Summary
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Transcript
Good morning church, good morning.
Oh man, I am so excited to be here. I'm your man Jonathan, lead pastor here at Tuscany Church. I wanna welcome you guys this fine Sunday morning, our fourth week of Advent, which is so exciting. I love this week. Hey, I got a couple of things before we get into today's sermon. We read today's key passage for this morning.
I got a three or a fourth, I don't know how many things I've got, we'll count. One, so many of you look so wonderful today and your Christmas best and or worst. Like you guys just look so great this morning. Give yourself a round of applause for those.
River and Tina Sutton, stand up. Go ahead, stand up. I don't know what's going on over here. It's a lot.
There's a lot going on. But I like it and they're great. If you wanna take pictures, they're available for $ a piece. And then yeah, it all goes to River's College Fund. So that's going on. So yeah, that's great. Secondly, I wanted to let you know, for those of you who were here last week, we collected our staff offering and I wanted to just thank you from the bottom of my heart. Our church, I don't know another word other than to say ultra generous. Ultra generous to our church staff. It was absolutely incredible. They are so blessed. I know they're so thankful.
And man, it was just awesome. I'm so proud to be part of this church and to be able to participate in that. And then the last thing, some of you guys know this, some of you guys don't. We had a little, I don't even know what to call it because we've never had this happen before. We had a little thing happen over the last week. So many of you were here last week. We had our church production, which the worship team and Pastor Isaiah did an awesome job if you were here. It was incredible.
It was so good. Had so much fun. I laughed, I cried, I did all the emotions. And throughout this week, we've just been sharing some of the different highlights in the clips from the different show, which is great. But one particular clip has garnered an unusual amount of attention. Our Frosty the Snowman ACDC clip has gotten a little more attention than normal. So it's up to like, as of this morning, I think it was at , views, , views, which is not good.
Some of you guys, like to put that in an average, like a normal video we post has like 600. So like just to like kind of, you know, let you know where we're at in a ratio wise. And the only reason I'm bringing it up is not to brag about it, because it was just a funny, if you miss it, it was just a funny parody between ACDC and Frosty the Snowman. It was hilarious. I laughed really hard during it. David Duvall was cracking me up. And it was great. The only reason I'm bringing it up, but it's not to be like, look how, we've really made a church, we've gone viral. That's not it. We have been picked up by a couple publications and a couple of church accounts that specifically like to bash churches, specifically like mega churches. So we have been titled as a mega church with unlimited Christmas budget. And that is what happens when you are a mega church with unlimited Christmas budget. That was the result that we went, which is great because we had people here and we spent about $, $. We spent $.
I say that's good value for money.
If you get mega church results on $600 budget, I mean, man, although there was one comment that said, boy, for a mega church, I would have expected a little more. So I guess you can't, you can't get all, you can't please them all, I guess. So, and I only tell you this, I only tell you this, if you've happened to come across it, which now there's a couple of news articles that have started to publish about it and talking about it, it's like a really wild deal.
There are plenty of kind of, I'll just call them mean and negative comments about our church and about our message and about what we do as a church. And the reason I want to tell you is, I just want to tell you, don't let your feelings get hurt. Don't feel like you need to come to the rescue of the church or defend what these accusations are or any of that stuff. Cause it's easy to be like, I'm just going to read these and think it's funny. And then you get like in, you're like, who do you think you are? You have no clue about our church, right? And listen, it's okay. Listen, God is the one who justifies. There's plenty of people who are out there that their whole life is around just trolling certain things and finding out certain things. I wouldn't have even known if someone didn't call me and be like, bro, did you know that your video has , views? I was like, I think you have the wrong church, man. Like it's like, it's on Twitter. I was like, I don't even think we're on Twitter.
I don't know how that works. But listen, I just tell you, man, if you want to watch the video, watch it. It's hilarious. If you missed it last week, I laughed really hard, but don't let your heart be troubled. There will be people who say things that could be potentially offensive. And you can be like, this shouldn't be. That's not Isaiah's heart or David's heart or our church's heart, and we don't do that. And it's okay. Listen, God knows our church services are always, first and foremost, for our church, for the people who are here in this room. And that's what we're here for. And if you were here last week, you will not think that we were magnifying Frosty and Magic and Witchcraft and all the other things that we've been accused of there in this holiday festive season of love and all those things.
