Inland Empire: Riverside
For God So Loved The World - Audio
This is my first time ever having to use the headset here, and I've spent half the service going like this thinking that something's behind my ear or something's on my head the entire time, and it is. Well, good morning, church. I'm excited and grateful to be able to come before you guys this morning to share the word with you. It's been a great service so far, hasn't it? And man, I always appreciate the worship leaders and how much effort and work they've put into making sure that we have a great song service, appreciate all the speakers and the testimonies that were shared, you know, it's kind of funny that, you know, every now and then we get these services which just kind of seems like everything just gels very well. The songs kind of flow with the message, the testimonies flow with the message, everything just kind of fits in there. And so I'm excited, I know that God has really blessed us with an amazing campus ministry, and I'm really proud to be a part of that and just be able to see them up here sharing their heart and their lives with us this morning, so hopefully you guys have definitely felt that. You know, in the 50s, there's a doctor named Harry Harlow, in his classic experiment two groups of baby Reese's monkeys were removed from their mothers, and the first group of Terry cloth mother provided no food while a wire mother did, in the form of an attached baby bottle containing milk, in the second group a Terry cloth mother provided food, the wire mother did not. It was found that the young monkeys clung to the Terry cloth mother whether or not it provided them with food, and the young monkeys chose the wire surrogate only if it provided food. Whenever a frightening stimulus was brought into the cage, the monkeys ran to the cloth mother for protection and comfort, no matter which mother provided them with food. This response decreases the monkeys got older however. When the monkeys were placed in an unfamiliar room with their cloth surrogate they clung to it until they felt secure enough to explore. Once they began to explore, occasionally they returned to the cloth mother for comfort. Monkeys placed in an unfamiliar room without their cloth mothers acted very differently however. They froze in fear, cried, crouched down or sucked their thumbs. Some even ran from object to object apparently searching for the cloth mother as they cried and screamed. Monkeys placed in this situation with the wire mothers actually exhibited the same behavior as the monkeys with no mother. Once the monkeys reached an age where they could eat solid foods they were separated from the cloth mothers for three days. When they were united with their mothers, they clung to them and did not venture off to explore as they had in previous situations. Harlow concluded that the need for contact comfort was stronger than the need to explore. We were created with a basic need for love. It drives and dictates almost everything that we do in life. We are surrounded by a culture that attempts to define it really because we are confused and jaded about what it really is. Our relationships are wrought because we have no idea what real love is. We search in jobs, we search in friendships, we search in all these different avenues to try and figure out what love is. The Beatles told us, "All you need is love, love, love, love, love is all you need, but money can't buy you love." I don't care too much for money because it can't buy me love. Marley asked, "Is this love, is this love, is this love that I'm feeling?" The backstreet boys, it's for the younger crowd over there, poetically informed us that in a relationship it doesn't matter who you are, where you're from or what you did as long as you love me. It's a notra attempt to define it, "L is for the way you look." You get the picture, I'm not going to. I couldn't keep going, I know you really, really want me to. Then finally, Aaron Neville reassured us, unassuming and unintelligent people, that love doesn't require the smarts, "I don't know much, but I know I love you, let me be, oh I need to love." That was my best Aaron Neville impression. When asking children about their thoughts on love, their responses were, "I'm not rushing into being in love, I'm finding fourth grade hard enough." Love is what makes you smile when you're tired, "Oh God, for those kits you want to make." Love is when Mommy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip before giving it to him to make sure the taste is okay. And love is that first feeling you feel before all the bad stuff gets in the way. You've clearly been misunderstanding what this word is. Not just in our culture, not just in the media, but in the church. In my life, lately, I've seen a serious need and a serious lack of understanding of love. And all this really has led me to, as it should, focusing on what God's love is about. You know, the most misunderstood concept is defined in arguably the most misunderstood and overused passage in the Bible, John 3.16, let's go ahead and put that up on the board. In this scripture, we all know very well, we see it on t-shirts, necklaces, tattoos, signs in sports arenas. All around us were surrounded by this idea, for God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall perish, shall not perish but have eternal life. I was reading a different version, apparently. You know, throughout the New Testament, I did a study looking at God's love, and throughout the New Testament, it defines God's love the exact same way. You know, I've got one of those big, fat, study Bibles, and with every scripture in the New Testament that talked about God's love, points back to this scripture. You know, and I tend to scoff at this passage. I overlook it, as I do pretty much anything that I feel is overused or outplayed or undermined. But really, when you look at this passage, we are giving God's definition of what love really is, for God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only son. God defines love in a