This is Love
Easter Sunday (April 21, 2019) – Brad Bailey
[In the following message given at Easter, the following resurrection narrative was read earlier in the service: John 20:1, 16-22 (NIV).]
Intro: As we come to engage what today is all about, it will be helpful to personally consider:
How big is your world?
What is the ultimate reality in which you exist?
We do well to ask ourselves that question…because what we engage on this day bears the power to transforms our limited perspective.
The current trend for many today… is to believe that “This is all there is.”
• Maybe it represents a type of courage to face a hard truth.
• Maybe it is deemed to be associated with being a person of facts over faith.
> But if we allow ourselves to reflect a little more deeply… it seems to me that such a posture reflects the same lack of limited perspective that has always proven to be wrong in our assumptions.
For a long time… we believed that the world was flat…that of we ventured too far…or sailed too far…we would drop off the edge. We may laugh at that idea now…but it made sense given that everything appears flat. Then we understood that we lived on a spherical planet…but we believed that the sun revolved around the earth…after all…it appears to rise each day… we assumed we were the center… but we would come to realize that we are but a small planet rotating around the sun. Again…the problem… a limited perspective.
At each juncture human beliefs became certain that they understood reality… because it was assumed that we had enough perspective. And so we should wonder why we should presume that we know the whole of reality today. And in fact the most current understanding in physics points to a realm that lies outside time and space as we know it. And that gives reason to assume that we are the finite… who cannot presume to grasp the infinite.
And the event we come to today… declares that indeed the world is bigger…infinitely bigger.
Jesus comes confronting the limited perspective. In fact, when Jesus came, there was already a parallel view… “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”
[1] Listen to what Jesus said…
John 3:11, 13-16 (NIV) ?I tell you the truth, we speak of what we know, and we testify to what we have seen… 13 No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven--the Son of Man. 14 Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, 15 that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. 16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
Jesus confronts our presumption to think we understand the big picture. How can you presume to know what is beyond you? He has come from the heavenly realm.
He is the intersection of two realms.
He declared that the God behind all creation was at hand…and breaking into this world…restoring it… redeeming it. Everything about him revealed something beyond this world. A curtain was opened… and then it seemed to close… he was crucified. He hadn’t simply died… he was crucified by the very powers that rule this world…and that first Sunday morning… we find his followers back to hiding…some willing to go treat the dead…because death had won.
How many of us may have felt a longing stirred… connected with...only to then seem confused… return into a safe mode….and in our own ways… we are just ‘treating death’… wrapping up death.
The event that we celebrate in Easter…Christ defeating the powers of this world… including death… radically transforms our understanding of what defines our lives.
Jesus declares that we exist within a larger reality and a larger story.
The resurrection was not merely a moment.
Rooted in real life…in real time and space living… but it is that which reveals what is timeless.
It is in the story…but redefines the whole story. [2]
Jesus would surmise the story line this way…
“For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” - John 3:16
> “For God so LOVED…” – At the root of what we come to today…is love.
Behind the whole of the life, death, and raising of Christ… is the power of divine love.
The resurrection of Christ reveals…
1. There is a Love that rules all of life.
The resurrection declares the power of the personal and eternal Love that lies behind all of life.
One of the greatest challenges to understanding this reality…is that the very word “love” is used to speak of so many things.
As is often noted… we use the English word love to speak of many things… like food we love…or places we love… or about the special feeling we may have for someone.
(You can even have love at first sight but that’s probably not a good idea since love is also blind.)
To understand the love of God behind all existence…we need to realize that such love is not merely the warm and flighty feeling we usually associate with love.
The love of God is not merely an emotion or feeling. It does not wait passively to arise …and then go away when the right chemistry is gone…or it doesn’t enjoy what it once enjoyed.
It is an unchanging force.
• A love that is eternal.
God is eternal… has always existed. In fact the very word “existence” may not even be fitting of how we speak of God.… because all existence comes from God.
So the love of God is what has always been… what is… and will always be.
• A love that is personal.
Not merely some impersonal force with some type of frequency and vibrations we try to resonate with. Love by it’s very nature is personal… profoundly personal… it’s what lies between persons. And in Christ the very nature of God is revealed to be one god in three persons… Father, Son, and Spirit. An eternal community of love. Our existence is an extension.
