Children of God

Rev. William “Buck” Day

The great Broadway star, Mary Martin, received a note just before she was about to go on stage one night.  It was a note from Oscar Hammerstein.  The note said, “Mary, a bell is not a bell until I it is rung and a song is not a song until it is sung.  Love is not love until it is given away.”  That is a great prelude to what we are going to be talking about today.  It helps us, I think, begin to understand God’s love for you and for me because God’s love originated with God.  It originated in and of Him.  It is not something that originated in us.  It is not something that originated in this world as much as the world would like to have you believe that.  But it started with God and, in that, then God gave it away. He gave it away to all His creations.  Without that act of giving it away, the world would not know love.  God’s love is an action.  It is something that happens.  It is not a sentiment; it is not a feeling.  It is an act that we can point to.  This action of God’s love comes to us in the form of a story among other things.  It comes in a story of God creating, God creating a place for his creation out of His love; and God then seeking to redeem His creation when we thought we had our act together and went our own way and turned our back on Him.  In the course of this story, God’s love comes to a pinnacle in the person of Jesus Christ, when God sends His Son, Jesus, to die so that we might be spared what we deserve:  God’s judgment.   God’s love is an act.  It is an ongoing act.  It is done by the Creator on behalf of the created, us.  As a result God will love us.  There is nothing we can do to change that.  We can’t make that go away.  We can’t do anything to revoke God’s love that He has for you and for me.  He loved us before we loved Him; and yet, despite the truth of that statement, the sad reality is that for many of us, we do not experience God’s love in our lives.  For some people it is just simply too much of an intellectual or perhaps a philosophical leap to acknowledge that God could or that God would love us.  For others, we are broken, because we live in a broken world; we are damaged by this world.  We are damaged to the point that it is hard, and for us perhaps impossible, to receive love from anyone, let alone from God.   Yet there are others of us who I think understand and can acknowledge God’s love but we probably haven’t experienced it on any kind of a deep meaningful level. So no matter where you are today, I want you to know my prayer for you, my one desire for you today, is that you would be able to embrace God’s love in a new way.  God has poured out His love for us and He continues to pour out His love in new and significant ways.  I believe, more than anything else, God wants us to know and experience that love.  For when we experience that love from God, we are, in fact, experiencing Him.  When we experience God, our lives will never be the same as a result of that.  So I want you to join me in praying to that end.  Let’s pray.

Oh Lord God, Thank you that your desire is to love us and you do that with an unending love.  Lord I cry out for all of us, on behalf of all of us, because we all need your love more.  I pray Lord that by the power of your Spirit that we would be able to experience your love on a deeper level so that we could be changed as a result of that love.  Lord that is the cry of our heart this morning.  We lift it up to you.  Thank you that you hear.  Amen.

Well, we are continuing our sermon series on How God Meets the Deepest Desires of our Hearts and today, if you haven’t already guessed, we are talking about Love.  We are going to be looking at our scripture from 1 John, 1 John 4:7-12; and as a way to participate, let’s all read it together.  Let’s read God’s word.

Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God.  Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.  This is how God showed his love among us:  He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.  This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.  Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.  No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

The word of God for us this day.

You know it’s interesting, you probably heard my sigh, it looks different from what I saw and I went “uhhh”.  So don’t worry about me, it’s just a little different.

So we’re going to talk about God’s love and what I want to do is I want to take a two-pronged approach in this today.  The first approach I want to take is to take a look at how Christ experienced God’s love when he was on earth and then turn it around and say, “How can we experience love on earth for ourselves”.  So to do that, let’s start with Christ when he was on earth.  Christ embraced God’s love when he was on earth.  There was lots of ways that He embraced it and one of the ways he embraced it was through intimacy.  While Christ was on earth he was in constant communion with the Father; but that was really a continuation of his experience before he came to earth, because he is part of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  As such, they have unity and community together in the Triune Godhead.  They are in constant communication.  That is one of the great things about the Trinity; and, in the process of that, Jesus intimately knows the Father and the Father intimately knows Jesus.  There is unbroken fellowship, continuous communication and common purpose through the Godhead; and yet, when Christ came to earth from heaven that continued, that was a continuation and as a result Jesus was always seeking the Father’s input as he walked through the earth.  We see how he prayed in the morning and how he looked to heaven and he was kind of in that zone all the time when he was walking.  There was an intimacy of the relationship between the Father and the Son.  As a result of that, Jesus fully experienced God’s love in that process.  So he embraced God’s love through intimacy.