So that's where we're at. So I just tell you that because I know when you love something like this place, and then you hear somebody saying, it basically lies. You can get defensive and you can get your feelings right. And I'm just telling you, listen, we can let God do all the justification. We can trust Him with everything. And it's said, we're just gonna go on and do this. We're not gonna get famous as a result of this. I can tell you that for sure. Except maybe David, he may have a new slogan for his law firm company. Congregation Laughing He said he was gonna change it. It was a parody on bankruptcy. It was gonna be pretty funny. I don't know. It could be good. It could be good, but I mean, that's a whole different thing. So I just wanted to let you guys know. Some of you guys already knew.
Scott said he's believing for a million hits at the end of the day. So I don't know. We'll see what happens. We'll see what happens. But hey, we're gonna keep going. I'm excited about today's message. Week four of Advent is always my favorite. Will you stand with me? Will you read me? Read God's word this morning.
In this fourth week of Advent, we are highlighting the theme, the idea of love.
First John chapter four, verse says this.
So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love. And whoever abides in love abides in God. And God abides in him.
Why this is love perfected with us so that we may have the confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out all fear. For fear has to do with punishment. And whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, I love God and hates his brother, he is a liar. For he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, who he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him, whoever loves God must also love his brother. Let's pray this morning. Father, we thank you so much for today. Lord, we thank you that you're here in this place, Lord dwelling among us, Father God, that you and your spirit are tabernacled here in our hearts. Father God, in love is the thing that draws us close to you and draws us into your presence this morning. Lord, we just give you the rest of the service. We give you every conversation. We give you every thought. We give you this moment and we give you this time, Lord, to be drawn into closer fellowship, closer relationship with you and your spirit. So in Jesus' name we pray, amen.
Amen, you may be seated, you may be seated.
All right.
Well, week four, Advent. I love Advent, it's my favorite time. I'm excited. I always get excited when I get to love, but then I get a little sad because that means it's almost over. And if you've missed any of the weeks, I encourage you, you can always go back and rewatch them or celebrate them. But week one, we talk about hope and the hope that we have in Jesus and the future that we have him coming. In his second coming, we talked about, in week two, peace and the completeness and the wholeness that we have through the work of the cross and the birth of Jesus. Last week we celebrated joy and the joy that we have through Christ and that our joy is not based on the present circumstances or what's happening in our lives, but based on the very character of who he is and the joy that he sets before us to participate in his mission. And today in Advent, we are going to be focusing on the word love. And at the beginning of all of our Advent word studies, we love to take a little bit of time and just learn a little bit of language. I know some of you language nerds out there really love it. And love is this great word because there's several different words for love in the Old Testament. Love in English, it's a pretty, when you think about it, it's a little bit of a lame word because it's got too many meanings, right? You can love your spouse, which is really good. You can love your kids. You can love that show on Netflix and you can love it when you get a free coupon when you check out at CVS. And those can't be all the same emotion that you're feeling.
And if it is, we've got some issues somewhere. Like that's a problem. And so we have this word love that kind of can lose a little bit of the oomph behind it in English. And because it's just this one word that means so many, I know in Spanish, my wife's first language, they have a few different words that can mean love and therefore like different types of love and that's a little bit better expressed. But in the Old Testament and the New Testament, we actually have quite a few different words that they use that have different connotations and different meanings. That's pretty cool. In the Old Testament, we had ahhavah, which is kind of this key word for the way that God loves his people, although it can have some other meaning as well for sure. Jesus spoke Aramaic when he preached and the word that he would have used in Aramaic and he talked about love in all of his sermons, like the Sermon on the Mount, would have been rock ma, which is a pretty cool name. I always think every year it could be a cool rock band, but now we can't make any rock and roll jokes anymore as a church, so sorry we're out.