This love is personal, but it is not like our romantic feelings that follows an inner need to be wanted … but closer to the force of a protector… to the nature of a mother’s sacrificial love more
It is the love that loves when rejected.
This is that which gives of itself for the good of another not based on what the other does for it.
• A love that exists in itself… beyond need.
When we are loved by another person… it is always the love of one who by nature has needs as well. And as such… the nature of love is always sown with needs. We may always feel that the commitment to us depends on what needs we may or may not fulfill.
But God’s very nature is love… and it has existed forever… in the complete perfection of Father, Son, and Spirit.
Behind all of eternity is God who is by nature love.
1 John 4:7-8?“…love comes from God. … for God is love.” [3]
What we call love can rise towards this… but because we never operate completely out of the love of God…we always have various degrees of need.
God has no need. What that means… is that you exist not because of a need…… but because you are wanted.
Security is rooted in being wanted…not needed.
Human life has always longed to belong… never fully there… and Jesus made clear it’s because our home is in the heart and home of God…our Father.
There is a Divine household… we were created to enjoy…but we demanded to go form our own…but Jesus has come to bring the full nature and measure of God’s love to bear.
It changes one’s entire understanding of the reality we live in.
Jesus knew this world bore the suffering of separation… injustice… violence… death.
But he lived in relationship to a larger world…a larger reality.
That is what he came to share.
He pulled back the curtain. And there is our true home… an unending love that cannot be overcome.
We know that first morning included Mary…the earthly mother of Jesus. He had loved her…but he also challenged her to understand… there was a bigger household that he belonged to…and that she could belong to.
And then there was Mary of Magdala…the first Mary to discover the empty tomb…a women who had never known much love until she met Jesus.
So was lost without him….she Mary’s at the cross…and who came to the tomb.
You can try to bury Love, but it cannot be contained.
There is a love that is more powerful than evil.
(Visited Rome… it’s Forum… Pantheon… Colosseum. Impressed by the great work of that once dominant empire. But that empire is no longer. No empire on earth ever will last.)
This is what lies behind the death and resurrection of Christ.
God so loved the world… God so loved you.
The resurrection of Christ reveals… There is a Love that rules all of life
…And what does such a love do?
“For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” - John 3:16
The love of God was doing something to reach us.
When Jesus was raised it was the culmination of having first been given.
This is what God did… he gave his son.
And it was not embraced… painfully embraced by Jesus…
Jesus came to break the power of our own separation.
The resurrection of Christ reveals…
2. There is a Love that suffers to reach and redeem us.
There is a Love that will bear separation to end ours.
We all may have ideas about how we would like to be loved.
But none is more essential than the ability to be reached…and the willingness of another to sacrifice themselves to reach us. As Jesus explained…
John 15:13 (NIV) ?Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.
What a stark contrast to the purely materialistic assumptions about life. To believe the world is merely material in nature…reduces love to that which is merely chemical… developed for survival. It presumes we are only fooled in thinking that there is anything more than mere chemicals seeking to survive…with no more inherent value. Whatever best serves physical survival is all there is. In the materialist world… there is no other force other than chemical survival.
In the grandest of contrast, the grand declaration of Easter is that what lies behind all mater is personal…and defined by giving at the most personal level.
Romans 5:8 (NLT2) ?God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. ?
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. - 1 John 3:16 (NIV)
Because of the death and resurrection of Jesus, we see the love of God. When we look at Jesus, we can say, “This is love.”
It is a love that loves even when rejected.
Love does not control… it provides.
That is the great sacrifice of love.
…But it will provide for all who respond.
“For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” - John 3:16
What was fulfilled by God in Christ death…and resurrection… is that which seeks to save everyone.
Our current culture speaks a lot about the problems of discrimination and the need for inclusion… equality of opportunity. And naturally there are concerns that religions exclude some simply because they have the wrong ideas.
But the emphasis here in regard to believing…is that of choosing to trust in God’s loving provision… rather than one’s own goodness.
If we allow ourselves to bring religion to what today is about…we will miss understanding this. We will think it is about simply believing the right truth…or being a part of the right organization or group.
Jesus says that our hope is not in becoming religious people but rescued people.
This is not a religious event…it is a profoundly relational one.
It is about the love which is the source of all life… coming sacrificially… and calling us to come home to the household where we belong.
