Christmas Certainties in an Uncertain World: God Loves Us
Gettysburg Presbyterian Church
David C. Wright
John 3:16, 17
December 20, 2009

         A number of times when I’ve been watching a football game on TV, I’ve noticed someone holding up a sign in the endzone with the words “John 3:16.”  You’ve probably seen it, too.  It seems kind of strange and out-of-place, but it happens fairly often.  Clearly, it’s a kind of Christian witness, but why would people choose that particular verse?  Well, it’s probably the most famous verse in the Bible, and it contains an excellent summary of the gospel in just a few words.  If you are like many Presbyterians, and have trouble explaining your faith to others, listen carefully this morning, because the essence of the entire Christian faith is found in this verse.
          We live in a world of uncertainty.  Some of the people who were sitting with us in this sanctuary last year are no longer with us this year.  Some are ill or have moved unexpectedly.  Some have even died.  We live in a world of uncertainty.  Christmas brings some certainties to us, including the certainty that God loves us.  John 3:16 summarizes that certainty very well.  For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
          Now let’s break it down so we get the full impact.   We begin with God, the Creator and Manager of the entire universe!  For reasons which our puny brains will never comprehend, God is concerned about us, the creatures he made who inhabit this small ball called earth as it hurtles its way through space.  It is significant that John begins his summary of the gospel with God, for that reminds us that our salvation begins with God’s initiative, not our’s.  Sometimes we’re tempted to think and act as if our salvation were dependent on us, but, as we will see, it is actually dependent upon God’s action. 
          When Keith Brown was pastor of Bethlehem Presbyterian Church, he noticed one of his parishioners wearing a bulldog pin on his lapel during coffee hour one Sunday morning.  “Frank,” he asked, “What does that bulldog symbolize?”
          “It’s the symbol for Mack Truck, where I work,” Frank responded.  “But it has spiritual symbolism, too.  It symbolizes the tenacity with which I hold onto Jesus Christ.”
          “Well, that’s a nice sentiment,” replied the pastor, “but I don’t think it’s very good theology.”
          “What do you mean?”  Frank asked.
          “It shouldn’t stand for the tenacity with which you hold onto Jesus Christ.  It should stand for the tenacity with which Jesus holds on to you!”
          Pastor Brown makes a good point.  The gospel begins with God and continues with God.  Let’s keep going.
          God so loved.  The Greek word here is “agape,” which denotes a special kind of self-sacrificing, action-oriented love.  It is the kind of love to which we all aspire, but only rarely reach- a love which always puts the needs of others before our own.  And God is agape-love!  As Bible scholar William Barclay put it, “the mainspring of God’s being is love.”  So it isn’t as if God has to work up some kind of love for us.  It is God’s nature to love, a love which is on display in the inner, mysterious workings of the Trinity, where the three persons of the Godhead work in unison as one.
          God is love.  The prophet Hosea portrayed God as a lovesick husband desperately hoping to win back the love of his unfaithful wife.  Jesus portrayed God as a love-filled father waiting expectantly for his wayward son to return home.  It is God’s nature to love.
          And God’s love has an object.  “For God so loved the world.”  Now there are several things to point out here.  First of all, this would have been a shockingly new thought to Jesus’ Jewish audience.  They understood well that God loved Israel.  The Old Testament is filled with promises of God’s love for his people.  But over time, they had developed a corollary thought suggesting that God’s special love for Israel meant that God hated everyone else!  They completely forgot about the part of God’s original covenant with Abraham back in Genesis when God promised that he would bless the whole world through Abraham and his descendants.  They forgot about God’s compassion on pagan Ninevah in the story of Jonah and Jeremiah’s understanding that God is sovereign over all the nations of the world.  God doesn’t just love Israel; God loves the whole world with all of its people, the entirety of creation.
          And this world makes it difficult for God to love it!  In fact, the Bible says the world is in active rebellion against God and God’s purposes for his creation!  It’s as if we raise our tiny fists and shake them in God’s face saying, “I know you abhor violence, but we’re going to justify our wars anyway.  I know you hate lying, but I really need to tell one this time anyway.  I know you call us to give generously to the poor, but we’ll get serious about that only after we are outrageously comfortable and secure.  I know you want us to serve one another, but I’m going to insist on my rights.”  You see, we often actively oppose God’s work!  And the result is the kind of pain-filled, uncertain world in which we live.  You get the picture.  Yet, astoundingly, this is the world which God loves!  It is truly beyond our comprehension.  Apparently this world is valued by God because God made it and believes in its potential. 