We're not gonna do that anymore. And then in Greek, which is what the New Testament was written in, there are four words for love. And some of you who've grown up in the church, you maybe have learned this, C.S. Lewis made this really famous in his book, The Four Loves, where he really unpacks all those. Great book if you haven't read it, you should check it out. But the Four Loves, the first one is called Storge. Storge is like an empathy or a familial bond, right? So you have a love for your family or like people that are close and it's this bond that comes together. There's this one that's called Philia, which is like where we get the word Philadelphia, which is talking about a friend bond or a brotherly love. That's where I like Philadelphia is like the city of brotherly love, Philia. Then there's Eros, which is like romantic love, that word, it means between like a man and a woman and like the idea of romance and sexuality. And then the fourth one, which was the one we're gonna focus on a little bit more today is the word agape, which we would, if you look at it up, you'd find this like unconditional love of God that God has for his people and that people can have for God, this word agape. And the interesting thing about agape is when you study it, it wasn't like this was a word that was highly used. And whenever they were writing the New Testament, they're like, "Oh, I know this word fits perfectly in my lexicon and so I'm gonna use it." They actually took this word and in many ways, they coopted it and created the definition of what agape means based on the very character and the person of God and how we can see God in two different ways. One, through the writings and the stories of the Old Testament, but two, through the very life of Christ and the way that Christ lived, that when they were able to say, "This is what love is, this is how God loves," they said, "You need to look no further than the history of how he's loved his people in the Old Testament or you can look to the very life of Jesus that we're writing about." And Jesus' life is the very picture, the action executed of God's love. And so this is important because we're gonna kind of talk about what does love mean to us today? And so here's some interesting things. In defining love, we know that we are understanding the very character, the core characteristic, the very idea of who God is. And when you are saying something like that, that's a big claim, to let someone know, like I'm gonna give you the definition, the character, the very behavior of the creator of the universe, that I'm gonna try to wrap my mind and wrap my brain around an understanding of who he is and how he thinks and how he feels, and that very idea is very big and a tough one to accept. But listen to a couple of verses.
John chapter one, verse , it says this, no one has ever seen God, the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known. This scripture is talking about that Jesus is at the Father's side and that no one has seen God, but in seeing Jesus, the one who was born in a manger, lived to adulthood and then ministered for a little over years and then died, that person made the very image of God, the character of God, who he is known. That if we want to know who God is, we need to look no further than the Son and we know who they are. Now, some of you guys are here and you've got kids in the room, I've got kids in the room, and I get accused of this very often with my voice. They will do a particular something, a particular thing. Usually it's a little snarky, usually it's a little defiant, usually it's a little sarcastic, and my wife will look at me and will be like, they got that from you.
It's your fault. And you know, it really comes full circle. I get roasted in my house a lot. I've got four boys and they just take turns roasting me. Like I'm prepared for social media backlash because I get personal backlash every day. I get backlash over my hair, over my glasses, over my outfit, no matter what I'm doing and like I'm getting roasted by these boys. And when it happens and it's really starting to dog pile and I look to my wife thinking, surely my wife, the lover of my life will come to my defense. She looks at me and she's like, this is what you get.
You taught them this.
When they see, when you see them, you're looking in a mirror.
And it's like, wow, I'm good.
Wow, I'm good. And I said, like, so you can know a little bit about me, even if you've never got to have a conversation with me, if you get to know my boys. Now they're not exactly like me. This is like just an example, right? They're their own young men. But like, you can know a little bit, guess what, you can get to know a little bit about my dad who's here somewhere. I don't know where he is. He's here somewhere, running around. You can know him. Maybe you've not met him, but you'll know a little bit about him because you've heard me. That's how this works. We can sometimes know people. But in the case of Jesus, it is this idea, the very physical expression of who God is was lived out in the life of God. So when you read the gospel, and when you read the stories of Jesus, you are reading in a way in which, if you ever ask yourself, how would God respond to this if he was here? Like, I don't know if you've ever had that question. You're going through something hard. You're walking through something. You're like living in a circumstance. You think, boy, if God, the creator of the universe was here, how would he respond to this?
And maybe sometimes you get real Ethereum. I'm like, well, he could respond to this if he wanted to because he's omnipotent and omniscient and all powerful and all that. So if he wanted to respond to this, he could. And so his response must be nothing. Maybe you've gone there, or maybe it's just me who's been cynical in this place. But all we have to do is look at the life of Christ, and we can see how God responded because he did respond. And one of my favorite things was constantly Jesus. If you look at his life, and you read through the stories, especially in the gospel market highlights this a lot, although all four gospels will highlight this. Jesus will be going about, he's on mission. He's trying to get somewhere, and he gets distracted.
