John 3:16-21
God’s Heart for the Lost
Do you remember the commercial that was running just before, and during the Olympics? The one that had snapshots of different people playing or watching hockey throughout the country? Everybody yells out “He shoots, he scores!” The tag line at the end is, “If we all shout it loud enough, they’ll hear us in Salt Lake.”
We as Canadians can get pretty excited about a hockey game, and even one shot on net. Luke 15:10 says that the angels get really excited about one person becoming a Christian. I don’t think they yell “He shoots, he scores!” but it does say “there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.”
I have to admit, that I don’t always have this kind of passion over reaching people for Jesus.
A few weeks ago I was watching a movie called Indocine – it is a movie about Vietnam under French colonial rule. As I watched I realized that while I had passion for the people’s political freedom, but I had very little passion for their Spiritual freedom – of course the movie was designed to raise our political hackles, and not our spiritual ones, but all the same there were thousands of lost people on the screen and I did not feel a lot of passion for their salvation.
Closer to home, often I find it difficult to persevere in prayer for my neighbours and for their salvation. Again, I like them, I wish them well, I’d like to know Jesus, but my passion for their spiritual welfare is not at the top of my mind.
If I’m like this as the pastor, I can imagine that many of us are the same way – we would like to have God’s heart for the lost, but we can’t seem to work it up. What I want to do today is grasp God’s heart for the lost, and then pray that we would receive his heart for our fiends, nieghbours, coworkers, loved ones, and even people we have not yet met.
People Matter to God
John 3:16 has almost become a throw away verse for people who have grown up in the evangelical church. Most of us can rattle it off like it is our phone number, and yet I don’t think that we will ever quite grasp the depth of meaning in this verse, the profundity of this action the immensity of this love that God has for us.
For God so loved the world that he sent his only Son…
Pam and I did all that we could to make sure that Hayley could go to French immersion Kindergarten without having to take a bus all the way over to Dufferin Street. I just could handle the thought of my little girl having to take a bus through the city each day – I love her, and I was afraid for her.
You can well imagine how the mother and fathers of the men and women of the armed forces in Afganistan felt as they sent their loved sons and daughters off to war, and how some are feeling brining them back in coffins.
We are imperfect in our love! Between the Father and the Son there is perfect love, perfect unity, and he doesn’t send him on a bus, or even to Afganistan as a warrior. No, he sends his one and only son, his beloved one, to be a baby without a home in a land where the king wants to kill him, where the people don’t understand him and eventually kill him.
God send His loved Son from his throne to live in the middle of all our human sin and squalor, not just to live there, but to die there.
Verse 14 alludes to the fact that Jesus would have to die on a cross to bring us back into relationship with the God who loves us. God loves us – the whole world of us so much that he sends his son, not onto a battlefield where he had the chance of dying, but as a sheep is sent to the slaughterhouse, with no chance of survival.
God created us to love us and be loved by us to live in close knit relationship with us, but instead we decided to go another way and we have done things to break that relationship. In fact the bible tells us that because we have done what is wrong, we deserve death.
God sends his son not just to teach us how to live right, but to die in our place – that it how much he loves us.
The love that the father and Son have for us comes so clear to me in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus is about to be arrested, tried and put to death in one of the worst ways possible. He prays in the Garden, “is there another way?” He says is there another way to bring people back into relationship with you? He never says “they aren’t worth it.”
God loves us so much that he would send his one and only son to die in our stead.
God loves the people we see each day on our street in the office, at home, at school, he loves them so much that he would give up the life of His only son to be with them!
As Bill Hybels says “you’ve never locked eyes with anyone who doesn’t matter to the Father.”
We might accent to this, but how much do people really matter?
“Mike I know that lost people matter, but those lost people are in my pew and they stole my parking spot!”
To reach the lost God gave up his life, what are we willing to give up? Our favorite pew? The sermon directed at us? Our worship style? What if to reach the people in this neighbourhood who matter to God (that them all) we would have to crank up the old organ again and wear suits and ties? Do they matter that much.
People matter enough that Jesus traded his throne and glory for a stable and a cross. That’s how much people matter to God.
People Are Spiritually Lost
People matter to God, he Loves us more than we could think or imagine, the difficulty is that people are lost.
Verses 17-18 make it clear that each of us have a choice to make
“For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.
19This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. 20Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. 21But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God."
The choice is to walk in the light, or to walk in darkness, to be in relationship with our creator who loves us, or to remain broken, to choose God’s presence, or his absence in our lives.
