From a sermon preached at Calvary Church Pacific Palisades on December 24, 2023.
Merry Christmas! Thank you for joining us this Christmas Eve afternoon. You may not have noticed that we have a short Advent Season this year. Advent is a four-Sunday anticipatory journey leading up to the traditional Christmas Eve (or Day) Service. But this year the fourth Sunday of Advent IS today (Christmas Eve), so we are combining the fourth Sunday of Advent with Christmas Eve and this afternoon we will be considering Advent Love.
There is a very popular and free Bible app called YouVersion that has been downloaded more than 700 million times in the U.S. and around the world. In 2023 the longing for hope is reflected in a list of the top 10 verses that users searched for. The No. 1 verse for the third year running was, “So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God,” — Isaiah 41:10. Other popular searches included more familiar verses like, “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. And “For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.’” –Jeremiah 29:11
This is a verse that had a strong effect on me when I was 20 years old. I had an encounter with God a few months after reading this verse. A friend who became a Jesus follower gave me a used Bible. I took it home and sat it on the dining room table wondering where I should start, so I just opened the book and looked down and Jer 29:11 was highlighted, so I read it and thought, “Well, there’s two things I don’t have yet – a future and a hope. I should probably keep looking into this Christian thing…”
Hope, as most of you know, is a traditional Advent theme and one that we addressed three weeks ago in our Advent series, Good News, Great Joy. We have looked at the Advent themes of HOPE, PEACE, and JOY. By way of reminder, here’s a (very) succinct overview…
Advent HOPE is a life-shaping certainty that our ultimate future is found in the eternal love and glory of God. A holy and practiced HOPE can overwhelm whatever grief we may be experiencing.
Advent PEACE is not merely the absence of conflict or fear but an unshakeable confidence and trust in God’s wise and good control over our lives.
Advent JOY is delight and gladness in God and His salvation for the sheer beauty and worth of who God is. The counterfeit of JOY is mere happiness.
And for the next few minutes, we will be considering Advent Love.
Why these themes?
Because of the incarnation of Jesus, the Christ we now have an awakened HOPE that gives way to an abiding PEACE, which blossoms into a fragrant JOY that causes God’s sacrificial LOVE to flourish.
I have a non-traditional advent verse for us to consider today… “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” –1 John 3:1a (NIV) [notice the exclamation points…] Just a bit of context…John was the sole remaining survivor of the original 12 apostles who had intimate and eyewitness friendships with Jesus — and John is likely between 85-90 years old as he’s writing this letter.
John wrote the Gospel of John, and he also wrote first, second, and third John. The Gospel of John was written that we might believe. The Letters of John were written that we might know – as in having assurance. Assurance that the Christian faith is true. Assurance of our own salvation. Assurance of God’s love for us, which I’d like to focus on today.
I’d like to draw out two aspects of this verse as we consider God’s Advent LOVE…
- The FOCUS of God’s great love.
- John’s EXPERIENCE of God’s great love.
The FOCUS will be fairly familiar to many of us, but considering John’s EXPERIENCE may offer a fresh perspective for some of us. With that said, here’s the big idea for us to reflect on this Christmas Eve:
There is a difference between knowing ABOUT God and truly KNOWING God.
Let’s look at these two aspects one at a time…
- The FOCUS of God’s great love.
The first thing we need to notice in 1 John 3:1a is that “The Father has lavished great love upon us.” [I love that word lavish…]
The Greek word for great in this verse literally means “from what country?” If we were to contemporize the phrase it would mean that this love is “unworldly,” or, out of this world. (used 7x’s throughout the NT). This same word is used in Lk 1:29 when the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary and told her she was “favored, and the Lord was with her.” She was “pondering this ‘unworldly’ salutation.” This word is also used in Mat 8:27 when Jesus spoke and calmed the ragging sea and the disciples looked at each other in the boat and basically said, “Who is this guy?!?”
The Greek word for love in 1 Jn 3:1 is agape. Simply stated, AGAPE LOVE is a sacrificial serving that reaches out to people who don’t deserve it. (“For God so loved the world…”) C. S. Lewis wrote a book entitled The Four Loves in which he unpacks four different Greek words for love. Lewis uses the word charity to describe agape love. Lewis writes that charitable love allows us “to love what is not naturally loveable; lepers, criminals, enemies, morons, the sulky, the superior, and the sneering.”[1]
What does it mean that we are “called children of God”? It’s not just an expression, there is a theological order of salvation. First, there is an outward call that people hear with the ears of faith, which leads to regeneration where God sovereignly imparts spiritual life into the hearers, which leads to conversion where we confess our sin and selfishness and then willingly surrender to the call of God, which then leads to justification where we are instantaneously and legally forgiven of all of our sins, which then leads to our adoption wherein God makes us members of His family. And this adoption includes becoming “partakers of the divine nature” (1 Pet 1:3-4.) And with this gift of divine nature, we then begin the lifelong journey of sanctification (or transformation).
