Word of Salvation – Vol. 42 No. 48 – December 1997

 

God So Loved The World!

 

A New Year’s Eve/Day Sermon by Rev. M. P. Geluk on John 3:16

Scripture Readings: Luke 21:25-38; Ephesians 6:10-18

Suggested Hymns BoW 206; 464; 370; 243

 

Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

As another year draws to its close, let us look at this rather familiar text – John 3:16.  It’s one of those Scripture verses that has been put to music, we have it in our Songbook and we’ll sing it again in this our last worship service of the year.  Because we sing it from time to time, and thanks to Sunday School and Calvinettes or Cadets, even the children can probably sing it from memory.

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, Jesus Christ, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.”  Yes, the world – everybody is always talking about what goes on in the world.  Especially at the end of the year.  Newspapers, magazines, television and the odd book or two give the year in review.  Pictures and words remind us what events took place and the best of these can be very interesting.

Christians should do more, however, than merely review the year through the eyes of journalists and newscasters.  We ought to also think about the world, its past and its future, with a Christian mind.  That is to say, we must try and see the world in which we live as God would see it.  Not with our own imagination but with a mind that tries to take in what the Bible says about God and about the world.

And why should we try to do that?  Why can’t we tonight and tomorrow just do what most others do – relax with family and friends, have a drink and a chat, see some fireworks maybe, and wish each other a happy new year.  Well, if you are Christian then the gospel has made an impact on your life.  At some point in your past God reached out to you in Christ and through faith you received from Him forgiveness and pardon, a new direction and a new life.

And if you are still working on your sanctification, then Christ through His Word and Spirit still lives in you and you are daily seeking to do God’s will, seeking to walk with Him.  All this has come about because in His amazing grace, God loves you and gave His one and only Son to die on the cross for you, so that you, by believing in Him, shall not perish but have eternal life.

Now you, like everybody else, lives in the world.  From among its many millions of people, God somehow found you and has showed you His compassion.  So you know of His love.  You have experienced His care.  You have received His salvation.  Thus you and I, remembering what God is for us, can’t very well now look at the world and not be filled with the same compassion for it as God has for us.

But I know and you know that sometimes, in fact maybe more than we like to admit, we can be fairly indifferent about our world.  We see ourselves differently as Christians.  There are, of course, many good and biblical reasons for doing that.  But sometimes Christians see themselves as being different from the world in a wrong way.  We’ve become ‘stand-offish’ from the world.  We see the non-Christian as a bit of a lost cause.  It’s them and us.

The people of the world are, well, worldly people.  We try not to be.  They do some silly things.  We try to do the right thing.  They often have no idea of how God meant life to be lived.  We think we do.  The world, as we know it in our own society, is busy with many non-Christian things, like abortion, euthanasia, materialism, sexual abuse and misuse, divorce, and so on.  At least that’s the impression we get from TV, the papers, and from some people we know and hear about.

We sometimes fail to notice that not everyone in our neighbourhood is quite like that.  We sometimes forget that God still works with His common grace and still allows decency and good will to work in many people.  But when we do remember to thank God for His common grace then we, of course, also know from the Bible’s teaching that common grace does not save anyone.  All are sinners, even the decent ones, and salvation is effected only through faith in God’s saving grace.  So the world is still out there with the unsaved, and Christians remember with thankfulness and deep humility, we trust, that they are the church.  The church is also in the world, but as the saved.

But now, with this text for our New Year’s Eve service, we see that God has not abandoned this world of the unsaved.  God says that He still loves this world which seems to do everything possible to ignore Him.

Do we know how much God still loves the world?  Well, God’s love for this world speaks strongest when we realise how the world abuses His love.  That abuse of God’s love was not always present to the same degree.  The book of Acts, and church history after that, show how the gospel was accepted by many in Europe.  And again, in the time of the Reformation.

God’s love was also responded to when the Pilgrim Fathers, and later the Puritans, came to America and helped give that nation a Christian foundation.  And when the church followed the colonials and convicts to Australia, this nation, too, responded much more to the gospel than is generally realised.  lain Murray, in his book, “Australian Christian Life From 1788” has documented a number of Christian revivals that took place in Australia.

But whatever spiritual gain was enjoyed in early Australia, there is now, speaking nationally, not the same evidence of love and service to God as in years gone by.  In our Australian society, judging now by what the media presents us, there is little love for Christ.  Among the many tens of thousands that turn up for a Michael Jackson concert, and similar numbers that attend famous motor sports events, or similar huge numbers that fill the cricket grounds in Melbourne and Sydney for a cricket test in summer or the football finals in the winter, or when seemingly most of the nation comes to standstill on Melbourne Cup day, we could safely say that amongst all those hundreds of thousands of people there is not a great deal of interest in the salvation riches of Christ.

