It makes sense because when you love
Good morning, church. So we've been doing pastoral
letters the whole Advent season, and I get the privilege to read
my letter to you all this morning.
So here we go. Frontier Church, Grace and peace
for my Lord Jesus Christ, who has been so gracious to call me
to pastor you out of all the responsibilities that I carry to
pastor you is among the most joyful.
Whenever I go before the Lord in prayer for you, one thing
continues to come to mind as I sit across from you at cafes or
in premarital counseling or listen to you over the phone.
One request from God continues to roll off of my lips, and it's
this. Lord, don't let them get dulled
even as I write those words. It seems pretty fitting given
what tomorrow is during the Advent season.
There's tons of anticipation, singing and lights, ugly
sweaters, great cocktails and amazing food.
And it all culminates on Christmas Day.
But something happens on the 26th.
Lights, singing and celebration that made sense yesterday seems
too much for today. If you aren't careful, this
could be your experience with Jesus.
The things that seem to excite you about him could become
dulled or even seem irrelevant. Today.
The beauty of his words may become dulled by the business of
life. The comfort of being in his
presence could turn into, could turn boring by the amusement
that the world offers. The great privilege of sharing
his good news and pursuing justice could become less urgent
as we become more consumed with our screens.
Lord, don't let them get dulled. The Lord has been really good to
us. He has.
He's grown our congregation. He's provided us with a good
bank account. He's given us this building.
But my prayer and my encouragement is to not let our
growing stability coax us into comfort.
Don't allow yourself to drift into the sea of dullness.
Pursue Jesus in his word because there is treasures of joy hidden
for you to discover. Don't stop asking God how you
could be used because remember, your life is a holy and
sanctified sacrifice to God that brings a smile to his face.
Never become satisfied with who God has become to you.
But like our forefather Abraham, wrestle with God until he
blesses you. Lord, don't let them get dulled.
This is my prayer for you, and I am confident that the Lord Jesus
won't answer that prayer. I'm confident because the work
to make all that and more and all that I've said possible has
been accomplished already for you.
This is the good news of the gospel.
It's not just that God will save you because He can and He will.
It's not just that God puts you in the right standing with Him
because you are justified in His sight.
It's not just that at the end of your life you you will be
glorified like He is because if you saw your future self, you'd
be tempted to worship yourself. No, the gospel is also the good
news that in the here and now, even after the lights go out and
the decorations come down and you find yourself in the daily
grind of following Jesus at work, at home, and in your
community, God is transforming you into the very image of Jesus
from the inside out. He won't let you get dulled.
I am confident in this because this is my experience too.
I too am distracted. I too am way too busy.
I too at times yawn in the face of God.
I too find myself ignoring my neighbors from time to time.
But if there's been one consistency in my life, it's
that God is fully committed to me and he is fully committed to
you too. And he will not let your hearts
get dulled. No, He will keep us until the
coming of our Lord Jesus, who will wipe away every tear from
our eyes, bandage up every womb that we have, and will kill
death itself. To Him be the glory in our
church and in our hearts forever.
He is worthy of all praise. Amen.
Jesus, we thank you. I thank you for this church.
I thank you that you have called me to pastor these people.
And I just pray, Lord, that you would not let our hearts grow
dulled. Lord, after tomorrow I pray that
you would just continue to remind us, Lord, that you are
here, that you have come and you will come back.
And so I pray for my brother Cole as he comes and preaches.
Lord, I pray that you would give him a very real presence, a very
real experience of your presence up here this morning.
I pray that our hearts will be softened to the gospel and to
His words. Lord and I pray, Lord, that we
would be forever changed by what this brother has to say for us.
We thank you in Jesus name. Amen.
Good to see you guys. If you have a Bible, go ahead
and get that open to John chapter 3.
We're looking at verse 16. It's probably the the one spot
in your Bible you've got highlighted already, so go ahead
and get there. My name is Cole.
If we haven't met, I'm one of the pastors here.
I get to preach here on on most Sundays, but the Sunday before
Christmas, Historically, what the church has done has focused
on the love of God through the coming of Jesus.
And so that's going to be our focus this morning is the love
of God, theologically, practically, biblically, the
love of God. My goal is, I don't know what
your week looks like, but my goal is to sow, preach on the
love of God that we are filled so much with the love of God
that we just float out of church this morning and into our
Christmas plans. Wouldn't that be awesome?
So let me pray and then I will jump into it.
Heavenly Father, open. Open up our eyes to your glory
this morning as we think about just the wonders of Christmas
and the amazing particularities of the Christian story.