He also embraced God’s love through passion.  While Jesus was on earth, he was completely focused on his purpose for being on earth.  Everything he did revolved around that purpose, which was to live so that he could die, so that you and I could live.  He said, “My will is to do the will of the Father,” so everything he did, he wanted to do what the Father wanted him to do not what he wanted to do.  We know where that took him, don’t we?  It took him to the cross to die so that we could live forever and that is what this table celebrates.  So Jesus embraced God’s love through passion.

He also embraced God’s love through obedience.  Everything that Jesus did was what the Father wanted him to do.  He steadfastly lived out the law.  He said, “I didn’t come to abolish the law but to fulfill it.”  In the fulfilling of that law, he shows us what true holiness looks like, while not succumbing to the legalism of so many of the others around him.  Even in the midst of his walk on earth, he was obedient, even when he faced the cross, even when he didn’t want to face the cross.  “Lord, let this cup pass from me.”  But then what’s the next line? “Not my will be done, but yours.”

Christ fully embraces the love of the Father through intimacy, through passion, and through obedience.  God’s love comes to full flower in Jesus when he is on earth.  What about us?  Can we experience that same kind of love that Jesus experienced with the Father?  I think the answer is an emphatic, “Yes!” to that question.  We can experience that same kind of love when we do these things.  When we embrace intimacy and passion and obedience, for when we do that, I believe we will experience God’s love in powerful ways.  But before we get to that, I want us to all understand the starting point where we start in this process.  Jesus was called the Son of God.  He was part of God’s family.  One of my favorite verses in all of scripture is this one right here; it is 1 John 3:1.  It says, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God!  And that is what we are!”  We too are a part of God’s family as a follower of Jesus Christ.  We are called children of the Father.  Then John reinforces that by saying, “And that’s what you are!  It’s not an option.  It’s not a may be.  It’s not a could be.  It is.  It’s a reality.  You are a child of God.  There is nothing you can do to change that.”  I hope that’s good news.  We are children of God and God has given us all the love that we need.  No matter where we are in regards to that love, we are a part of God’s family with all the rights and all the privileges of any family member, including Christ.  So if Jesus as the Son can experience God’s love in the way we’ve talked about, then you and I as members of that same family can experience that love as well.  That made a powerful impact on my life as I let that settle in on my soul.  For the love that Christ experienced on earth is available for you and for me in our lives.

So let’s go back to those ways that Jesus embraced God’s love and ask ourselves how do we do that? Remember the first one we talked about was that Jesus embraced God’s love through intimacy.  How do we grow in intimacy with God?  How do we do that?  Jesus was constantly communicating with God.  Can we have that same kind of intimacy, that same kind of continuous communication?  God speaks to us through His word.  That’s one of the avenues that we can communicate with God.  So reading scripture, studying scripture is important.  The Holy Spirit is inside of us.  The third person of the Trinity, the Spirit of the risen God, resides within each one of us.  It says the Spirit intercedes for us when we don’t know how to pray.  The Spirit guides us, the Spirit molds us, the Spirit leads us.  All of that is talking about intimacy, building that intimacy with God.  Prayer is an avenue, that two-way communication.  You know, it’s just as important to listen, to ask God, “God what do you want to say to me?”, as it is for us to go with our checklists of prayer requests.  In my life as I have spent time listening to God, in that process, God has spoken words of love into my heart, things that I needed to hear for my soul and my heart; and lots of times it would come in the form of a verse, like 1 John 3:1.  I would go, “Thank you Lord, thank you.”  Other times it would come as a word or a phrase that was right what I needed to hear.  Other times God would give me a mental picture that when I first would get it, I would scratch my head and go “Huh, what does this mean God?”  In the process of letting that settle over me, God begins to bring me understanding of that picture, brings me clarity.  Honestly, to listen takes times of silence.  In that silence you have to sit there for a while, you have to settle into that time, before God will begin to show us anything.  It is hard to be quiet.  It is hard to just settle down and be still before God.  To be at a point where you are ready to receive because we are all, we have things to do, we have people to see, we have phone calls to make.  But we need to settle down.  I think as we take that time, and I’m talking taking more than just thirty seconds of quiet, it takes some time to just be quiet; and as we do that God will honor that persistence and He will speak to us.  So those are some of the ways we can cultivate intimacy. 

