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“The Heart of the Gospel”
John 3:14-21
- Those very special verses...
- The Golden Rule
- The Great Commission
- John 3:16
- Our focus: "For God so loved the world..."
- The Context:
- Jesus has been speaking to Nicodemus
- Jesus recalls the story of the Israelites, judged for idolatry and bitten by serpents, who only had to look to the bronze serpent Moses placed on a pole to be healed (Numbers 21)
- In coming to see Jesus at night, Nicodemus had moved from darkness into the light
- The Heart of the Gospel
- For God so LOVED...
- For God IS..
- Love stretches back through eternity past, BUT God chose to share that love by creating others with the capacity to love each other and to love Him
- For God so loved THE WORLD...
- NOT "worldliness!"
- God so loved every fallen, broken person that has ever been or ever will be; though He hates the evil that we do, he loves each and every person He created so much that He bore our sins in Christ on the cross.
- Are we sharing God's Love?
- Are we sharing and living the message that God loves everyone He created?
- Or do we send the message that God only loves some?
- We are all human. We have our "comfort zones."
- Christians have a reputation for being a clique. Is that fair?
- Are we sharing God's love within our fellowship?
- John 13:34 "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you..." How well are we doing this?
- Christians have a reputation as divisive and combative, with churches splitting even over little things. Is that fair?
- Are we sharing the kind of love God has?
- God's kind of love is not content with those that already share in it.
- God's kind of love is explicitly self-sacrificing. How many times have we placed our wants before others' needs?
- Jesus said, "Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect." (Matthew 5:48) Many Christians, including Methodists, understand that to mean "perfected in love," so that every decision, every action, has love of God and love of others as its motivation.
- Example: In 1st-century Rome they practiced sex-selective infanticide. Imagine living in a world so callous that the cries of abandoned infants are ignored as an accepted, necessary part of a "modern society." Then imagine this one, crazy group of people who start to say, "we will take them! Don't kill them!" That was a shock to the Roman world that left an impression of God's kind of love. And such extravagant love went on to transform the world...
- That is the kind of love that can fill our hearts, our minds, our very lives... if we let it.