It's not it's it's not that we just believe in some distant,
nebulous God somewhere. That's that's not Christianity.
Christianity is the historical position that we believe that
God took on flesh in the person of Jesus Christ and came into
the darkness. And when that light came into
the darkness, that light gave us hope, and that light gave us
peace, and that light gave us joy, and that light drew close
to us to give us love. And that light's name was Jesus.
So in the midst of our darkness, in the midst of holiday
craziness, I pray that we would see the light.
So in Jesus name we pray. Amen.
Kids say the craziest things, especially when you have a four
year old who you just saw, who also acts and talks like a
teenager. We were.
We were at Chick-fil-A last week.
Like most weeks, we were at Chick-fil-A, having a good
lunch. I was talking with my
father-in-law, hanging out with Chloe's dad.
And so the kids, obviously, they're at Chick-fil-A, they're
right next to the play place. So they blast through their
meal, they blast through their lunch, and when they're finished
with the lunch, they run into the play place and they start
playing and making new friends. And so I'm sitting there, you
know, hanging out with Chloe's dad talking.
It's been a couple minutes since I've seen my kids in there, so
I'm like, maybe I should go check on them.
So I pitter patter on into the play place.
I open up the door. I look around.
I don't, I don't see my kids anywhere.
I see Russell somewhere. But then I see Della's shoes
just around the corner. She's she's hiding underneath
the playground equipment with a new friend that she just met.
And so I I go over and I peek my head under and I say, hey
sweetie, are you having fun? And rather than answering my
question, she looks at her friend.
And she doesn't just look at her friend, she looks at her friend
out of the sides of her eye. She side eyes me like this,
cocks her head this way like she's an embarrassed teenager.
Doesn't even look at me. And instead hey Della, how's it
going sweetheart? She looks at her new friend and
says, that's my dad. He always looks at my eyes like
that. It's like, ow, who taught you to
talk like that? Like a teenager in in a movie
who's already embarrassed by her father.
Apparently I'd looked at her with some sort of visible love
that she found embarrassing. Right.
My, that's my dad. He always looks at my eyes like
that. The truth is that I don't right.
She gets other looks sometimes. My loving, my loving gaze.
It it oscillates. It's here.
One moment, gone the next moment.
That's my dad always looks at me like that.
Wouldn't it be nice if God always looked at you like that,
With a loving gaze in his eyes? That's the message of Christmas.
Let's stand for the reading of God's word.
What is the basis of of this claim?
What's the root of God's love for us?
What's the sure foundation we can look at and be certain of
His love for us? Here's what John says for God so
loved the world that here's the expression of it.
Here's the surety of it. Here's the certainty of it.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that
whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal
life. So the advent of Jesus, the the
coming of Jesus according to John 316 is God's historical
objective expression of his love to the world.
So it's on this foundation that I can look at you as your pastor
from behind the word of God and say to you, God loves you.
He does. You can have a seat for God so
loved the world that he gave his only Son.
God loves you like he loves you a lot.
Like he really, really historically loves you.
He loves you abundantly. He loves you extravagantly.
He loves you with the love that is so over the top that if you
could see it clearly and comprehend it clearly right now,
it would make you blush and look out of the side of your eyes.
And what I want us to know this Christmas is I want us to notice
in the biblical text how we can be certain of God's love for us.
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.
And so follow the flow of There's a flow of logic right
here that hinges on the word, that God's expression of his
love. God so loved the world that how
does he express it? He sends Jesus to us.
So the flow of logic here is that God expresses his love to
us. Not by filling our bank
accounts, not by making the pain go away, not by taking away the
depression, not by making life easy.
God expresses his love for us by giving us Jesus, which sometimes
feels like a cop out because we've heard that theologically.
It's like, yeah, OK, I get that. I was just hoping for a
different gift. But the deepest level of who you
are, it makes sense. It makes sense because when you
love somebody, you don't just give them trinkets or things,
you give them yourself, right? That's that's the highest
expression of gift giving, is to be able to give yourself.
And that's what we're seeing here in John Three is God the
Father giving God the Son to us so that we can have all of God
that's his Christmas present to us.
And the amazing thing when you read the Bible is this gift
comes packaged and wrapped up in such a way that it displays
God's love for us perfectly. I'm going to knock these over.
Let's get that out of the way right now.
The way the gift comes packaged and wrapped up to us is
theologically important. It displays God's love to us
perfectly. Here's Luke, chapter 2.
You've read this, You've heard this.
But what I want you to notice as I read this really quickly is
that it describes not just the wrapping paper in the bow, but
the very box that the present comes in.
