John 3:14-21
Ephesians 2:1-10
“We Need Only Trust God”
By: Revernd Kenneth Sauer, Pastor of Parkview United Methodist Church, Newport News, VA
www.parkview-umc.org
When Martin Luther was printing his translation of the Bible in Germany, pieces of the printed Scripture fell to the floor.
A young girl picked one up and read part of a verse from our Gospel Lesson for this morning: “For God so loved the world that he gave…”
The rest of the sentence was missing, but nonetheless that was a defining moment for the young girl—as the truth griped her and light began to shine.
You see, she had been told so often that God was a Judge and One to be dreaded.
She had been living in the darkness…the darkness of fear and meaninglessness all her young life.
She ran home with excitement in her heart…
…passing the note to her mother and talking endlessly of this wonderful discovery.
Her mother read the piece of Scripture…became perplexed, and asked her daughter: “But what did He give?”
The young girl was lost for a moment with a puzzled expression, not knowing the answer.
But suddenly a thought came to her and her face lit up again as she said, “I don’t know; but if He loved us well enough to give us anything, we need not be afraid of Him.”(story borrowed from Dale Pilgrim)
Have you ever felt as if you were living a very dark existence where people aren’t very nice to one another….
…where everyone seems mad and on the defensive…
…ready to strike out with hate and anger and vengeance at any moment?
I don’t know about you, but I like a bit of personal interaction…even if I’m just stopping into 7-11 in order to get a cup of coffee.
Life can be so lonely when we don’t smile at one another or even acknowledge one another’s existence.
And it seems like, and maybe I’m wrong, but it seems like there is less and less smiling going on these days.
Has the world gotten so dark?
Does life just appear to be some cruel joke?
So I stopped in to get a cup of coffee at 7-11 the other day…
…and like I said, I like a bit of personal interaction.
I like to be able to smile with the cashier.
I like to be able to commiserate with him or her….
…maybe just talk about the weather.
But even this kind of stunt can be dangerous.
Many of us are just too angry.
Our world is too dark.
I was paying for my cup of coffee, and I noticed that the woman behind the cash register…now this is not at all unusual…
…it seems to be the norm…
…would not even look at me…
…but actually looked angry.
She looked tired as well.
So, wanting a bit of personal interaction I asked her: “Have you been working a long shift? Been a rough day?”
I didn’t say this in a condescending manner.
I just wanted to commiserate.
I wasn’t feeling like I was floating on the clouds either.
She didn’t answer me, except to let out a burst of exasperated air and tell me that I needed to swipe my credit card again.
So, I asked her, “I’m sorry, did I make you angry for some reason?”
“Now I’m angry,” she burst forth as she looked me in the eyes for the first time.
I think I’ll just wait until I get home or get to the meeting I’m headed for instead of stopping at a convenience store for a cup of coffee from now on.
I don’t like to make people even more angry than they already are.
There is a lot of darkness out there.
Now, granted.
I’m sure the woman at the 7-11 is a fine person who has had a difficult life.
Who knows what horrible adversities she faces.
But this is an example of the darkness, the miserable darkness that pervades and runs our lives.
This world can be a very lonely place.
And the darkness is the most lonely place in which we can live.
Our Gospel Lesson for this morning tells us that “Light has come into the world,” and that that Light is God’s one and only Son.
“but men loved darkness instead of light.”
What a miserable thing to love darkness instead of light.
What a miserable thing to love anger, greed, selfishness instead of light.
What a miserable thing to choose to live in the darkness when the Light is here for the taking…
…it is a free gift…
…what a miserable thing to choose to live in hell instead of living in the light of the kingdom of God!
And it is a choice we are called…
…we are allowed to make.
God does not force our hand.
We have free-will.
We can choose light over darkness or darkness over light.
We can choose to be part of the mean and angry world of darkness or we can choose to be part of the kingdom of God—right here and right now.
And the kingdom of God is all about living in the light!
“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.”
There is no better proclamation on the face of this earth.
There is no better news!
My goodness!
There is hope!
The creator of this universe loves us more than we could possibly imagine!
And we can choose to believe this good news, thus entering the kingdom of God or the kingdom of Light right here and now…
…even as we are surrounded by the darkness on all sides!
Have you ever noticed while reading the Gospel of John….
….how the author of this Gospel refers to Himself?
He doesn’t call himself by name…
…or in a sense maybe he does.
He calls himself “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”
But we know that his given name was John the son of Zebedee.
He’s the same guy who wrote the Epistles of John and also….most likely…the Book of Revelation.
But he doesn’t call himself John…
…he calls himself by another name…
… “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”
Why is this?
Did Jesus love this disciple more than the other disciples?
It doesn’t appear that John felt this way.
For instance, John talks about how Jesus loved Mary and Martha and…well…he tells us how Jesus even wept over the death of his dear friend Lazarus.
So what made John feel so special?
Could it be that after having had a life-changing encounter with the Son of the Living God…
…after having experience first-hand the forgiving and accepting love of Christ…
…after having traveled with Him for so long…
…after having watched Him die on the Cross at Calvary….