Think of God as Judge and Jury. He declares us “not guilty.” Then He gets up and comes around the bench, takes off His robe, and adopts you into His family. One theologian says that “God gives [us] His own life and love in adoption.”[2]
This is the kind of love you and I are invited into…Advent and celebrating Christmas gives us space to step back and reorient our lives to both receive God’s love as well as to share God’s love.
2. John’s EXPERIENCE of God’s great love.
The old KJV translates this verse as, “Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons [lit children] of God.” Most English translations do not do justice to the Greek rendition. In the NIV translation, at least have the exclamation points at the end of the first two sentences. A literal translation might be: “Look at the sort of love the Father has given us!” [3]
So, what’s happening here? As John is writing about assurance and thinking about what he’s about to write, he gets caught up in worship and adoration. And we, the readers, experience John experiencing God. Grammatically, these verses can be described as parenthetical, meaning they could have been or should have been placed in parenthesis.
This sort of outburst of spontaneous worship and exaltation happens (at least) two other times in the NT. Paul, in writing to the Ephesians in chapter 1:3-14 there is one run-on sentence of 202 words where we readers experience Paul experiencing God. And the same thing happens in Peter’s doxology in 1 Pet 1:3-9. In each instance, we experience each author experiencing God.
Here’s what’s happening…In 1 John 3:1-3, John goes from knowing to beholding. John goes from understanding to standing under – and he’s not just writing about it – he’s demonstrating it to us. It’s like the truth of Scripture becoming radioactive and gushing out of our head and traveling the 18 inches from our head to our heart and then flooding through our soul. Still, another way to think about this is like lightning striking a lightning rod and all of that energy coursing through the rod. Has that happened to you? Have you had an encounter with God where you experienced His love and delight?
This is what I want for every person in this room (or who watches this online). That, by God’s grace and mercy our knowledge ABOUT God would be converted to a personal and experiential knowledge OF God.
Think of a father dropping his son off to college and as the son walks his father to the car, the father stops and grabs his son kisses him, looks him in the eyes, and says: “I love you son and there is NOTHING I wouldn’t do for you to help you become the man that God has called you to be – including die for you.” And the son weeps. Why? It’s not new information. The son already knew his father loved him. But the information becomes new, and he experiences his father’s love in a new and profound way.[4]
When the truth about God, or the truth about our identity as a child of God becomes real to us – it flows out into every other part of our lives.
My longing to understand God’s love and grace exploded into a whole new reality when I realized that Hosea REALLY, REALLY, REALLY loved Gomer.
D.L. Moody a 19th-century American evangelist and pastor was walking up Wall Street in New York City…and amid the bustle and hurry of that city…the power of God fell upon him as he walked…and he had to hurry off to the house of a friend and ask that he might have a room by himself. In that room, he stayed alone for hours [as] the Holy Spirit moved upon him filling his soul with such joy that he had to ask God to withhold His hand, lest he die on the spot from…joy. [5] I want this for you and for me.
As we close and prepare to go on our merry way, I’d like to repeat a verse that I shared earlier. It’s one of the most searched verses from the YouVersion app… “For I know the plans that I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope.’” –Jeremiah 29:11
That’s a pretty encouraging verse, right? And then let’s look at Jeremiah 29:12-13… “Then you will call upon Me and come and pray to Me, and I will listen to you. 13 You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart.”
God has plans for you and me. And He is inviting us to come to Him and pray. Notice that He says that we will find Him (or experience Him) when we search for Him with ALL of our hearts.
It’s not that we need to be all heart all the time. But there is a wholeheartedness that God is looking and waiting for. Have you made your whole heart available to God?
What if your relationship to God is not based on your spiritual resume, but based on the spiritual resume of Jesus, who lived a life of perfect obedience because you and I couldn’t? What if you and I are radically loved because of what Jesus has done? The astonishing and life-changing message of Christmas is that God didn’t just declare his love; he demonstrated it. God didn’t just tell us what love is; He showed it to us, and God is willing and wanting to show up in our lives to reveal Himself and His love to us.
Our cultural symbol for love is a heart because the emphasis is on how we feel. But the Bible’s symbol for love is a cross—a demonstrated and sacrificial agape love that reaches out to people who don’t deserve it. My prayer for you, for me, and for Calvary Church this Christmas is that there would be a refreshed wholeheartedness that would position us for a fresh encounter with the living and loving God.
[1] The CS Lewis Signature Classics, Harper One 2017: 828.
[2] Kyle Strobel. Formed for the Glory of God, IVP 2013: 43.
[3] Colin Kruse. The Letters of John (Pillar New Testament Commentary Series). 1 John 3:1-3.
[4] Adapted from Tim Keller, which is adapted from Thomas Goodwin (1600-1680), an English Puritan theologian and preacher.
[5] R.A. Torrey. Why God Used D.L. Moody, 1923: 51-55.
Gregg Caruso 