Out and About
The sermon I heard about Christmas was based on 1 Corinthians 13, otherwise known as the love chapter of the Bible. I’m using it as our quote of the week this week and it can be found at the bottom of this column.
We can never hear enough about how much God loves us. Even though I grew up in the church, I don’t think that the reality of God’s love traveled the thirteen inches or so from my brain to my heart until much later in life. Christmas really brings all of this home – to the heart of the matter.
Many like me have had thoughts that God is kind of like Santa keeping a score card of who is naughty or nice and that good things only happen for those found on the nice list. The problem with that is, compared to God’s standard for us – we are all naughty. That is why He loved us enough to send us Jesus to pay the price for our “naughtiness” otherwise known as sin. Jesus was born for one reason, because God loves us. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him shall be saved.” John 3:16.
We have a hard time accepting that God loves us. I know I do. However, He loves us with an everlasting love that is so deep and so broad that we cannot outrun His love for us. God became human in Jesus. God becoming human demonstration a love like nothing else. God wasn’t motivated to come to us in the form of Jesus because He was frustrated with us. He wasn’t trying to prove Himself. God’s motivation to becoming human in the form of Jesus –was singular. God loves us – with a love like nothing else.
Many are kicking the tires of faith – exploring what it means to have a relationship with God.
I want to give you great news today that you can get right with God because of Christ’s birth in Bethlehem and because there is nothing you can do to outrun the goodness and the love of God. It doesn’t matter who you are, what you have done, what you have come from or anything in your past or anything coming in your future. God loves you with an everlasting love and that is what Christmas and Bethlehem is all about.
God became human in the form of Jesus because He knew that we wouldn’t be able to comprehend that a relationship with God was something we could grasp so he emptied himself taking on the form of a servant and became a man. The step Jesus took from heaven to earth shows love.
“…although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, [and] being made in the likeness of men.” Phil 2:6-7
Read any gospel, Mathew, Mark, Luke, or John and you will see how Jesus demonstrated love. Jesus showed us how to love: in the way He left heaven, the way He loved here, and the way He left here. God is Love, Jesus is Love. Substitute God and Jesus for the underlined words below and perhaps you can begin to understand the nature of God’s love for us.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. 1 Corinthians 13:4-8a (ESV)
Matthew 1:23 – “Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which is translated, “God with us.”