…and having seen Him after He had been raised from the dead…
…that John’s life had been changed so dramatically…
…his identity had been so forever marked by the love of Christ…
…that there was no other name by which he could think of to express who he was?
That’s how personal the love of Christ is for you and for me.
What good news!
Everyone of us can have such a personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ…
….each and every one of us…
…if we choose to accept God’s outstretched hand of love and friendship…
…should be able to refer to ourselves as the disciple whom Jesus loves!
Now that beats living in the darkness any day!!!---Hands down!!!
Thomas Lane Butts writes the following: “The most elusive and sought after commodity in this life is unconditional love and acceptance.
It is that most precious of all conditions, which, when we find it, everything else is secondary.
It empowers us and gives us a sense of meaning and worth.
It is the ‘pearl of great price’ for which we would give all that we have.
Indeed, there is so little of it in the places we look.
When we find some glimmer of it in another person, we want to possess that person.
We marry for it.
We pretend to be someone and something we are not in the hope of winning it for ourselves.
People experience great disappointment in friendship, love, and marriage when their source of unconditional love dries up.
We want to be loved in that indescribable, mystical, and unconditional way.
Think about how much of your life you have spent looking for that kind of love.
Think about the scars you have from the crushing disappointment of thinking you had it, but you misjudged.
How ironic that we search and sacrifice, beg and plead for what is ours for free.
The unending source of what we want is freely offered to us by God in Christ.
We get temporary snatches of unconditional love from human beings, but it never lasts.
It dries up or turns into something else.
The greatest human disappointments come when we expect of human beings what can only be expected of God.
Friends and loved ones ultimately fail and disappoint us.
Their self-interest or lack of understanding or their mere human frailty leaves them unable to do and be for us what only God can do and be for us.
When you discover that you cannot handle all that happens to you in life alone;
when your friends fail and loved ones leave you in one of the many ways in which someone can go away; when you feel all alone in the universe; take these two verses of Scripture into your heart and find the comfort that comes when you trust them to be true.”
“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. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”
There is nothing more profound than this!
There is no greater news!!!
Sometimes we aren’t real nice to one another.
Sometimes our feelings get hurt by an unkind gesture from another.
But another fact is true as well.
Right here and right now, seated in the sanctuary of Parkview United Methodist Church are a great many people who God so loves!!!
We can accept that love and live in the light of that love or we can choose to remain in the darkness….
…and the darkness is a gloomy place to be.
But in some kind of self destructive insanity many of us choose the darkness over the light.
“This is the verdict:,” Jesus tells us in our Lesson for this morning, “Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear
that his deeds will be exposed.”
What a lame reason not to come to Christ!
For fear…
…remember in the garden of Eden after Adam and Eve had eaten of the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil?
What did they do?
They hid…
…for fear!
There is no reason to be afraid of God…
…not of a God who loves us so much that He is willing to sacrifice His One and Only Son in order to get our love back!
There is no reason to fear a God who loves us so much!
There is no reason to fear the Light!
Come out of the darkness!
We need only to trust in God!
If God loves us enough to give us such a gift as His Son…
…we need not fear Him!!!
The young son of a very committed Christian father became very ill.
After the boy had undergone an exhaustive series of tests, the father was told the shocking news that his son had a terminal illness.
After earnestly seeking the direction of the Holy Spirit, he went with a heavy heart through the hospital to his son’s bedside.
First he read a passage of Scripture and had a time of prayer with his dear son.
Then he gently told him that the doctors could promise him only a few more days to live.
“Are you afraid to meet Jesus, my boy,” his father asked him.
Blinking away a few tears, the little fellow said bravely, “No, not if he’s like you, Dad.”
The Bible tells us that when we choose to believe in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior we receive the Holy Spirit that makes us children of God.
And by the Holy Spirit we cry, “Abba, Father.”—which is an expression of a very close relationship with God…it’s like calling God “Daddy.”
The author of the Book of John…the son of Zebedee… a humble follower of Christ from the earliest days of His ministry…
…One of the apostles who gives us eyewitness testimony of the life and Words of Jesus…
…had been so changed by the Ultimate Love of God that he could find no better way to refer to himself than to call himself “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”
Certainly, there is a drastic contrast between the gloomy predicament of a human life lived without Christ and the gracious glories of life lived in Christ’s healing resurrection power!!!
It’s the difference between living life in the darkness and life in the light!!!
Do we know that we are also people whom Jesus loves?
Do we believe?
Have we received God’s eternal life?
Eternal life is, on the one hand, life after death in the presence of God; but on the other hand, Eternal life is life lived in the presence of God in the here and now.
Eternal life is a ongoing relationship with God in and through belief in Jesus Christ who Himself brings the life of God into our lives now and forever!!!
There is nothing to fear.
God loves us enough to give us His kingdom through the death of His Son.
We don’t have to live in the hell of darkness.
The choice is ours and the choice is now.
Will we trust God?
Will we live by the truth and come into the Light?
