Advent 4: The Love Of God

Advent 4 Sermon - Love - December 19, 2021

I want to start with a question. Are you ready for a question? If you could have any 3 words spoken to you by someone you truly care for, what would they be? [Await response]

Well, a survey was done some years back, and participants in the survey were asked this question.......what 3 word sentence would you most like to hear or have said to you ? The top three answers were 1. I love you.....2. I forgive you.......3. Supper is ready. How does that relate to Advent? Listen and I’ll tell you.

Let’s look at this word, since it’s the focus of today’s advent theme: Love

Love. What do you love? What it is that you love most in your life. What do you really cherish?

Love is a strange word in the English language. It’s a word that carries great weight, and conveys deep human and divine emotion and affection on the one hand. On the other hand, in modern usage, the word "love" gets applied to all kinds of what are really "likes". You know what I mean: "I love that TV show"; I love that kind of chocolate";"I love that game"; “I love sleeping in in the morning”.

Like many people, I might say that I love music, I love the arts, I love staring at beautiful paintings, I love nature, creation; I love good literature, a good movie, a good TV series, and there are a lot of them nowadays.

But of all of the things that I've seen and experienced in my 59 years on this planet, nothing comes anywhere near close the beauty of Jesus. There is no one who evokes a love response in me that’s close to Jesus. I am profoundly in love with my wife. I deeply love my children and grandchild. I’m completely committed to them.

But Jesus - Immanuel - God with us. There’s none like Him. There is none like Him. There is no greater love than His. There is no greater gift than the gift of His love.

And as personal as Jesus is to me, as life-changing as his presence has been in my life, the truth is that Jesus has made an enormous impact on all of human history. In fact human history can be thought of as being in two parts.

There is everything that has happened since the beginning of time. That includes all that has been created. That includes all the years and millennia that humans did not walk this earth, and it includes all of human development since the first man and the first woman. It would take a library the size of Toronto to record all of that. Ridiculously large volumes of data.

So that's a lot of things. And what would it take to bust history in half, to create a break in history, to create a tear between one time and another time, to be such a rapture to the fabric of time as to create a division in history?

What would it take to reboot history and require it to start fresh, with yet a new beginning. Perhaps a comet from outer space that threatened to blast the world to bits. That would be a significant marker in time. Existence itself would have to start all over again. Don’t worry. This comet will just pass us by.

What could divide time, the way humans think of time?

Perhaps the founding of an empire that was to outdo all other empires. But history is full of human empires - the Han Dynasty, the Mongol Empire, the Greek empire, the Roman empire, The Ottoman empire, The Holy Roman Empire. These were huge, powerful human creations that dominated their regions of the planet. They were each a massive big deal. But none of them were big enough to divide time.

What could divide time? What could be the reason that we’re at the end of 2021 and that it’s not December 4021? That your birth year is what it is? Mine is 1962. Yours could be 5374 but for an event that reset all time.

And if something did happen in our history to mark a division between all that had gone before and all that came after, would you think that that would be worth spending some time to learn about it? I honestly think so. And I honestly believe that the quality of our lives will change when we embrace what happened to divide the way we count time forever.

One of the most wonderful and peculiar things about the Christian faith is that it recognizes that the axis that time turned on was...perhaps surprisingly, an infant. A baby boy to be precise, who divided all of history.