The main topic of conversation among the many that fill the pubs after a day’s work is not about how to best serve the Lord in thankful obedience.  The indifference and ignorance among the Friday and Saturday night party goers about the things of God is undoubtedly of a high percentage.  Those many people that fill the gambling halls, visit the brothels and the strip joints, and line the streets for the Mardi Gras parade, would be the most outspoken that Christian morality should not be imposed on the nation.

And add to all that the abuse, the yelling and screaming, and the violence from drinking and arguing, that takes place in many a home, then the worldliness in our society is disturbingly widespread and distressingly strong.

Now faced with all that, which has become normal Australian life, it’s little wonder that Christians have developed this ‘them and us’ mentality.  But because we have, it has perhaps also become more difficult for us to still understand that God could sacrifice His one and only Son, whom He deeply loved, for that kind of world and for that sort of society.  But God has.  His Word here says so.

The lack of respect for the love of God in Christ would be more understandable if we were talking about a kind of world that was there before the coming of Christ.  Whilst Christ had not yet come, the prophecies about the Messiah picturing wonderful peace and justice, would have sounded rather unbelievable.  The heathen, lost in their world of spiritual darkness, would not really have understood much about the light and the life of the Christ to come.

But we’re not talking about the world before Christ.  We’re looking at the world after Christ had come.  To this world the gospel has come to just about all the nations.  The Bible has been translated in most languages people speak.  Our own English language has many sayings that have been borrowed from the Bible, indicating a past familiarity with what the Bible teaches.

For example, people swear that they speak the gospel truth, and they can say that even when they are not even remotely talking about anything to do with the gospel.  Everyone knows what kind of person it is when he/she is called a doubting Thomas or a Judas.  Sessions of parliament are opened with prayer, hands are placed on the Bible when people take the oath in court, and an incredibly high percentage of people use the name of Jesus and Christ when they curse.

Our society is now largely non-Christian, but in its language and culture one can still detect a Christian background.  Most people still know what is right and wrong by God’s standards even when they maintain they don’t believe in Him.  The teachings of the Bible are known by the educated even if these same people live unashamedly by another code of ethics.  And then there are always those in our world of science and technology who love to explain how their modern theories have shown how irrelevant and meaningless the Bible has become.

So, in our part of the world, it’s a society that is post-Christian, yet still knows of the Bible’s teachings, and is aware that Christianity positively helped shaped the nation in its beginning stages but is now becoming increasingly critical about its Christian past.

In fact, one could say that Australian people have, as a whole, ceased to be the salt of the earth.  Now with the salt having lost its saltiness what more can God give to what He has already given in Christ?  Apart from Christ, is there still a greater revelation of God possible?  In addition to what He done for sinners in Christ, could God possibly show a yet deeper compassion?

In the days of Noah that was possible.  The people of his time had also become unimaginably evil, and God punished that unbelieving world with the great flood.  But God had promised the Saviour Jesus and so God preserved Noah and his family in the ark and the Lord began all over again with a new world of people.

Years later, God drew up His covenant with the people of Israel.  God showed them a lot of grace and mercy but they, too, lost their saltiness and all were dispersed among the heathen nations who took them captive, except a remnant.  For the sake of His promise to send Christ, God brought this remnant back, and eventually among them the Saviour was born in Bethlehem.

But even with Jesus the Son of God ministering among them and showing them the nature of God’s kingdom, many of the Jews rejected Christ and the gospel went to the Gentiles.

Since Pentecost, God has given Christ to all the world.  Whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.  Now, in the light of what God has done for the world in Christ, what more compassion can God show the world?  Whoever has not yet been touched to his soul by God’s gift of Christ, what else could possibly stir that person’s being to make him sit up and take notice of God?

God has given nothing less than His one and only Son!  The Son whom God loves is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of God’s being (Heb.1:3).  The Son in His own being is God.  At Jesus’ baptism, and later at His transfiguration, God said, “this is my Son with whom I am well pleased.”  Through that Son, God created the whole world and poured out in Him all His treasures of love, power and wisdom.

There is no one in heaven or on earth who can surpass the glory and majesty of Christ.  He is the Immanuel, which means, ‘God with us’.  By giving Christ to the world, God has exhausted His inexhaustible compassion.  There is nothing higher or deeper to give to the world.  Christ is God’s ultimate.  God cannot love the world more.

In the gift of His only-begotten Son, the nature of God’s love for the world is complete.  God is most deeply united with Christ, yet gave Him up to the deepest suffering of hell and death in order that the world may be saved.  Truly, God’s love for the world is beyond comprehension.  Yes, God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son.  And now God cannot go any further.  Therefore, the sin of unbelief and the falling away of those who have tasted something of the love of God is so terrible.  And that’s the way it is with much of this present world.  Our society’s present attitude to God threatens to become the sin for which forgiveness is no longer possible.  It’s the sin of hardening the heart against the eternal love of God.

