man first fell away from grace into sin, God promised to send a Redeemer. You see, propitiation means a perfect substitute. Jesus bore the full wrath of the Father toward his Bride. She deserved destruction for what she had done. And Jesus took it, undeservedly, willingly, for you. God’s love was so great that He sent His Son to become like us, walk the Earth like us, grow in body and soul like us – but He did it perfectly because we cannot. He showed us what love is by His teaching and His actions, and His death on the cross. In the greatest gift of love, He even conquered death for us. We didn’t do anything to deserve this gift. What we deserved was exactly the opposite: eternal damnation. He did it just because He loves us, and it was perfect. In spite of our unfaithfulness, God puts His gifts of forgiveness and mercy in front of you every day.
So often today, we try to make God’s Word relatable to us, instead of letting the Word recreate us. God in His wisdom shows us how His gift of love is relevant today, relates to you today and is receivable by you each and every day. Jesus truly is the gift that keeps on giving. That is no cliché – it is literally Gospel Truth. In the gift of baptism, He makes us His children because He loves us, and wants us to be His own. In the Lord’s Holy Supper, we receive the gifts of renewal and forgiveness of our sins, just because He loves us and knows we will stray like the children we are. Therefore He strengthens and nourishes us with the medicine we need to fight the temptations of the world, the power of the devil, and our own sinful nature. And as our Father, he forgives when his children stumble.
Every day, you wander. Every day you throw the precious gift our Father in heaven has given us to the ground. But your story doesn’t have to end like a bad soap opera. It doesn’t have to end in tears or terror, bitterness or sorrow. No, not at all. Even when, like the bride in our story, you throw the gift of love to the ground because you think you cannot possibly be worthy of God’s mercy, and the gift cannot possibly be for you. Because every day your loving Father picks up that gift and puts it in your hands again. When the bride stumbles and fumbles, He welcomes her back from her wandering with arms open wide and wraps her in His forgiveness. No matter where she turns, there the gift lays before her, to be picked up and opened again and again, as often as needed. And we will need it often. Daily. Constantly. For all our days. Through His gift of love, Jesus prepares His Bride the Church to join him in eternal life in heaven, all debts paid. Sins forgiven and forgotten. The wedding feast goes on forever, and the honeymoon is never, ever, over!
Yet there is still more! As we receive these gifts, a change begins in us. Because of this great love He has shown us, we now can begin to understand what it really means to love, and as the Word and the Sacraments recreate us - we can now return that love. We now may not only love God in response to His great love for us but begin to love our neighbor. The spark of fire kindled in us by the Holy Spirit becomes visible to those around us in our own words and deeds. It spreads hope, peace, and life. It is not our doing, but the natural consequence of God’s great love for us. “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” as St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians.7 And in our love for God and neighbor, we become a further instrument of God’s love, so that all mankind might come to know Jesus and the awesome, undeserved love He has for us. God is love, and because he loved us and redeemed us; because He gives us His Holy Spirit so that we can now believe in Him and love Him in return, we can let the whole world know that they have a Savior and that He loves them, too.
+ Amen +
And now may the peace which surpasses all human understanding keep your hearts and your minds focused on Christ Jesus, the perfect Gift of Love, for you!
+ Amen +
1John 3:16 NASB.
2Lenski, R.C.H., Interpretation of John. Special edition reprint, Hendrickson, 2001. p.258.
3LW LXXVII, p..365.
4Mathew 22:37-39 NASB.
5Luke 9:10-17.
6I John 4:10 NASB.
7I Corinthians 13:13 NASB.