Word of Salvation – Vol.26 No.32 – May 1980

 

The Father’s Christmas Present – Have You Opened It Yet?

 

Sermon by Rev. A. I. deGraaf on John 3:16

Psalter Hymnal: 191:1,2; 345; 339; 329:1,4,5,6; 346:1,2,5; 490

 

I am about to do a dangerous thing this morning.  I remember quite well how an old and very experienced colleague of mine once told me that there are texts in the Bible – like this one, John 3:16 – that are so beautiful in themselves that with any sermon you try to preach on them, you can only spoil it.

And yet I will try this morning, to preach on this, maybe the most well-known of all bible verses.  Christmas – you see – is the time for presents.  There are Christians who do not like that feature much: that giving and getting of presents at Christmas.

All that commercialism, all that high pressure salesmanship and advertising that goes with it….. the festive ring of the cash registers, except that they don’t ring any more but go electronically.. “pip-pip-pip….!”

Yes, there are many Christians who think that all this detracts from the REAL thing of the Christmas event.

But you see, the most well-known Bible verse tells us that that event was also not only the giving of a Gift but also the getting of it.  And that accepting that gift is so important that it decides the everlasting weal or woe of any human being on earth!

To receive – but especially – to GIVE gifts on Christmas Day, is to follow the Father’s example.  But there are some very important conditions.  First of all, the Bible tells us that the Father gave this Gift because He loved.  Before we hear that God gave we are told… that He loved…  Loved… THE WORLD.  Loved…. people in that world who did not love at all, people who hated, people who rebelled and made chaos out of God’s beautiful creation.  But God knew all that – more than anyone of us will ever know – and yet He loved.

There is nothing sentimental and weepy about the love of God.  God’s love is not blind.  God’s love sees all our cruelty, all our selfishness, all our pettiness and our hypocrisy, and even though he hates all that with a fiery, flaming hatred, yet the world He loves.  He hangs on to that world for dear life.  God’s love is the most constant, the most rock-like faithful thing in all creation.

He made this world and all that is in it, and He loved it, and kept on loving it.  He made the people on this world and in spite of all that they did to Him and to one another, He loved – and loves still.  Not with a silly love of a weak parent who spoils a child rotten until it grows up… first a brat and then a criminal, not in the weak way of old Voltaire who said: “Forgiving, that is God’s trade…!”

No, His love was out to restore, to root out evil at its very heart.  God’s love can hit hard, it can be searing like a flame.  But it is constant…. always there.  God loved the world.  And when even Christians at times said things like: “Stop the world I want to get off…!” and turned their backs on God’s creation, the Lord never did.

His love might send a flood to wash the place clean, (after having warned and waited 120 years for people to come back to Him), but it hung on.

And when nothing less would do, when nothing less could tackle the rot that ate away God’s handiwork, then God went so far as to send His Son.

To….. GIVE His Son.

Nothing less would do, and so nothing less it was.  That is the heart of the Christmas message.  It hurts our pride.  We somehow like to make our own way.  We like to show off about our “goodwill among men”, and come to God with a bargain.

But John 3:16 says it: We did not love God, we did not love one another, – not really – not as we should – we did not love the world either – we exploited it and corrupted it, yes….. but GOD loved.  It is all His.

That is what the Bible calls sovereign love.  It is the love that comes first; the love that hangs on for dear life.

The love that sees things through until it is all completed.

Mind you, let me say something else here: when Jesus said, “God so loved the WORLD… don’t you think for a moment that Jesus didn’t quite know what we know now about what a rotten place the world can be, that He had some nice romantic picture in His mind.  He came from a poor family, did Jesus, and He knew about injustice and deprivation and social misery more than any flat-dweller in (Richmond) or more than any South African black would know now.  When He said God so loved the world, he knew better than anyone of us – b  they ever so disillusioned or bitter – what kind of a world we live in.  But He said it: God so loved the world that He gave…. And while all we could give was maybe a dream, a programme, a lifetime of hard work perhaps but still tainted with shady motives….!  He gave His dearest, He gave His Son.  Not just to show us the way because we still could not be trusted then to walk it.  But to be the Way, to live FOR us the life we could not live… and to die for us the death that was the only offering God could accept for our misdeeds and shortcomings, the death that was to wipe out the record that would condemn us forever.  God gave the only Living One….. to die.  God gave what we never could give.  All we could do with that Gift – and that still holds for you and me today – is receive,

All that we ever can give, shall it have value for God, is our response in deep gratitude and utter humility, our response to that unique Gift He gave.  God gave His Only-begotten Son.  The Splendid One through Whom all creation was made, to identify with us the lost ones.  God gave His Only One, His dearest, to become a man, THE man that we were meant to be.  THE perfect human being that whoever believes in Him will one Day become again through Him.  God gave Him….. that whoever puts his trust in Him, receives Him, accepts Him from His hand… should not perish.

For to perish forever, that is the irrevocable end for everyone who tries to make it apart from Jesus.  He who does not believe in the Son – says the Apostle of love in his first letter – he who does not believe in the son shall not see life, he who throws from Him the token of the free love of God in Jesus will die under the anger of God.  Then – as John says – the anger of God will stay on you

–

Never mind how well you think you mean, never mind what your friends say about you or what they say in glowing terms at your funeral.

There may be a merry Christmas but outside of the faith that accepts Christ as the Gift of God to the unworthy – there will never be a blessed Christmas.  Even if you sat on your seat in church every Sunday twice: the question is: what did you do with God’s Gift?  What did you do with the son, the Only Son of God?

Oh, yes, we know a lot more about other religions now than we did before, and we know of the striving of men, and their sacrifices, and their splendid lives.  From our point of view they may be all that.

But GOD in His love gave ONE Way,
He tore Him from His own heart to be the way.
It is up to no man to think he knows better.

And so no Christian may ever say to anybody that he will be alright because he means well.  You become a murderer of souls if you say that to anybody.  We must proclaim the love, the endless love of God.  But then SO He loved the world, not so that He let everybody find his own way but HE GAVE HIS ONLY SON TO BE THE WAY.

Not to let everybody find and live his own life, but HE GAVE HIS ONLY SON TO BE THAT LIFE.  Whoever believes in Him… is the one – and there are the thousands and millions – that shall not perish but have everlasting life.

Not whoever belongs to the Reformed Church either.  When they are in the Roman Catholic Church, the Presbyterian Church, the Seventh Day Adventist Church, or wherever, who believe in Him the Only Son, as the Redeemer God gave who gives life by His death, then they shall have everlasting life.

God is love.  He sure is.  He did the only thing that could be done about our lostness.

He wanted, not just people, back to His eternal home, but a WORLD – a creation back again into the light of everlasting meaning and everlasting praise.

And so He says: Here it is: My present.
Open it.
Do not think you may only open it AFTER THIS LIFE,
It does not say: SHALL HAVE everlasting life (one day!)

For God so loved the world that He gave His Only Son that whosoever believes on HIM should not perish but have everlasting life.

Amen.