God loves this world.  Not the world’s sinful ways or her unholy struggle to be rid of God.  And he or she who loves the sinful ways of the world is an enemy of God.  But the world made by God is what God loves, the world which owes its origin to God, the world which has been planned and fashioned by God, the world so uniquely and wonderfully created by God, the world which to this day God upholds by His power, the world on which God put man, made in His image, to subdue it and take care of it – that world is the world God loves.

In this connection the theory of evolution is such a terrible slap in God’s face and the whole evolutionary way of thinking such a terrible denial of the commands and institutions God has given to mankind for its well-being.  The world which God made to glorify Him has been stolen from God and is now said to have come from some big bang.  God’s world now worships the false god of evolution.

People who were to love, serve and obey God as His image bearers have cut themselves off from their Maker and falsely say their origins are to be traced to the apes.  The world is God’s, but many now say it belongs to nature.  With all this the world has cut itself off from its Maker and Provider.

But how amazing is God’s love that He will not let this world go.  God will not abandon the work of His hands.  The world, His own creation, the product of His wisdom, His handiwork, which mankind has hijacked, ruined and broken, God will recreate it, remake it and will renew it.  Behold, this world will be transformed into a new earth and it will be perfectly united with the new heavens.  All things will be made new and everything will be more wonderful than it ever was.

But all who live in this world will have to believe in the Son of God if they want to be part of the new earth.  If they continue to cling to this world and not break free from its moral destruction, if they go on with their defiance of God and continue to ignore Him and His commands, then they will perish.  God, who once put Adam and Eve out of Paradise when they sinned, will also banish whoever refuses the Son and allow them to perish forever in hell where they will always be separated from God and where there is never-ending weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Therefore, those who want to be saved along with the world which God loves and will renew, they must take hold of the Son which God gave to the world in order to save it.  They must find out why Christ was born in Bethlehem, why He died on Golgotha, why He arose from the dead and why He returned to heaven.  They must discover in all these saving acts of Christ, God’s compassion.

A looking to Christ in this way is how we ought to end another year.  Not with reckless abandon and copious amounts of liquor but with a humble gratitude to God who so loved the world.  We will want to end the year with reminding our children that God, who promised His love to them in their baptism, continues to call them to conversion.  We will want to say to them that what truly matters in their lives is that they have a personal relationship of love and faith with the one and only Son of God.

At the end of another year it is also my hope and prayer for the congregation that the preaching of the love of God will warm your heart and stir your soul, awaken your conscience and fill you with a love for the world like God has for the world, and which moved Him to give His Son.

Through us, through God’s people, the love of God reaches out to the world.  Christ will not return to establish the new heaven and earth until all the peoples and nations of the world have heard of God’s love through the Son.  With a new year dawning the church on earth must realise again that she has a calling to take part in that great missionary command to go out into all the world and help proclaim the good news of salvation.

Yet, let us not forget that the reaching out with God’s love to others can begin in our own marriage, with our own family and amongst the baptised members of the church, and perhaps some communicant members as well, who still need to surrender in full their lives to God.  Have a compassion for them for there are so many voices from the world that call them away from God, so many influences that seek to distract them from the Bible’s teachings.  Have compassion on them like God has for the world.

But do pray for and strive for a full conversion.  Half-hearted conversions don’t last.  Their hearts need to be won over fully, for the Lord commands that we love Him with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind and with all our strength.  For unless we are all for Christ, we will continue to be against Him.

But you reaching out to others with the love of God will only happen when you also love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.  Let the year end and the new year begin with you, yourself, rejoicing in Christ, the gift of God’s love.  So do not neglect your own faith.  When you think back over this past year and look ahead into the new year, then realise again what love God has shown you in that He also called you into His service and saved you from everlasting ruin.

Rejoice again, yourself, in the compassion God has had for you.  If it wasn’t for God’s love for you and reaching out to you, you would have never heard of the gospel and you would still be in spiritual darkness.

You, then, also would have been part of a world that says: let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we might die; yes, belong to a world that says: perhaps our world began with the big bang and our human origin is from the apes; yes, identify with a world that says: our survival lies with man’s efforts in preserving the environment and in science and technology.

Yes, do not forget that the God of all grace has come to you personally and caused you to believe in Christ so that you will not perish but have eternal life.  Always remember God’s love and compassion for you so that you will not begin to feel proud of your own faith or godliness.  You can only reach out to others with God’s kind of compassion when you remember that they need, not your good feelings about Christ, but Christ Himself.

Yes, give honour and thanks to God that you may end one year and begin another as His child and that His love and protection is over you forever and always.  And let’s pray and work that this may also be true for others.

Amen.