He gets distracted by someone's brokenness or sickness or loss or death or demon possession. He gets distracted, and it says he is filled to compassion. In fact, if you actually read the words that it says in Greek, it's not just like, oh, he had this little feeling. From the very internal of his bowels, from the inside out, he had to be moved and filled with compassion to go and to either heal or to free or to teach or to love or to affirm. Like he could not stop going out of his way. It was constant. Even when he was going from one distraction to another distraction. Like when he got off the boat and he's like, my son's dying, will you come with me so that you can pray for them? He's like, yeah, and the crowd's slowing him down. And Jairus is like, come on, here we go. And then the woman goes and touches him with the issue of blood, and he stops and says, I have to make sure that the person who just received healing knows they don't have to receive guilt and condemnation along with him.
I have to.
And Jairus is losing his mind because he thinks his child is going to die. Imagine if you thought you had the answer, and they're stopping like on a side quest over here, and you're like, no, no, no, no, Jesus, I already got you, pay attention.
He's like, I gotta talk to this lady for a minute. And you're like, it's cool, she's my kid. I guess they're gonna die.
That's high stakes.
But Jesus couldn't let that woman know
that she was unloved or that she had done something wrong, because in her mind, she just touched someone who was pure with an impurity, and she thought, I may have just defiled this person, and he wanted to make sure that when you are holy and clean from the God of the Father, that which is unclean touches was clean, and you are now clean and you are now forgiven, and your sins have been forgiven, and you are made whole, and you are now a daughter of God, and you can leach your head off of that ground that you've been stooped over for the last years, and you can look up into the eyes of a loving God and know that you are accepted. And you don't need to feel like you've broken any kind of rules here in this place, because I have made sure that all your sins are forgiven. That's the work of what Jesus does, so he does that. But then, the boy's child dies. The guy who was his child dies.
And it's like, Jesus, you blew it. You don't even need to come anymore.
You blew it. And he said, oh, don't worry about it.
It's fine. I had to deal with that, but I'm still gonna deal with this. And they're not dead, they're just asleep. Because I can't be late. I can't be late. Jesus can never be late. You may have something in your life where you're like, Jesus, you're too late, it's dead. The relationship's dead. My finances are dead. My kid's gone, and they're not coming back. It's dead. And Jesus says, no, no, no, no, no. It's just asleep.
I'll come wake it up. I'll come wake it up. Just a touch from me brings resurrection life. Just a word from me at distance brings resurrection life and power. This is the very God that we serve, the one who cannot help but show love to the people around him.
That's why Mark tells me that he went around healing all who were sick. Not some, not the ones who had good faith, not the ones who had been good and given their tithes that day, not the ones who hadn't watched the frosty video. It's at all. He healed all of them because he couldn't help it. And I just always had this picture. It said that they would line him up on the streets. And in my mind, I'm picturing Aspen, right? It's this beautiful five lane highway with the two sides, it's like this thing. It's like, oh, well, that's pretty white. That's not what ancient streets looked like. They were these narrow things. I mean, some of those streets, one person could pass by the time, maybe two. They were small streets, and I just have these pictures of the sick and the oppressed and the demon possessed that are lining up in front. And as far as you can see, they're lined up, begging for mercy and healing from the creator of the universe. And everywhere Jesus goes, he touches them. But behind him is just a trail of healing and wholeness and health and freedom. That is the result, the character of who God is. Every ground that he takes, what is left in his wake is nothing but his goodness.
That's why God said, "I'm gonna pass before you, Moses, and what you're gonna see is the trail of my goodness."
When Jesus passed before people, all that they saw was the trail of his goodness and his love.
John says, "I have manifested your name," this is in a prayer, "I have manifested your name to the people whom you gave me out of the world.
Yours they were, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word." I love it. "I have manifested your name."
Maybe we missed this idea in our mind. In ancient times, there was nothing more important than someone's name, than your family name. Then what that had to do with it, that was your reputation, that was your standing in society, that was the cultural identity that you had. The name meant a lot. When you had a name that was honorable, it meant a lot. And Jesus said, "God, I represented and I manifested. I made available and viewable to the people around you, your name, your name, your character, your identity."
And God had given his identity in Exodus , verse six, whenever he went to Moses, and Moses begged him like, "Please, will you like, show me your goodness, show me who you are." And he said, "I'm gonna pass before you." And he proclaimed, "The Lord, the Lord, a God of merciful, gracious, slow to anger,
abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness."
