A Love That Chooses
Res Spears
Advent 2021 • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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As he neared the end of what we know as Romans, chapter 8, that great chapter about the glorious and gracious work of God in salvation, the Apostle Paul had already discussed the hope that followers of Jesus Christ have in the resurrection, and he had talked about the Spirit of Peace whose presence within a person confirms him or her as a child of God.
The whole chapter rings with the joy of Paul’s theology of salvation, the assurance that it is a work that begins and ends with God.
And so, we see three of our Advent themes — hope, peace, and joy — scattered throughout this marvelous and beautiful passage of Scripture that I shared with you on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, the last Sunday before Advent started.
But I would submit to you that the most important of the Advent themes you see on these banners over here is the one we are highlighting today — love.
Paul recognized the centrality of love to a proper understanding of salvation, and he surely would not have left it out of this passage.
Indeed, if as some commentators have said, Scripture is like beautiful ring and the Book of Romans the precious gem in its setting and chapter 8 the sparkling point of that stone, then I believe the concluding verses about the love of God in Christ Jesus are in fact the very sparkle itself.
If you can remember my presentation of this chapter a few weeks ago, you might recall that it reached a crescendo in the last four or five verses. And that’s because I think that Paul was here coming to the high point of his praise for God.
The language that he uses here is unrestrained, and I can almost see him smiling from ear to ear — and maybe even jumping up and down — as he dictated these verses to his secretary.
These verses are what makes this stone a precious gem, the reason it sparkles and glimmers as it does, the cause for our great delight, for without the love of God in Christ Jesus, neither hope nor peace nor joy would be available to mankind.
But because of God’s great and gracious love for us, all of those things are available to those who have been adopted into the family of God through faith in His Son.
We who have followed Jesus in faith have been joined to Him in love. Paul uses the phrase “in Christ” to describe this new position we occupy. And then he asks how that position could ever be put in jeopardy.
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
We followers of Jesus have been joined to Him because of His love for us. We are overwhelming conquerors THROUGH His love for us. And we can have confidence in God’s continued love for us because we are in Christ, God’s beloved Son.
Notice that love is at the root of it all. But it’s not our love for God that makes this possible; rather, it is God’s love for us.
Remember — God demonstrates His love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
It’s tempting for us to think that this all began in a manger in Bethlehem, where a young virgin girl and her betrothed husband watched over the child who had been born that night.
And in a sense, it is true that love came down that night in Bethlehem. In His incarnation, Jesus, the unique and eternal Son of God, set into motion the events that 33 years later would lead to the cross, where His love for mankind was demonstrated most clearly, as He suffered and died so that we might have eternal life — everlasting life in perfect fellowship with Him and with His Father, the way it was always meant to be.
But John, one of Jesus’ 12 disciples, who is often called the Apostle of Love because of his focus on God’s love in both his Gospel and his letters, reminds us that the incarnation of Jesus was simply the manifestation of God’s love.
We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.
God IS love. It is, perhaps, His defining characteristic. His righteousness is a function of His love. His grace is the fruit of His love. Even His holiness can be described as an aspect of His love.
And so, what we see in the Nativity, when we look at that helpless child in the manger and recognize Him as the Word, who was with God in the beginning, the Son of God who has existed in perfect fellowship and harmony with the Father and the Holy Spirit for eternity, and the one through whom all things came into being — when we see these things, we see the love of God placed into the body of an infant boy.
When we begin to understand what Jesus had to set aside for the incarnation, then how can we see anything other than His great love for us?
Paul talks about that in his letter to the church in Philippi:
Therefore if there is any encouragement in Christ, if there is any consolation of love, if there is any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and compassion, make my joy complete by being of the same mind, maintaining the same love, united in spirit, intent on one purpose. Do nothing from selfishness or empty conceit, but with humility of mind regard one another as more important than yourselves; do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others. Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.
Jesus existed through eternity in the form of God, the morphe in the Greek, which refers to Him holding equal station with God, sharing in position, honor, and power with His Father.
But instead of grasping or holding onto that position of honor and power, He emptied Himself of the honor He deserves as one member of the Trinity, and He took upon Himself the form of a man. He came as a servant, obedient, as Paul puts it in the next verse, “to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
And back at the beginning of this chapter, Paul connects these actions of Jesus to love, calling on the Philippians to make his joy complete by, among other things, “maintaining the same love” among themselves that Jesus demonstrated in His life and in His death on the cross.
At the manger, we see the eternal Son of God setting aside His glory and honor in love to be born as a helpless child among a bunch of smelly animals.
And at the cross, we see the King of kings and Lord of lords humbling Himself in love to die naked and nearly alone, covered in blood and carrying the guilt of the sins of the world, even though He had committed none of His own.
I think there is a lesson for us in the shared circumstance of humility between the manger and the cross. Real love requires humility. Real love sets aside its own rights and privileges and honor. Real love chooses to love even when it hurts.
Last month, Annette and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary, and she gave me a box of my favorite cigars, 20 of them. And each cigar had a special band around it on which she had written one special memory she had from our years together, so that as I get ready to enjoy one of those cigars, I will unwrap her band from it and be reminded of one of the things that has been special to her.
It has been wonderful to read those memories, and I still have a bunch to unwrap, but one of them just blew me away. Here’s what it said: “The day I realized that I was going to make this marriage work, no matter what happened.”
I’m sure it’s plain to most of you that I’m not an easy person to live with, but what many of you don’t know is that there was a time, before we were saved, when I was an absolutely terrible husband.