There are other ways to cultivate intimacy with God.  How about reading spiritual books?  That could help us grow in our intimacy with God.  Seeking to be aware of God’s presence as we walk through our day, as you walk into a grocery store and meet someone you haven’t seen for a while, you can say “Thank you Lord for bringing that person.  It was great to see them again.”  Or there is another thing you can do called personal worship where you take time to do what we’re doing here but you do it on your own, maybe it is singing, listening to worship music, and praying the scriptures back to God, personal worship.  There is another aspect I think too of this cultivating this intimacy and it’s called communal intimacy.  It’s what we do here on Sundays and throughout the week.  It is gathering with other followers of Christ, being together with Christ, that’s called the church, isn’t it?  All Right!  It is in the church, it is in that community, that we can experience God’s love through other believers.  That’s one of the values of why we gather as the church.  You know, we’re getting ready for summer, we’re getting ready to scatter; but you know what, there is value in being together because God’s love is shared through us to each other.  So how’s your intimacy?  You need more time for silence?  Do you need more connections to the church?  I invite you to ask God what you need because He’ll show you because He loves you.  He loves you.  He’ll show you.  Just ask. 

So we can experience God’s love as we embrace it in intimacy.  We can also experience it as we embrace it in passion.  We said that Jesus knew his purpose.  He lived to fulfill that purpose.  He said, “I came not to be served but to serve and give my life as a ransom for many.”  His heart was to serve.  Why, because that was the Father’s heart.  The Father’s heart is to serve.  The Father’s heart is love.  The Father’s heart has not changed.  The Father’s love has not changed.  So that when we serve we are reflecting the Father’s heart; and, in the process of reflecting the heart, we become a conduit for God’s love.  God’s love comes in and then goes out.  That’s why it is critical for all of us to be serving somewhere in the body of Christ.  There are lots of different ways to serve.  Even as we maybe don’t get around as well as we used to, there are still plenty of ways to serve.  When we think of this service, we always think of it as us loving others, letting God’s love come through us to others; but there is another aspect to that, that we forget about lots of times.  It is we receive God’s love in the process of serving.  We receive it directly from God, but I think we also receive it indirectly from God through other people as we serve them.  I haven’t asked, but I would guess everyone who was down in Mississippi that served at Katrina’s Kitchen this last winter got as much love back as they gave.  That was God’s love.  That was God’s love coming through those folks that they were serving back to the servers.  So when we serve, we can experience God’s love as we serve.  That shouldn’t be our primary motivation, but it is one of the benefits of serving.  So how’s your serving?  As you are serving, are you receiving love?  If you’re not, I invite you to check your attitude, check your motivation.   Why are you doing it?  Because both of those can block God’s love that He wants to give you.

Finally, we can embrace God’s love through obedience.  Obedience is a lot like service in that it can block God’s love.  When our motivation and our attitude is a little suspect, when we seek to be obedient because we believe that’s the only way God is going to accept us, that will block God’s love coming to us.   Or if we believe that somehow that we’ll get a special in with God if we are obedient, that also can be a disconnect for God’s love coming into our lives.  But when we seek to live lives that please God, He promises that He will love us.  So obedience is this road to God’s love.  So once again it’s heart check time.  How’s your obedience? What I mean by that is, are you living a holy life?  What does that look like?  Well let’s kind of think about our days.  In your dealings at work, how are they?  Are they ethical?  Are they above board?  Are they beyond question?  How about at home?  Parents, the love and care that you have for your children, is it the same love and care that the Father has for you?  Or for your friendships, the same thing could be said, do you love and care for them the way God loves and cares for you?  Or spouses, the same thing, do you submit to your spouse?  We are all children of God when we claim Christ as our Lord.  We are loved with an unending love and he desires us to experience that love more completely each day. We do it, I think, when we do these things.  Remember, you are a child of God and there is nothing you can do to change that.  Amen.