Jesus describes those who have chosen darkness over light as the lost – not in a derogatory, judgmental way, but he says in Zacheus’ house that his mission was “to seek and save what was lost” (Luke 19:10)
This is the situation that everyone who doesn’t know Jesus finds themselves in.
Romans 3:10-12 says”
"There is no one righteous, not even one;
11there is no one who understands,
no one who seeks God.
12All have turned away,
they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
not even one."
We are created to live in the presence of God, but the things that we do wrong – our sins – keep us from that relationship.
Isaiah 59:1-2 says
1 Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save,
nor his ear too dull to hear.
2 But your iniquities have separated
you from your God;
your sins have hidden his face from you,
so that he will not hear.
When we die if we have chosen to remain in separation from God, living like he does not exist, doesn’t pour his love out on us, doesn’t have a say in how we live our lives, then that separation becomes complete, and we live in eternity without God’s presence.
If, as the psalmist says “In his presence there is fullness of joy,” then out of His presence there is Hell.
Hell is not a topic that we are fond of talking about – I don’t like talking about, it’s not politically correct, it is certainly not an enjoyable topic, but Jesus doesn’t shy away from it. He describes this place outside of the presence of God as a place of torment, fire and darkness, a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth.
I think that our avoidance of this topic is connected to our reticence to tell people about our faith in Jesus. We are more afraid of their rejection than we are of them going to hell. Chris was reminding this week that if we really believed in the reality of hell, as our bibles and theology do, We would do all that we could to keep people out of it. It would at least drive us to our knees in prayer for them.
A week or so ago I was driving Hayley to school I along with a car at each of the corners had to wait as some boys crossed diagonally across intersection. I yelled at them. I told them that they were likely to get hit. I was angry with them, but I was also concerned for their safety. We might be quick to tell people that they are in immediate physical danger, but do we feel like we need to tell people about the spiritual danger they are in?
These people, who God loves enough to die for, are lost.
When we share our faith, we are not giving people a nice self help program that will only help them live a little easier, we do not tell people about Christ like we tell them about a weight loss program that really helped us, no it is of eternal significance!
People Need Christ
There is a belief in our culture that there are many ways to God, and even if we do not believe it, we often act like it. If people are living fairly moral lives with healthy families and steady jobs, we tell ourselves that they are doing okay. If they find some healing in the new age movement or another world religion, we think that it’s better than nothing.
The verse does not say God so loved the world that he sent his one and only Son (amongst some other good teachers) that whoever believes in one of them shall not perish…
We have the unpopular belief that Jesus is the only way to God! But it isn’t something that a bunch of bigoted preachers made up, Jesus himself teaches this.
He says, “I am the way the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Peter added that “salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to people by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). He also explained that “Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God” (! Peter 3:18). Paul capped it with his simple declaration, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15).
If there was more than one way to God than Jesus, you think he would have known it. And if he knew it, why on earth did he go to the cross? Why didn’t he say oh yea there is another way, so as long as you are sincere, follow who you want, and you’ll eventually get there.
Sincerity is not what counts. Many people are sincerely wrong – Hitler, Mao, Bin Ladin – a very sincere man by all accounts. People do not need sincerity to have a relationship with their creator: they need to have their sins removed! And Jesus is the only one offering to do that.
God loves us desperately, he loves the people you love more than you, he loves the people that bug you more than you ever could. He desperately wants a relationship with every one he ever created.
Tommy Tenny says that even though some of us are desperate to encounter God, God wants (hu)man encounters way more than we could ever want God encounters.
People are truly lost without God. Paul describes pre-Christ people in this way: Ephesians 2:12 “remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.”
People Need Jesus
He is the only way to the Father, and people need to know about him.
We as Christians need to open our mouths to give the Good news of God’s Love.
Romans 10:13-15 “For "Anyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved."
14But how can they call on him to save them unless they believe in him? And how can they believe in him if they have never heard about him? And how can they hear about him unless someone tells them? 15And how will anyone go and tell them without being sent? That is what the Scriptures mean when they say, "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!"
NLT
Next three sermons: “How God can use you to draw someone to Himself” “How to explain the Good News to Someone” & “Prayer Evangelism, or how to talk to God about your neighbours before you talk to your neighbours about God.”
But where is starts is with our hearts – if our hearts are not changed, we will not last, or will judge people for being the very sort that Jesus came to save, and our good news will lose its goodness. Lets pray together that God will change our hearts – that we have enough of his heart that we will love the lost more than our own comfort, more than our style…
Lets pray that God would change our eyes, so that we would no longer view people from a merely human point of view, but we would put on our God glasses to correct our vision and we would see them as he sees them. We can’t make our selves do that, we need God, lets pray now.