Here's here's Luke. He says quote and Mary gave
birth to her first born son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes
and laid him in a Manger. Everybody say Manger.
Just the kids say Manger. A Manger.
God's presence comes in a Manger.
Want to know how much God loves you.
Jesus was born for you in a Manger.
It's not a crib. Sometimes you picture a crib but
the the old hymns make this clear.
Crystal clear right away. In a Manger, No crib for a bed,
right? Sometimes you picture a crib.
It doesn't make any sense. I didn't think Jesus got into
the inn. What's so the inn just has a
crib sitting outside? No, because a manger's not a
crib. What's a Manger?
It was ancient farm equipment. Specifically what a Manger was.
And everybody in Jesus's context would have pictured.
This is a feeding through for animals now to build feeding
troughs. 2000 years ago they didn't use sheet metal or really
expensive you know metal or tin or whatever they make them out
of now right? So a Manger in Jesus day and age
would have been cut out of jagged and rough stone.
So picture that rough stone with animal food in it.
Rough stone with a swarm of flies surrounding it.
Rough stone with rats crawling through it.
Rough stone with slobber from the farm animals covering it.
In other words, being born in a through in an ancient world was
like being born in a dumpster. Why?
Why was Jesus born?
Why was it necessary, according to God's provision, for his son
to be born in a in a feeding through?
We'll picture it for a second, right?
There's Mary. She's just given birth to God in
the flesh. There's Joseph trying to fulfill
his duties as a dad. He can't get into the end.
So he's like, where am I? Where do I put this baby?
Right. So there's some farm equipment
over here. They walk on over, right to the
Manger cut out of stone and they lay God in the flesh.
God's gift to the world in a feeding through.
So picture Christ as an infant in the feeding through and as
you do. What you'll see is you can
already see Christ beginning his life of suffering for you.
The abrasive stone bruising, his tender newborn skin, the germs
threatening to give him a life threatening illness.
There were no baby wipes in the ancient world.
A bloodthirsty ruler, King Herod, already trying to kill
him. This is not, by the way.
This is not the way that kings were born in the ancient world.
In the ancient world, when somebody gave birth to a king,
it looked like the scene from Lion King, right?
All pomp and splendor and glamour and a crowd of people
and epic music and holding the baby up and everybody celebrates
it. Not Jesus.
Jesus is placed in farm equipment.
He's laying down in a feeding through.
Why is this the case? Why is it necessary that for God
to express his love to us, his gift has to be packaged in a
feeding through? And I think the answer is this,
because that feeding through foreshadows your heart.
God knows that you have a heart of stone.
God knows that your heart's infested with all of the wrong
thoughts. God knows that your heart is
infested with all the sinful desires.
He knows that it's filled with slobber and rats and flies.
And he wants you to know, through the gift of a son that
he's still comfortable being in there.
That's where he started his life, and it's where he's going
to spend eternity indwelling in his people, right?
Let me say it this way. The birth of Jesus proves to us
that the love of God is comfortable dwelling in a Manger
of stone and a heart of stone. God loves you so much they sent
Jesus to suffer from you, to save you for your sin, and then
he dwells in your heart of stone and makes it into a heart of
flesh. In other words, God loves you a
lot, and he wants to make that abundantly clear to you in every
imaginable way. That's the message of Christmas.
God loves you first by putting infant Jesus into a Manger, and
God loves you finally by putting King Jesus into your heart.
It's how God loves us through Jesus Christ.
He loves us through Jesus. God doesn't love you because
you're lovable. God doesn't love you because of
your morality. God doesn't love you because of
your spirituality. God doesn't love you because of
your works. He doesn't love you because he's
good. He doesn't love you because you
are lovable. And thank God because our
lovability oscillates, doesn't it?
And we are lovable when we've had our morning cup of coffee
and then we are not When we have our afternoon crash.
We're lovable with eight hours of sleep, and we are not with
seven hours of sleep. Our loveliness is it.
It's here. One moment it's gone.
It's Flash and Pam. If God loved us on the basis of
our lovability, there would be nothing to love.
And so God doesn't love us because we are lovable.
God loves us because God is loving.
It proceeds forth from who he is.
It proceeds forth from his eternal character.
And that means that if the love of God is not rooted in your
loveliness, then the love of God is unconditional.
And that's good news. Amen.
Because that baby in a Manger. Jesus grew up and he met every
condition necessary for the love of God.
Jesus was obedient. Jesus was sinless.
Jesus was righteous. Jesus checked off all of those
boxes for you. And that means through faith in
Jesus you get all of his accomplishments and you have to
meet zero conditions for God to love you.