couple of different ways, and we can look at this passage and just, you know, I know the contemporary Christian world we love to just wrap our arms around this passage and feel all kinds of warm, fuzzy feelings about God, and, you know, all we got to do is believe. But God says He sent Jesus to the world for two purposes, the life of Jesus, and the example that He sets for us to live by, when He sent Jesus, He didn't just send Him to die, He sent Him to live as an example for us of what we should be, what kind of men and women we should be if we really want to please Him. And number two, the sacrifice and the resurrection of Jesus, which allows us to have an intimate and holy relationship with God, this is unheard of at this time when this was written. And as Nick said earlier, we could take this for granted so quickly and easily and overlook how powerful God's love is, but also we miss to find it. I tend to define God's love as the blessings I receive. God meeting my immediate needs, taking care of my finances, making sure our job situations are secure, the household is taken care of, that I never have to walk around in any kind of worldly capacity of insecurity or a life in a blissful state of utopia. Loving God and being loved by God means we should all just be happy all the time, right? Everything should be fine, carefree, worryfree. But in fact, what God's love is, is the opportunity for the perfect sacrifice of Jesus to have the walls of sin torn down in our lives and to be embraced by God Himself as a son or a daughter. This love is unconditional and unearned, it's something that nobody in this room, nobody on this earth, deserved. And you think we would understand this by now and how much we see this scripture advertised all over the place. Almost all of us, I'm sure, have it memorized to some capacity in whatever version you memorize it in. But the problem is two different things. Number one, we don't recognize this as the defining trait of God's love. God's love requires perks and benefits. That's the only way it counts. Or number two, we don't understand that God's love merits a response from us. That thought was given unconditionally and unearned, it merits a response. God wants us to respond to His love. And the question for us today is not what is God's love. I think I'm really grateful for Nick and Anna and all that they shared during the community. I thought they did a great job of explaining that for us. What is God's love? It's the forgiveness, it's the mercy that we've been shown at the cross by Jesus being sent here. But the question for us today is how do we respond to this? And we're not going to go into deep teaching or next to Jesus on John 3 and just spend a lot of time talking about Jesus and Nicodemus. We're going to look at how we traditionally respond to God's love. The title of my lesson is, "For God So Love the World." Let's bow our heads in a word of prayer. Father, I just want to thank you so much for the opportunity to be together. The opportunity to worship in your name, to reflect really on what your love is about but also what your love should cause us to do with our lives. Father, none of us deserves to be here. And I pray that as we move through the word, as we look at these scriptures, God, that we would be impacted deeply by recognizing how far you're willing to go to love us. And as a result, God, what kind of men and women that we want to be for you? God, please be with us. Let's hear a sense of prayer. Amen. You know, we tend to respond to God's love much like children and have three points and they're all about how we can respond like children. We'll look at their first, we have a little video for each point, we want to look at this first video. A flea shade that actually comes to life, she's afraid of her own shadow. What? What? What? What? What? What? Alright. Let's go. We're going. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. What? What? What? What? What? What? What? What? It's not going away. It's not going away. It's not going away. It's not going away. Someone would be like, "Aww, that's so sad." The rest of you are laughing. Look at the mom. She said, "Jump, jump, jump." The first way we can tend to respond to God's love is like a fearful child. Turn your Bibles to John chapter 3 verse 19. Nothing drives our sinful nature and our lack of understanding of God more than fear. Fear is wrought our world. It's in the economy or lack thereof. It's in the job market or lack thereof. It's in our financial decisions that we make every day. It's in our relationships, whether with family, friends, children, whatever. Sometimes we can be so wrought with fear and so controlled by fear that we can even be afraid of our own shadows, a fear that just seems so completely irrational. We look at that and I mean it's funny, a child is afraid of her shadow. Look in the shadow duder but yet this is how we can be. Look over at John chapter 3 verse 19. It says, "This is the verdict. Light has come into the world but men love darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light so it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God." This is Jesus talking, this is right after John 3, 16, in the middle of this conversation with Nicodemus and he says, "Light has come into the world. The Son of Man is here, salvation is here. This is supposed to be a comforting and reassuring thing. You know, it's like a child who's afraid of the dark or you're wandering down an ominous hallway. It's like that story of going into the basement, of going in the attic when it's dark and being terrified of what might be on the other side waiting to grab you and being able to flick that switch on and be reassured, okay, there's nothing here. But instead how we treat this light oftentimes, as we treat it, like we're standing on a dark stage in our underwear with a spotlight on it, some millions of people are going to laugh at us and mock us if we're in this light. We would rather be in darkness is what Jesus says. What are we afraid of? Why would we be afraid