That is our choice. And that is the nature of love. It cannot control the will and heart of another.
Love flows from a choice…it always bears the freedom in being offered… and the freedom to be received.?
The resurrection of Christ reveals…
3. There is a Love that controls no one…but can save everyone who will respond in trust.
It is not for those good enough. It is for those who respond by accepting what God has done… and entrusting themselves into that love.
Our family recently got a new dog…his name is Buddy… pure bred Golden Retriever… despite his pedigree… he’s not safe because he’s not fully responsive.
> And in a similar way, God knows that our pedigree can’t substitute for our responsiveness. The power of loves is based on becoming responsive.
It means turning from our own self-directed lives…and being ruled by His love.
As the closest disciple to Jesus describes…?
We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love. - 1 John 4:16-18 (NLT)
Those who had been with Jesus physically… were telling us that as people who carry the memory and the experience, of what it’s like to live with the presence of the risen Christ after the resurrection.
John is describing the abiding of Jesus’ presence…saying that which we knew in historical life, has moved inside, has made a home in us, and it has also become the source of life that flows out through us.
They could not see him…but knew that having risen… and sent his Spirit…that he was with them.
A story is told of a night a house caught fire and a young boy was forced to flee to the roof. The father stood on the ground below with outstretched arms, calling to his son, "Jump! I'll catch you." He knew the boy had to jump to save his life. All the boy could see, however, was flame, smoke, and blackness. As can be imagined, he was afraid to leave the roof. His father kept yelling: "Jump! I will catch you." But the boy protested, "Daddy, I can't see you." The father replied, "But I can see you and that's all that matters."
> God sees you… and bears a love that can be trusted.
…And the outcome?
“For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” - John 3:16
The resurrection of Christ reveals…
4. There is a Love that defeats death and leads to eternal life.
The goodness of God is His love…and that love provides a way to live forever with God.
As the Scriptures describe…Jesus was the first fruits of a new creation.
Jesus did not just teach us about such a reality…he revealed it in himself. He was raised…and said: "Examine me to see if it is really ME. Look at my Body and see if it is REAL..... I`m not a GHOST"........... And they DID, and found that this Man Jesus, whose Body had been killed on a Cross, was alive again in a Body which was a REAL FLESH AND BLOOD BODY, a Body that could eat bread and drink wine.... and yet a Body which was also very DIFFERENT.
But it is not simply a matter of living forever as we know it…but living in a state in which all is restored.
1 John 3:1-3 (NIV) ?How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!... 2 Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
What we will be has not yet been made known…it is beyond us. It is far more radical… which means more at the core… more fundamental.
We tend to think that in their more confined times they were not fully themselves. The truth is that we have never been fully ourselves.
If we think that the pre-born life makes a big transition when it is born into what seems a whole new world…it can barely suggest what a new world we will enter outside this world.
How much does that unborn child understand of life outside the womb? Not much… just the distant sound of voices and the sensation of limited movement.
Then the day comes when they enter the new world they were created for… it is so vast… but there awaits them… a voice—a tender, melodious voice they had only heard echoes of. It’s a presence that has waited for them…that welcomes them...the one whose image they bear…it’s their source of life…the source of their comfort…and their completion.
[In this life we are like that unborn child. We know as much of life after death as the unborn child knows of life after birth. We hear the sound of laughter coming from the other side …but it is beyond us to understand.]
The apostle Paul said…look at your own garden … different seeds grow different types of life. THAT`S HOW IT WILL BE WITH US....... these earthly bodies will be very different from our heavenly body, when we come back to life again. Here, our bodies are NATURAL.... human bodies. THERE they will be SUPERNATURAL..... spiritual bodies. [4]??As John Stott says…
“Jesus is the resurrection of believers who die and the life of believers who live. He promises not that you will just survive, but that you will be resurrected. When he says, “you will never die,” it doesn’t mean that you will escape death, but that death will prove to be a trivial episode, a transition to the fullness of life.” - John Stott [5]
That is what Easter brings to bear.
In the raising of Christ … we see the power of love to destroy death…and not just so that Christ could live…but that we could live.
Christ knew that the powers of evil would rise up to oppose him… and he said watch… for he knew that the power of eternal love ruled.
No matter what we face or feel in this world… love rules…
Romans 8:37-39 (NIV) ?In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Closing:
Easter is about that which has declared that there is a bigger reality… a much bigger reality.