It's unconditional love. And since it's unconditional
love, then God's love has rested on you from before eternity
began. Because God is love, which means
there's nothing outside of Him that dictates his nature.
There's nothing outside of him that changes his mind.
There's nothing outside of him that persuades him to love you
because God is love. His choice to love you happened
before the cosmos even existed. You have been loved longer than
the universe has even existed. It was set on you from before
eternity began, and if God's love was set on you from before
eternity began, then God's love will rest on you for eternity
past. To quote the old theologian
Gerhardt's Voss. And this is a sentence that I
can barely utter without shivering.
Voss said Quote The best proof that God will never stop loving
us lies in the fact that he never began.
Why won't God ever stop loving you?
Because he never started loving you.
It proceeds forth eternally from who He is and his very
character. There's not a date you can
circle on the calendar and say that's when God started loving
me, when I got my act together wrong.
There's not a date you can circle on the calendar in the
future and say that's when God is going to stop loving me.
Wrong. God's love has been set on you
from eternity past to eternity future, and that means that you
will always and forever without end or variation, exist in the
loving gaze of God. And the certainty of the love of
God resting on you has one fact holding it all up, that God so
loved the world He gave his only Son, Jesus.
For you. This is the very Jesus is the
very foundation of the love that we celebrate for Christmas.
It is the objective love of God historically expressed in God
sending Jesus for us. Come on.
Amen. It's Jesus.
That's how we know God loves us. It's Jesus.
It's always been Jesus. It always will be Jesus.
Jesus is God's public display of affection for us.
Jesus is God's love letter to humanity.
Jesus is God's DM in your inbox. Jesus is love covered in the
flesh. Jesus is objective evidence that
God loves you. Jesus is concrete data that God
loves you. And don't mistake what I'm
saying about the love of God as a newfangled or trendy
understanding of God. This is the historical and
biblical position on the character of God.
Consider these. Marie will have these on the
screen for you. This is this is Saint John from
2000 years ago. He said quote, God is, love is
or 400 years later, how about Saint Augustine?
Augustine came along in the four hundreds and said, quote, God
loves each of us as if there were only one of us.
There's only one cold, Ike, I'm going to pour all of my love
into him, right? Each of us as if there were only
one of us. Couple 100 years later in the
1600s, here's John Owen. He says, quote, the greatest
unkindness you can do to God is not to believe that he loves
you. You need some time with that
one. Or how about Ji Packer from the
1900s quote, God's love is like himself, unchanging.
He came once, 2000 years ago because he loves you and he's
coming back. You want to know why?
Because he loves you. Amen.
And so now, because of the gospel of Jesus, because of the
sending of God's very own Son for us, your Father, He always
looks at you like that, always without variance, without
shadow, without change. You exist in Jesus Christ.
You exist under the loving gaze of God always.
Even when God disciplines us, He looks at you with love.
Even when God corrects us, He looks at you with love.
In this moment, He looks at you with love.
Tomorrow He looks at you with love.
You could you could no easier escape the law of gravity than
you can escape his loving gaze. God loves you a lot.
A lot. And his love for you isn't a
cheap message written for you on a holiday coffee cup sleeve.
It's a message that's carved for you in the stone of a Manger
that holds the very love of God in human form.
So that every time we look this Christmas season at the Infant
Christ and a Manger, I hope we see a reflection of the love of
God being born once again in US. The fact that God loves me that
much. God loves you extravagantly.
God loves you abundantly. God loves you eternally.
God loves you so much that if you comprehended it, it would
make you blush. His love is set on you
permanently. Your Father, He always looks at
you like that. All because 2000 years ago He
sent Jesus Christ as His gift for us.
So let the weary world rejoice and Merry Christmas, Heavenly
Father, I pray that we would feel, experienced, know, believe
the love of God. For us, the love of God is not
just pure sentimentalism, although hopefully it does
include our feeling experience of it.
But the love of God for us is an objective fact.
And I know it's easy to sit underneath a message about God
expressing his love for us in the person of Jesus and think,
yeah, but I wish you would have expressed his love for me by
filling my bank account or by making my life easier or
whatever it is. And I understand that feeling.
But we also need to be people who look at the scriptures and
say who cares what our love language is?
God's love language is the gospel, and he has given us his
very own self in the person of Jesus.
He was born in a Manger, and that Manger prefigures the cross
that he died on. And so, Lord, I pray that you
would wake us up to the love of God that dwells in each of us
through the indwelling person of Jesus.
Jesus is amazing and we thank you for giving him to us.
So it's in His name that we pray.
Amen. What's up, dude?
Rocket and Spiderman? I'll feel like it.