of the great light of God, of Jesus coming to the earth, the light of the world? Because we're terrified of vulnerability. We're terrified of what people are going to really see when the light really is shed on us. We're terrified of reality. Would God really love me? If he really knew what was going on, that's why Anna was expressing, saying, "Why would God love me?" She had a hard time accepting that because of how she'd been hurt in her life. Would God really love me? Would God really love me if he really knew what was going on? Or more importantly, and you may be like me, where the people around me love me. What are the people in my life going to think? You know, this has dictated most of my sinful nature. What are you going to think of me? What are you thinking of me right now? I spent a good chunk of the morning in anxiety thinking, "Oh my gosh, they're going to stone me if I don't preach well." They've already got the rotten fruit loaded up in their bags right next to their bibles. I'm terrified of what the leaders are going to think when they hear this on CD. But more importantly, I'm scared of what people are going to really see in my life if I really come clean. You know, I spent my entire adolescence and teenage years in a sexual addiction, pornography. And you can't have an addiction like that without deceit, without darkness. You can't have any addiction without deceit and darkness. And I spent so much of those years knowing that what I was doing was wrong, knowing what I was doing was killing me, it was hurting me, it was hurting the people around me. The terrified that if people really knew what was going on, they wouldn't want to have anything to do with me. How would they let me come into the doors of the church as somebody that grew up going to church that's still spitting in the face of God's offering? How could I ever have a girlfriend or a wife if she really knew how serious my sin was? You know, I still battle with this even today. Not the sexual sin as much anymore, I'm grateful to God that I've been able to have repentance with that. But it's still the exact same. I'm still terrified that people are going to think I'm not spiritual, that they're going to see my flaws, the chinks in my armor. What would you think if after ten years of being a disciple, you found out that I was still struggling to have my quiet times? And some of us are probably feeling the exact same way, it's better if I live in darkness and come to church and put a smile on my face and pretend like everything's okay. We live in fear that our deeds will be exposed. Instead of the comfort, the security, the love that should come from standing in the light of God, from being completely unashamed with who we are before God. Instead we've cower, we hide, we've run away, afraid of our own shadows. But the benefit about God's love when we really understand that Jesus came to die for our sins is that in perfect love, there is no fear. But we have to be willing to pull ourselves out of the image that we think we have to present. The falsehood of spirituality. The hope that we can claim that one day we're actually going to achieve a level of righteousness that's going to be enough for people or enough for God. And God's love, we have nothing to be afraid of. Let me ask you, what are you afraid of? What are you really afraid of? What sin are you holding on to desperately in fear that maybe something might happen to you if you got really honest about this? What insecurities are keeping you from just being completely open and vulnerable and really loving people with unabandoned? What is it that you're afraid of? Number two, I should show the video here before I say my point. Why don't you just cook the breakfast and try not to burn anything? How long are they? 36, count them myself. 36, but no, here, no, here, I've got the sevens. Yeah, well, some of them are quite a bit bigger than last breath. How big they are? Very potter. Number two, the way we can act in front of God's love is like a spoiled child. Turn him by with a loot chapter 15 verse 11 through 13. Yeah, I don't know how you feel watching something like that. This stuff drives me crazy. How do we tend to feel about spoiled children? How do you feel when you see in the grocery store a child that just kicks and complains about the candy bar that they're not getting? Now I was in a video game store and I watched this young girl just talking back to her mom because she couldn't get the video game that she wanted. I call her mom stupid and all these different things. I just kept there thinking like, "Man, I would lift you by your ankles and just thank you until you were purple." I don't even have children, but they will not be like that. Yeah, I say that now. I'll give you the opportunity to do that to my kids when they come around, okay? Verse 11, "Jesus continued, there was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, "Father, give me my share of the estate." So he divided his property between them. Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had and set off for a distant country and they're squandered all his wealth and wild living. Skip on down to verse 25. Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing, so he called one of the servants and asked him, "What was going on?" Your brother has come, he replied, and your father has killed the fat and calf because he has been batched safe and sound. The older brother became angry and refused to go in, so his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, "Look, all these years I've been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when the son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fat and calf for him. My son, the father said, "You're always with me and everything I have is yours." But we had to celebrate and be glad because his brother of yours was dead and is alive again. He was lost and is found. Now, this is a parable we're all familiar with, a parable of the lost son, the parable of the rotten brat, as you might call it. Think about the audacity of the youngest son here, that at some point he gets so fed up with everything that he's had already, everything that's been given to him, that he comes to his father and says, "Dad, I know you're not dead yet, but I don't want to wait for what's rightfully mine when you do die. I want you to liquidate it and give it to me right now." No, 20s and 100s, that would be nice. Think about the audacity there, think about how the father must feel for those of your parents that are out there, how you would feel knowing that your son is saying, "I don't care that you're not dead, I want what's mine. Give me what I want." Imagine the feelings that the father would feel about, "Have I not given you enough? Have I not loved you? Have I not taken care of all your needs?" But it's not good enough. It says he takes his money out, squanders it all in wealth and wild living. And you know the story, he gets massively humbled. God sweeps the rug out from underneath him and he realizes, "Man, what I had back home was much better." And it's easy in this parable to focus on the younger brother because his sin is much more obvious than out there. It's very in our face that if we looked at this guy, imagine the malice and stuff, the things that I would want to say to him, "Who do you think you are?" We can miss the fact that the parable states, when Jesus is talking there, he says, "There's two sons." Two sons in this passage, and actually both of them were using their father's love to get what they wanted, just through different means. One of them was brazen and dared to open his spoiled little mouth and say, "Give me the money that I want right now." But as you look at the older son, when you look at the end, he said, "Father, have I not slain for you? Where's what's mine? Where's my goat? Where's my party?" Both of these brothers were lost. Just one of them was hiding it better than the other one was. The older brother was serving his father looking forward to his reward. They laid dormant for years, until it didn't yield the results that he wanted and as a result, it made him bitter and selfish. In the culture in this time, the mere fact that the older brother wasn't even willing to go into the party was dishonoring to his family. That was something that in the Old Testament you might have been stoned for, but that's how hard his heart had gotten. That's how selfish and bitter that he felt. Maybe he was envious of his younger brother. Maybe I should have gone out and taken him to squander my wealth. Maybe then I would have a party. Instead, I spent all this time trying to serve my father and didn't get what I wanted. Now, this is something for the kingdom kids here in the room that they battle with all the time. This is actually something that I've wrestled with more in my life than maybe anything else. Why aren't things going my way? God, I've been a good kid. I haven't committed adultery. I haven't done drugs. I've never been drunk. When am I going to get the blessings that come my way? Or maybe it took me on the opposite side to say, "Maybe I was missing out, because God didn't bless me the way I wanted to. Maybe I was missing out and I should have gone out to the world to get what I wanted." That's really where I would have felt the comfort and the satisfaction that I really desire from God. You know, I've battled with being the older brother my entire life. Now, I share with you already about how much I struggle with presenting this image of spirituality. That's much like the older brother was here. Look at all that I've done for you, God. I might not study the Bible with all these different people. Don't I show up to church every Sunday? Don't I know the songs? Why aren't you blessing me the way that I want you to? I struggle with this now. I struggle with feeling like, "Where do I get? When do I get what's mine? When is that check going to come in the mail that I'm not expecting that's just going to take care of all my needs for the rest of my life?" Haven't I heard that? We all feel that exact same way, unable and unwilling to see what God has already done for us, blinded to the love that He poured out, and looking for the perks, all the benefits that should come with loving God. We forget that we don't deserve salvation, let alone the opportunity to live like Jesus. We wake up every day with a purpose. What makes us think that we deserve any extra blessings? We've been given everything we need. Everything else from there should cause us to follow our needs and gratitude. Thank you, God, that I have food on the table. Thank you, God, that I've been given an amazing wife who loves you, who loves me in spite of the way that I've treated your daughters in the past. Thank you, God, for the money that I've had, even though I've squandered it on foolish things. I've wasted it. How dare we think that God should give us anything else. And last and finally, last job, you're about to see now was a surprise for a little boy whose dad has been in Iraq. The scene is a small town in northwest Washington state. US Navy Ensign Bill Hawes, who spent the past seven months deployed to Iraq, decided to surprise his six-year-old son, John, at school. John didn't know it till he laid eyes on his dad. It took young John a long time to stop crying, but when he did, he mustered the courage to introduce his dad to his classmates who had all written him letters while he was deployed. It's tough to take, but welcome home, go back with more right after this. It's a very touching video, seeing the emotion that was on the boy's face, as he went running to his dad, just embraced him with open arms. Turn your bibles to 1 Corinthians 15, verse 9. This would have been a very, very different video if the son wasn't anxiously awaiting to see his father. What if when his dad came, he hid in the corner in fear? What if he walked up to his dad and the first thing out of his mouth was, what did you get me from the war? Did you bring me back anything special from Iraq? But instead, what we see is, we see his son content and