In the same way we once thought the world was flat… that if we ventured too far we would drop off an edge…so it is that the truth is once again larger… reality is not bound in the finite…in time and space…but part of the infinite.
In the same way we once thought that the sun evolved around our location… and that we were the center of existence…so it is that once again we exist only in relationship to a larger force beyond ourselves.
And it is rooted in the perfection of love.
Christ has not simply revealed a much bigger world…but the reality of love that defines it… and to which our lives are to be rooted.
So let me ask you again: How big is your world?
What is the ultimate reality in which you exist?
Where do you live?
Jesus describes his desire for each of us….when he says:
John 15:9-15 (MSG)
I’ve loved you the way my Father has loved me. Make yourselves at home in my love. If you keep my commands, you’ll remain intimately at home in my love. That’s what I’ve done — kept my Father’s commands and made myself at home in his love. I’ve told you these things for a purpose: that my joy might be your joy, and your joy wholly mature.
When we are at home in his love… there is a joy that is set in us. [6]
This is the choice that lies before us. We either choose to make this world our home… declare that we will live out our existence in our own way and our own will…to our dying end…or to accept that we belong in the unending love of God.
Closing Prayer
Notes:
1. Note that when Jesus came, there was already a parallel view… “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”
Isaiah 22:13; Proverbs 23:35; Luke 12:19; 1 Corinthians 15:32. See Is “eat, drink, and be merry” a biblical concept?
The Sadducees rejected a belief in the resurrection of the dead (Matthew 22:23; Mark 12:18–27; Acts 23:8), but the Pharisees did believe in the resurrection. The Sadducees denied the afterlife, holding that the soul perished at death, but the Pharisees believed in an afterlife and in an appropriate reward and punishment for individuals. the Sadducees were more elitist and aristocratic than the Pharisees. Sadducees tended to be wealthy and to hold more powerful positions. The chief priests and high priest were Sadducees, and they held the majority of seats in the Sanhedrin. The Pharisees were more representative of the common working people and had the respect of the masses. The Sadducees’ locus of power was the temple in Jerusalem; the Pharisees controlled the synagogues. - From - https://www.gotquestions.org/Sadducees-Pharisees.html
2. The event took place in very real time and place…but it struck at a condition that has run through human history… the Scriptures tell us that our story is one in which we try to be more than we are… the center…the control (will)… and as a result we will demand our own way … violence on earth… defiance of God… that will only leave us in an outer darkness. Even while we long for more.
> We were created for eternity…but have trapped ourselves into the darkened world of our own separated existence.
> That is the state of human life in which we live.
That is why we live in a world in which we hear the rustlings of something more…but never fully realized.
• We feel drawn into a greatness… dream of a greater destiny…but feel trapped within our own darkened world.
• We long for transcendence…but feel our mortality.
• We long for justice… for things to be set right…but feel the limits of human nature to right itself.
But those longing point beyond themselves.
Everything points beyond itself
Science: The very nature of quantum physics is pointing to a dimension of life that exists outside of time and space that we exist in.
Hebrews 11:3 "By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God’s command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen." (NLT)?
Longings: The most basic truth is that we exist with longings…and all longings point to something real… such as hunger exists in relationship to food. So we should recognize that our longings point to a source of ultimate satisfaction.
We long for justice… because there is such an ultimate right…we long for transcendence because it exists… we ultimately long to belong…to be loved at a at a level of our core we may never fully know…because such love exists.
It is deemed our deepest longing… the ideal of philosophers… the underlying theme of storytellers…and songs.
Love is what we long for most deeply… an ideal forever looked for… … because it’s perfection exists.
God is love… manifest in Jesus… he opens the door to that bigger world.
3. The full text of 1 John 4:7-8?Dear friends, let us love one another, because love comes from God. Whoever loves is a child of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.
4. I Corinthians 15:35-49
5. From John Stott, Cross of Christ, p. 244
John 3:17 (VOICE)
Here’s the point. God didn’t send His Son into the world to judge it; instead, He is here to rescue a world headed toward certain destruction.
6. Regarding living in the love of Christ, we also read:
Galatians 2:20 power. “ I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
His divinity inhabits our humanity. I can live the Christian life not in my own strength, but in the strength of a risen Savior. We can plug into power every day.