When God introduced himself, he said, "That's who I am." And Jesus says, "And I made that name manifested in my life when I lived here on this earth."
So that people would know that God, the creator of the universe, is not judgmental, he's not the punisher, he's not angry, he's not frustrated, he's not disappointed. No, the Lord, the Lord, your God,
is merciful and gracious.
And the Hebrew actually says, "With a really long nose."
A real long nose, which means it takes a long time for the anger to get all the way down to the red part of the nose. I mean, I got a pretty big nose, but God's nose is bigger than mine.
It takes a long time.
And it says, "Steadfast love,"
which is the old, that's the word, has said,
this faithfulness.
It says, "That's who God is." And Jesus, in his life,
filled with love, may manifest the identity, the name of who God is. And here's the thing, God, which we already said, God is love, like that is who he is. But love, he doesn't love you and I just out of obligation.
He doesn't love you because it's like, well, I said I would.
And I am God who had never changed, but if I didn't have to, I wouldn't. But what are you gonna do? I got to.
God loves you because he feels love towards you.
And you need to know that. Every person in this room needs to know that. God is in love with you individually and he feels love towards you. I love this verse in Song of Solomon that says, "Set me as a seal upon your heart, "as a seal upon your arm, "for love is as strong as death "and jealousy as fierce as the grave. "It flashes, it flashes our flashes of fire, "the very flame of the Lord "and many waters cannot quench love, "neither can floods drown it."
That is how God thinks of you.
It is unbreakable. Death cannot separate it. Fire cannot consume it. Water cannot quench it. The love that he feels for you is beyond anything you've ever felt for any other person or thing or idea. He's just not obligated to love you. He actually feels love towards you. He is actually in love with you.
Even in your brokenness, even with your failure, even with your shortcomings, even in the places where you miss it and when you're still growing. In fact, it says that where sin abounds, his grace super abounds to come to you in that moment and to actually express even more love in that place.
His love for you is so much more than an obligation. It is something that's felt and he acts out of it. That's why Jesus couldn't help but acting out of love because he felt it inside him. He was compelled to move and love. But here's what's beautiful. It's not just a feeling,
but God loves both in how he feels, but he also acts on the love that he has towards you and I. He actually expresses it in a physical manner. Romans chapter five verse six, it says, "For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly, for one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person would one dare even to die. But God shows his love for us and that while we were still sinners,
Christ died for us. Since therefore we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, much more now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received this reconciliation.
He loved you and he sent his son to die for you so that you could be brought back to himself. That is the type of action that he has so that you could experience the grace and the goodness that God has for you.
I wrote down this quote and I thought it was so appropriate.
God is motivated by the love that's in his heart and he acts with his hands with the grace that was purchased by Jesus Christ.
He has so much love inside of you, inside of him towards you that he cannot help but continue to act on that and he is able to act because of the work of the cross through you that his gracious goodness can be poured out on you and even when you're sitting there and saying, "I'm not worthy, I don't deserve it, "I haven't done enough, I can't make it, "I know that you love me, but I have some shortcomings."
His grace is far bigger than any of those
and he creates a way for you. He creates a way for you.
And so he shows this love to the people and here's what's wild.
Here's what's wild.
We are called as believers to get to know this love of God more and more.
You are called personally.
One of the things of what it means to be a disciple of God, to be a follower of Jesus, is to learn more and more how loved you are by God.
Now listen, we as a church this last year, we've been walking through and we'll continue to walk through some different things about how are we spiritually formed and we've walked through different practices, we walk through generosity and how we looked at that, we walked through prayer, we have it through you more that we'll probably walk through this upcoming year and here's the thing, all of those things are great, whether it's reading your Bible or praying or fasting or being in community or being generous to the poor or any of these different things, all of those things are really great.
But all of them are just a means to the end. They're all meant for you to have a better understanding
of how much God loves you.
The entire context of scripture is meant to pour into you how loved you are by God.
When you spend time in this word, if you walk away saying like, gosh, I'm just a failure,
then you missed God's message for you today
because that is not the message. The message of the gospel of God is that He is in love with you and that He will move heaven and earth earth to be with you.
That is this love and there's a reason that He wants you to know how loved you are because the more love that you are, the more that you have the revelation of how loved you are by God, the more that you can accept the idea that as Jesus is, so are you in this world.