          “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son.”   God’s love for the world was costly.  It caused God to sacrifice that which was most precious to him- his only Son, Jesus.  At Christmas we celebrate that gift of God to us in the birth of Jesus.  That is why Christmas has always been such a joyful season!  We are excited and grateful when we remember that God’s Son entered our world. 
          But, we sometimes forget that it wasn’t such a joyful time for Jesus and his parents!  They were far from home because the occupying Romans insisted that they travel to Bethlehem to register for an oppressive tax.  The birth took place in poverty apart from family and friends in grim circumstances.  Soon after his birth the family was forced to flee in terror from  murderous King Herod and wound up as refugees, immigrants in the foreign land of Egypt.  We are right to be joyful over the coming of Jesus, but let’s not forget that it represents the costly love of God, which led Jesus to his horrifying death nailed to a cross. 
          God so loved the world that he gave his beloved Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”  John uses this phrase “to believe in” 98 times in his gospel!  It always appears as a verb, reminding us that believing is always active.  It never means to simply believe something is true.  There are other Greek verbs which mean that.  This verb means literally to throw yourself on something, to trust completely in something.  It means far more than mere intellectual assent.  It means to actually live in the light of an intellectual conviction.
          I have a stool here.  I believe in this stool.  I believe that this stool will hold me if I sit on it. I can examine the construction.  I can note the manufacturer.  I can point out the fact that I have seen others sit on this stool and it supported them.  But until I sit on the stool myself, I have not believed in it the way John says we need to believe in Jesus.  To believe in Jesus means to risk living your life according to his teaching as well as trusting in him for your salvation.
          “God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”  The present trajectory of this world is toward destruction.  With nuclear weapons, we now have the capacity to destroy the planet many times over.  And some of those weapons are in the hands of people we don’t trust, and other nations (like Iran and North Korea) are working hard to get them.  Biological and chemical weapons have added more horrific ways to destroy one another.  And the threat of global warming brings yet another possibility for the destruction of the planet.  So there is a real sense in which the very existence of our world seems precarious, a reminder that we need God’s intervention to save us from ourselves.
          But there is also an individual sense in which this is true.  Because of the pervasiveness of sin in our hearts, our tendency is to live independently, apart from God and God’s ways.  God is patient with us, but without God’s intervention and our submission to it, we are bent toward our own destruction and the destruction of others through our hate or greed or jealousy or self-centeredness. 
          The Good News here is that God offers an alternative to destruction- eternal life.  This, of course, includes spending an eternity with the Lord in heaven.  But it involves more than that.  It involves a new quality of life available to us now, life lived the way God intended it to be lived.  A life lived in love, a life lived in imitation of God’s character, who after all, created us in his own image.  Through believing in, through trusting in, through acting on our belief in the Son of God, we can live a new kind of life.  And this is a very satisfying life, because we have the sense that we are doing what we were created to do and are part of something far greater than ourselves.
          On Sunday, Aug. 16, 1987, Northwest Airlines flight 225 crashed just after takeoff from Detroit.  157 people were killed.  One survived- a 4 year-old named Cecelia.  When rescuers found her, they didn’t believe that she had been on the plane.  They thought she had been a passenger in the one of the cars which was struck by the plane when it came down.  But the passenger manifest listed her name.
          Cecelia survived because, as the plane was falling, her mother, Paula Chican, unbuckled her seat belt, got down on her knees in front of her daughter, wrapped her arms and body around Cecelia, and refused to let go.  Nothing could separate that child from the protective love of her mother- nothing.  And she was saved.  That’s a pretty good picture of the self-sacrificing love that God has for us.  Nothing can separate us from God’s love.
          “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” God loves us.  That is a Christmas certainty!  Do you believe in his Son, Jesus?  Are you ready to put that belief into action?  If so, as we pray in silence, tell God that you accept his gift of love and desire to follow Jesus with your life.  That’s when your eternal life will begin!

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