I’m certainly not boasting about that, and I wish I could go back and change it all, but I WILL boast about what God has done in me. I am a different person now than I was then, even though I still am far from the perfect husband.
Back then, Annette surely had every reason to give up on me. But she didn’t. She chose, instead, to humbly set aside her right to expect a husband who loved and treated her well and to love me through it all.
And God honored that choice when we were saved not long after that by changing me, by saving our marriage, and by making me realize what a treasure I have in her.
In these two passages from Philippians and 1 John today, Paul and John are both arguing that we who have experienced the love of God should demonstrate that same love toward one another.
“Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus,” Paul says.
“Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another,” John writes.
And the conclusion — that we should love one another — is certainly a valid one and an important one.
But today, for the rest of this message, I want to focus on the premise upon which this conclusion is built: God so loved us.
You see, in order for Paul to say that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, we first have to be connected to that love. We first have to be people who are “in Christ.”
And the simple fact is that if God had not chosen to love us, no matter what happened, we never could have experienced real love.
John puts it this way: We love, because He first loved us.
We were created, back in the Garden of Eden, in His own image — to reflect His character as the God who IS love, the God who had eternally existed in three Persons submitting to one another in perfect fellowship and harmony — in perfect shalom or peace.
But we rebelled against shalom. We rebelled against harmony. Instead of submitting to our creator in loving obedience, Adam and Eve set out to put themselves in His place.
And each one of us does the same thing whenever we sin. We choose to define what is good and what is evil according to our own terms, rather than God’s terms.
And God warned way back in that garden that sin would bring death into the world. It would bring the physical death to which we are all destined, and it would bring spiritual death — separation from He who had created us to be in fellowship with Him.
He brought light out of darkness, and we brought darkness into the light.
And God would have had every right to condemn His creation then and there. After all, the one who makes something has every right to determine what happens to it.
But even in that Garden, as Adam and Eve stood before Him in their sin and shame, God promised that He would one day redeem mankind from the choice it had made to put its trust in Satan, the deceiver, rather than in the God who is truth.
And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her seed; He shall bruise you on the head, And you shall bruise him on the heel.”
Bible scholars generally agree that this verse refers to Jesus, who would be bruised on the head as He died for the sins of mankind on Calvary’s cross.
But in His resurrection from the dead, Jesus would once and for all gain victory over Satan, that serpent of old, because at the cross He paid the penalty for the sins of all who would follow Him in faith.
And you should understand that this wasn’t a plan that God came up with on the spur of the moment after Adam and Eve had sinned.
Paul writes in Ephesians, chapter 1, that God “chose us in [Christ] before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him.”
In other words, before they sinned — in fact, even before He created Adam and Eve — God had planned to send Jesus as our redeemer.
This is a love that loves, no matter what happens. This is a love that humbles itself in order to lift up those who deserve only to be kicked to the curb.
And so, we see throughout Old Testament history, God working out this plan of salvation through a choosing love that chooses in humility to love those who don’t deserve it.
He chose Abraham, a man from a family of idol worshipers, to father a nation.
He named that nation Israel and called them His chosen people, rescuing them from slavery in Egypt and giving them a land of promise, where they reaped crops they had not sewn, drank wine from grapes they had not planted, and lived in houses they had not built.
He chose a king who was a murderer and rapist to be the one through whose bloodline His Son would be born.
He chose an ordinary young girl in an ordinary little town in Roman-controlled Judea to be the mother of His incarnate Son.
He chose a bunch of fishermen, and a tax collector, and a ruthless killer, and other outcasts from Jewish society to be the ones who would carry the good news of Jesus Christ to Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.
Throughout biblical history, we see God choosing outcasts, and cowards, and murderers — in other words, sinners, just like you and me — to be the people who would experience His love.
This isn’t what anyone would expect. We would expect Him to choose the pious, the righteous, the good.
But in choosing just the people we would NOT expect, God shows us two things. First, He shows us that none of us deserves His love.
Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” In other words, blessed are those who recognize that they bring nothing to the gates of heaven that would put God in their debt. Blessed are those who recognize that they are spiritually bankrupt.
God loves us, because God is gracious and not because we have done anything to deserve His love. We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.
God’s love for us is His gracious choice. He loved us while we were yet sinners, while we were still in rebellion against Him and His righteous kingdom.
And the second thing God shows us by choosing the people we would not expect Him to choose throughout biblical history is that nobody is so broken and sinful as to be beyond the reach of His grace.
When God determined, from before the foundation of the world, to love you, He knew exactly the ways in which you would rebel against Him.
When Jesus looked out from that cross at Calvary, He knew exactly what your sins would be, and He hung there and experienced the physical and spiritual death God had said would result from sin so that you could be redeemed, so that you could be delivered from the punishment of a righteous God who loves with justice.
This was the plan before the Garden of Eden. This was the plan IN the Garden of Eden. This was the plan when Jesus lay in that manger. This was the plan at the cross. This was the plan at the empty tomb.
God is love, and love came down on that night in Bethlehem so that love could hang on a tree at Calvary.
Love humbled Himself in a manger so that love could humble Himself on a cross.
And love says to you today what He said through His Son nearly 2,000 years ago: “For God so LOVED the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
God has chosen to love you, but you must choose whether you will accept His love.
That baby in the manger in Bethlehem was the greatest gift ever given, but you must choose whether you will accept that gift.
The choice is yours to make. How will you choose?