That the way that Jesus lived is the way that you're called to live because I know if you're anything like me, if you look at the life of Christ and then you look at your own life, you think, wow, I'm really far apart.
I am not slow to anger and I'm not abounding in faithful love. I am not someone who is walking around just giving God all the glory and praise all the time. I have all these different shortcomings and failures and you may look at your life and say, I am pretty far away from this picture of idea of Jesus. But when you realize how loved you are by God, you realize that the righteousness that Jesus has is yours.
It is yours.
And that is who you are. That is your very identity through Christ.
And when you understand that that's who you are, it changes not just how you live, but it changes how you're able to love others. You know, when Jesus was asked, what's the greatest commandment? Many of you know this story. He basically says, there's a couple different examples of this, but the end result is he said, you're supposed to love God and you're supposed to love others. Love God, love your neighbor. Like do unto others as you would have them do unto you. He said it different ways in a different couple of passages. But he basically said, you're supposed to love God and love others. And John picks up this idea and what we just read that if you can't do, like it's impossible to love God and not love others because if you can't love others, then how are you loving God? But here's the big cycle. You cannot love others well unless you understand how loved you are by God.
You will fail.
You may do the very best that you can apart from God. And I got a news flash for you. It's not very good.
When Jesus says, apart from me, you can do nothing.
He means it. Apart from me, you can do nothing.
You cannot love well. You cannot encourage you in chat. Like I always,
my wife and I we've been married now for years, which is wonderful. And we were married pretty young. I was , she was when we got married. And I loved my wife when we were married more than anything else in the entire world. And I loved her the best that I could love her. And at the time as a year old, it wasn't very good.
It wasn't very robust.
It was lacking in many areas. It was immature and it was selfish and it was selfseeking.
But over years,
I have loved her better, not because I've improved as a husband,
but because I've understood how much God's loved me more.
And his love has transformed me so that now I can love others better.
I love better because God has loved me. And in years from now, I will love my wife better. I will love my kids better. I will love you better.
Not because I'm on this great journey, not because I got a great Bible street going that I'm really proud of, not because I'm walking through this spiritual formation classes, not because I'm spending more time in the work. I will be able to love better in years because in years, I will have a greater revelation of how much he loves me.
And as I really know how much he loves me and I see that love, it's so much easier to express that love to other.
Because just like we read earlier, we love because he first loved us.
You cannot give what you do not have.
It is impossible.
You cannot give what you do not have.
If you've never received love, then you cannot give love. Or if you've received a very broken love, then what you give is broken love. If you've been exposed to selfish, selfseeking love, then what you give is selfish and selfseeking love. But when you were exposed to the selfless love of God,
you begin to love others with a love that's outside of yourself.
And you begin to hear words that Jesus says that sound completely unhinged and crazy when he's like, "Love your enemy.
"Pray for those who curse you." You're thinking, "Jesus, you've lost your mind.
I can barely love my children well. And you want me to love that person who's cursing me?"
Jesus is like, "Yes, I do."
And you can.
And it's possible to love people who look different, sound different, think different, or your enemies whenever you realize that I was an enemy to God, and he loved me and sent Jesus for me anyways.
You were an enemy to God.
We were all enemies to God, and yet Jesus still came.
And so now we get to experience his love.
Now I get to experience what God has for me.
And here's the thing as we get close to wrapping up this morning. When we get the opportunity as believers to come together and to worship and to sing songs of worship, and we get to take time and we get to study scripture, and you get to leave this place, and hopefully you're going home and you're spending time in scripture in some way. Hopefully you have someone that you can have conversations about God with. Hopefully you're spending some time in prayer on your own. Hopefully you're taking time to invest in your soul and your spirit and spending time with God and your own soul. Your soul and your spirit and spending time with the one who loves you the most. But in that journey, what you will begin to see more and more and more is look at how God expresses his love.
Look at how God expresses his love.
Look at how Jesus expresses his love.
And say, God, if you would do that for them, I know you would do it for me.
If you loved them like that, I know you love me like that.
If you weep because your friend Lazarus died, even though you were there to raise him back from the dead, I know you love me like that.
That's who I am.
Because in our whole journey as a church and our mission to know Jesus and show Jesus, we want to know Jesus personally and intimately and as an individual, not because we want to just say, like, look at all my Bible knowledge. I went to the Bible ball and I got all the answers right. I won the trivia.