overwhelmed with just having the ability to wrap his arms around his father. First Corinthians 15, starting verse 9, "Friend, the least of the apostles do not even deserve to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church of God, but by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No I worked harder than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. Whether then it was I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believe. A third response that we can have and should have to God is just being a grateful child. You know Paul, what I love about Paul is throughout all of his letters, as he expresses with humility his realization of who he is, who he is before God, and even who he is before the rest of the people. I don't deserve to be an apostle, I don't deserve to be included among these men. Instead of bragging and boasting about his position in Judaism, which he could have done, he was a Hebrew of Hebrews, Pharisee of Pharisees. Instead of bragging about Jesus appearing to him, he could have done that, nobody else could brag and boast that Jesus appeared to them on the road to Damascus. Instead of expecting God's blessings or love for him in a practical and material way, instead of running away and hiding who he had really been, he embraces his unworthiness, constantly expressing gratitude, but mostly by a changing who he became. You know, gratitude is a funny thing. Nick read the Scripture in Luke about how he who is forgiven much loves much, who is forgiven little loves little. We can look at gratitude as being something that is measured in a mouse. We have to have this much to be forgiven of in order to be grateful, or we have to have come from poverty to appreciate wealth. We have to have been starving to appreciate food. We can look at gratitude as a measure of weights and balances. We can maybe read about Paul and think, well, yeah, it's easy for Paul to be grateful. He was a murderer that he persecuted the church of God. He was well aware of who he was. We don't need that kind of transformation in order to be grateful. You don't need to have been a murderer in a complete pagan to appreciate what God has done. Because if you really look and examine your lives personally, if you are willing to expose everything that's there, lay it bare, shining in the light of Jesus, all the nasty and ugly things that you and I have committed, and there is plenty. I'm enough for more than this whole church. I've got enough sin in my life to fill the auditorium here to the rafters, just as much as any of you do. What makes us think that we have less to be grateful for? Have you earned your salvation more than Paul did? Have you earned God's grace any more than the people on the cross? He says, no, it's but by the grace of God, I am what I am, and His grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. Well, motivated Paul, and we can look at him, we're talking about the second most influential person arguably in history outside of Jesus. But what propelled him and motivated him was he realized how much he had to be grateful for, about how much he'd been forgiven of, about how much he didn't deserve to have God look at him at all. What does God's grace and what does God's love do for you? Is it something that we dwell on that motivates us to change, and we're not talking about ooey-gooey feelings here, we're not talking about something where we just feel so overcome with the motion that we just break down and cry every time we think about it. Hopefully, we get those moments sometimes, gratitude is not about emotion. Me showing my wife I'm grateful for her is not about how much I cry every time I think about her. Me showing gratitude for my life, for my wife is how I show her love by my actions, by my lifestyle being in service to her as a husband. God is no different. The part of why I've expressed this understanding God's love as a child is it takes on a new form of the relationship when we consider God as our Father and us as his children, and that is something that was only given to us as an opportunity through Jesus' sacrifice, but not by mere belief. Let's not mistake that. Let's also not mistake that the day that you got baptized and were saved, that that was enough in gratitude for God. Paul said no, his grace will not be without effect in my life. It motivates me to work harder, to help more people to come to know Jesus, to stand as an example of what God can do with an imperfect and unholy being. Turn your Bible to 2 Corinthians chapter 5, and we'll close out here verse 14. It says, "For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all and therefore all died, and he died for all that those who lived should no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and was raised again." God looked down at the fearful and the cowardly, the selfish and the spoiled, the lazy, the prideful, the liars, the adulterers, he looked down at us and said they're worth my son going to the cross. They're worth saving. They're worth being able to have a relationship with me. They're worth being adopted into my family. We really understand what God's love is, that it's not about the perks, even though there are some. When you look around, I hope you feel grateful for the men and women that God has placed in this room. We have so much to be grateful for if you just look around, but when we really grasp the magnitude of God's love for us, we recognize we have nothing to fear. First John 4 says, "Perfect love drives out fear," because fear has to do with punishment. We realize we've been given more than we could ever ask for. Let me hear the fact that I can stand before you today as a saved child of God is enough for me to be grateful for the rest of my life. Anything else is just an added blessing. For God so loved the world, but the question is, are we going to be grateful children? His love was unconditional and unearned, but is it going to change our lives? Amen Church, I love you guys, to God be the glory. [applause] [BLANK_AUDIO]
Sunday lesson by Jake Rock