1 John 4:12
I’m glad you’re here this morning. Some of you are probably exhausted from all your partying last night and staying up late. While I’m sure others of you enjoyed a full night of sleep! But no matter how you rang in the new year, here we are in 2017! It’s a bit weird thinking 2017 is already here and as I’m planning for youth into 2017 and 2018, it makes me see again how quickly each year goes by.
And for me I’m getting near the end of my bonus year. After I turned 34, I’m not sure what happened, but somewhere in that year I stared to think that I was 35. So for most of the year, I thought I was going to turn 36 on my next birthday. And as I was getting closer to my birthday, I started to take stock of my life and think about who I was and where I was at, and ask myself was I the man I wanted to be at 35 and so on. Then one day it came up with Andrea, and she corrected me and said I was only 34. I disagreed, and said” Andrea I know how old I am”. But them she told me to do the math, and I realized that she was of course right and I was an idiot, but it changed my perspective. It was almost as if I got to relive my year of being 35 to try and catch up to where I assessed I wanted to be. It’s been a really neat year that way. And New Year’s is kind of that way.
I’m not a big New Year’s resolution guy, but New years is a great opportunity/reminder for us to take stock of where we are at and what some goals or changes might be that we want to make in our lives to be better followers of Jesus in every area of our lives. And today I want to talk about God’s love, and where I want to get to is to encourage you that if you could change or improve just one thing this year, that it would be to spend more time with God’s word.
Last time I preached, I talked about God’s purpose for our lives, and the time before that, I touched on how we belong to God’s family. And the last piece of that triangle is our need to be loved. We were created in a way that we all desperately need to be loved. And that statement is complicated. Love is complex. We know that there are different ways we love, through friendships, through romantic love, and of course God’s perfect love, but all of those aspects are important to us because we have been created in God’s image. Of course the problem is that we seek love in the wrong ways – especially when we are not walking with God. We try to get validation from others; we post on social media hoping that a bunch of people will like our status or picture – and we get some sort of fulfillment from that, but the bad part of it is when none of our friends like our status and there’s a wave of wondering what’s wrong with it, was it a bad picture? Don’t people agree? We don’t lose sleep over it or anything, but it’s how we feel; some people try to get fulfilment from romantic relationships; and ultimately so much of these things fail because love is complex. We were created to love in many ways, and yet apart from or out of the context of God’s perfect love for us, it’s a struggle to be content. You see the love between us and God and love between us and others is actually connected. And although you hear the statement ‘God loves you’ all the time (Years ago my mom bought me a great shirt that said Jesus loves you – but I’m his favorite), realistically, after hearing it so much it begins to mean nothing. In fact, if you had heard in advance that today’s message is that God loves you, many of you would probably be like, “Oh boy, thanks pastor for that deep deep message” And I totally get that. But hear me out. But unfortunately, the worst thing is that many many people don’t know or believe that God loves them. That he actually loves them. Sometimes it’s because they have never been told. And they have never even had the opportunity presented to them to experience God’s love. Other times, in church contexts like this, many people hear that God loves them, but they don’t believe it. They feel they have never experienced God’s love. Instead they believe that God is just some ambivalent being who doesn’t care enough to stop the hurting in the word. The common argument is that either God loves us, but is powerless to take away our pain, or he has the power to help us, but doesn’t love us enough to intervene. Many who hear the message over and over -to the point that they are tired of hearing that God loves them- when they are faced with difficulties in life, and God doesn’t make it all disappear, they see it as proof that God doesn’t love them. It’s not that they are hostile to God, but they just feel that yay a, God loves me, but they don’t actually believe it. Sadly, statistically, that’s probably a lot of people in this room. And worse yet, there are some, who feel that they have done so much wrong that God can’t possibly love them, let alone forgive them. They feel they need to get their sins sorted out first so that God will be pleased with them enough to accept them and love them, but they feel they are too far lost in sin to even be able to make that change.