I want to know him because if I know who he is, then I know who I am. If I know who he is, then I know how loved I am. And if I know who I am and I know who he is to me, if I know Jesus personally and intimately, then I can partner with the creator of the universe who has said, I have kids who are far away. I have those who are still in darkness and need you to be an ambassador of light. Can you show them love?
And the more I spend time in his word and in his presence and being embraced by the love of God,
the more qualified I am to go out into the darkness and show that love to others,
to show the goodness of God, to love my enemies and those who are far away,
to bring light to the darkness,
that is the result of having our minds be just completely engulfed in the person of God.
And so when I'm reading scripture or when I'm praying or when I'm having conversations,
allowing myself to feel not just a feeling of love, but to see the action of God's love in my life.
And church, during this Christmas season,
we get many opportunities to walk in love towards people. I don't know if you've been on st lately.
It is full of enemies.
Felt like David, at every turn, they're there looking to take my soul.
It's rough out there.
Family gatherings can be wonderful or family gatherings can be, for some of you, awkward,
confrontational.
When we get to operate from a place of love,
we get to live differently.
When you know how loved you are, you get to live differently.
You will behave differently.
They may behave exactly the same.
They may be just as confrontational.
They may be just as hateful.
They may ignore all traffic signals just like they do on st.
And yet, you can be different because you know Jesus.
And you can live differently and you can show Jesus everywhere you go.
That is the purpose of being in union with God,
being loved by God,
as it gives you the chance, the opportunity to walk in that today.
So my encouragement for you this week,
as we get to, on Wednesday, celebrate Christmas Eve together, I hope you come to our candlelight service. It's gonna be awesome. It's one of my favorite services every year. And then on Christmas Day, when we get to celebrate Christmas, the birth of our Savior, when love came down and Emmanuel was with us,
when we get to celebrate that moment,
that you would take some time this week and press into and ask yourself, "How much do I believe God loves me?
"How much do I believe that God loves me individually?"
I think if you spend some time, you'll actually be surprised by the answer.
And how great. And no matter how much you think He loves you, if there's anything that Scripture tells you, it's more than you know.
It's more than you can ask, think or imagine. It's further than the East is from the West. There is no height that you can go or depth that you can experience. His love is far greater than you could ever imagine.
And that is the thing that we get to hold on to.
As we're waiting to see His goodness manifested in all of our lives, we can hold on to love this morning. Let's pray together today. Father God, we just thank you so much for today.
Lord, I thank you for your love.
I thank you for your mercy. I thank you for your goodness.
I thank you for who you are today.
Lord, for everyone who's here today, as we get to experience your love all around us, Lord, and we're in this season where love came down,
and we get to celebrate the birth of Jesus
and express your love all around us, Lord, help us know how loved we are by you.
Help us know, help us know that your love transforms us.
That if we wanna love others well, we need to first know how well we are loved by you. And then as we have a better revelation of your love for us, we can love others better.
Help us be inundated.
By the goodness of your love.
That not even death can erase.
We thank you for that today. We've never had a bow for just a moment more. If you're here today and you've never accepted Jesus, I wanna give you a chance to do that today. And it's as simple as saying a prayer, believing it with your heart.
And I'm gonna invite the whole church to say it, but if that's you, just say this with all your heart this morning. So just repeat after me, say, "Dear Heavenly Father,
"thank you for sending Jesus to die for me
"so my sins could be forgiven,
"so my heart could be set free,
"so I could be loved by you."
It's in Jesus' name, I pray.
With every head bowed for just a minute more,
if you're in the room anywhere and you made that decision today, would you just raise your hand up real high? Anywhere in the room. I just wanna celebrate, acknowledge you, pray for you this week as I move forward.
Anywhere in the room, just raise your hand up real high.
All right, if there's any hands up, they can go down.
Father, we thank you that we can celebrate you this week.
We thank you that we can celebrate you every week in our hearts.
We thank you for the gracious gift of Jesus.
Lord, bless our time in this season, this week,
as we can anticipate in our hearts the arrival and the coming of Jesus.
We thank you for that. So in your holy name we pray, amen and amen. Church, we love you. Thank you so much for being here this morning. Don't forget, Christmas Eve, Wednesday is gonna be amazing. Merry Christmas to all of you and we will see you soon. Have a great rest of your day.
