Scripture: John 3:16
Sermon Series: John 3:16: God’s Love Language – Sermon 02

Can I encourage you that, if you’ve never read C.S. Lewis, to read him? And please have your children read his Narnia Tales.

In his book The Screwtape Letters, the demon Screwtape tells his “apprentice” Wormwood, One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really DOES!!  Screwtape was right! God really does love us despite all we’ve done: For God SO LOVED!

We’re in the second week of our study on John 3:16, what we’re calling God’s Love Language. John 3:16 is the greatest, most concise statement of God’s love. This morning, we want to focus on that second phrase, For God SO LOVED!

For a word that we use so often, love is very difficult to define. If you look it up in the dictionary, you’ll find it’s both a noun and a verb with 11 different definitions. So, love is used with God, then used with romance. It’s even used with football, even if no one cares who’s in the Super Bowl.

Picture a young couple, they’re dating and he schedules a romantic evening. They go to a restaurant that’s really too expensive for him. Afterwards they go out on a warm, moonlit night, and sit on a park bench overlooking the lake. He puts his arm around her, and he realizes millions of times men have told a woman “I love you.” He’s fearful she won’t get all that he means by “I love you.” So, he looks into her eyes, having checked out a thesaurus and says, “I have tender, passionate affections for you as a member of the opposite sex.” Somehow, it doesn’t quite capture all that love is about.

In English we have only one word for love. That’s unfortunate. The ancient Hebrews had the same dilemma with just one word for love. But the Greeks had far more. Storge was probably their most frequent use of love. It referred to love between a parent and child. They had a different word for love between two friends, Phileo. It’s not romantic love, but attraction or compassion. It’s where Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love comes from.

Eros is another word for love. It’s used for strong passion or sexual attraction.  We sometimes refer to sexual intercourse as “making love.”

They had another word, Agape, that they didn’t use very often. It’s rarely found in Greek literature. It’s unique in that it’s focused on the one who does the loving, the one giving the love. And while other words for love are heavy on emotion, while Agape has emotion, it’s so much more than feeling. Agape focuses on action, doing something for the benefit of the other individual.

We love our children because they’re related to us. We love our best friends because we get something out of friendship. We express love sexually because we’re physically attracted. All are good and are designed by God.

Agape is unique. It’s not based on whether the other person is attractive or reciprocates. Agape is rooted in the one giving the love. It’s supernatural! It’s why it permeates our New Testaments which was originally written in Greek. Some form of agape is used nearly 300 times in the New Testament.

Be honest. Wouldn’t it be great to just to be loved for myself? I don’t have to look good, say the right things, have money or power, or any of the things others value us for? Wouldn’t it be great to be loved for being ME, even if someone knew everything about me, good or bad?

There is only one type of love that loves us as is. It’s agape, a love that has as its exclusive source, God Himself. As the Bible says, Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person. Though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love (agape) for us in this, while we were still sinners Christ died for us (Romans 5:7-8).  

Agape is the love found in John 3:16. That phrase so loved is important. It tells us how God responded to humanity after we sinned. It doesn’t just say “God loved” – which is be amazing – but it says that “God SO loved”!  

So indicates that the measure of God’s love for us is very great. It emphasizes the intensity of God’s love! God so loved us though our lives were a dumpster fire, though we were enemies of God (Romans 5:10).

For some, the concept of God’s love is hard to correlate with their past history. Maybe you grew up in a home where your parents who were supposed to love you hurt you. Or, you had a spouse who hurt and left you. Some were molested or abused by someone who was supposed to love them. Their picture of God’s love is contaminated by their experience.

So, if there is one thing I want you to take home today, it’s this: God so loves you. God’s love will never fail you! Right now, God’s affections for you are stronger than the love anyone else on this planet could possibly have toward you. That’s the great news of John 3:16! So, before we dig in, I want you to say this with me: God loves me. If you’re taking notes…

1. God’s love is NOT

Without a doubt the most commonly known character trait of God is that God is loving. Yet there is no character trait of God that has been so badly misunderstood. Although it may sound jarring to us, let’s talk about four common wrong ideas about God’s love.

God doesn’t love every person the same. 

We are made Imago Dei, made in the image of God. All of us have various circles of love but there are some that you love more…and so does God.

For example, we’re to love our neighbor, we’re to love our brothers and sisters in Christ. We’re to love our spouses, children and parents. But you should love your spouse the most, then your children. Then, it should go out to your brothers and sisters in Christ, and neighbors.

The Bible teaches that God loves the world, but He lavishes love on His own children. If someone has committed their life to Christ, they’re part of God’s forever family. Just as you love your children more than your neighbor’s kids, God loves His children more.

God’s love doesn’t cancel out His holiness. 

Unbelievers often think that God’s love is a “get out of hell free card.” They have the idea that when they get to heaven, God will smile and say, “You don’t deserve it, but aw, come on in anyway.” But God’s love is not some benevolent softness. God can’t overlook sin. He will never contradict His own nature.

Behind this wrong idea is a perverted view of love that says, “If you love me, you’ll accept anything I do.” Wrong! Jesus addressed this in John 14:15 when He said: If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.

Love makes judgment calls. It cares about right and wrong. It’s why parents discipline their children and why God disciplines His. God’s love is a holy love. His love is built upon His holiness and can’t exist apart from it. It’s why Jesus went to the cross so God could be both loving and holy. Jesus paid our sin debt so God could forgive us because God’s justice was satisfied.

God’s love doesn’t mean everyone will go to heaven. 

That’s the heresy of universalism. While it sounds attractive, it’s completely at odds with the Bible. Not everyone who says “I love the Lord” or “I’m a believer” is going to heaven. Hell will be filled with nice, religious people of all varieties.

As Acts 4:12 says, only those who put their complete trust in Christ will be saved: And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. As Max Lucado says, Jesus loves you just the way you are, but He loves you too much to let you stay the way you are.

God is love doesn’t mean that love is God. 

Scripture clearly states that God is love. Love is at the core of God’s being. It’s this love that causes God to reach out to rescue and forgive guilty sinners. But the thought, “love is God”—is manifestly untrue. Love is not love and not all love is of God.

We humans naturally love darkness rather than light. Some people love abuse and lying. Some love perversion and violence. None of those are of God. To say that “love is God” is false and a kind of New Age pantheism.

2. God’s love is to infinity and beyond

On one occasion, a student in a seminary class announced to the professor, “I don’t believe in God!” The professor, unraveled, replied, “Describe this God you don’t believe in?” After the student had described a hateful, vengeful God, the professor confessed, “I don’t believe in that God either. My God is a God of love.”

We humans love because we feel like loving, but God loves because He chooses to love. While God’s love is not emotionless, His emotions follow His decision. God’s love chooses to pursue the objects of His love. He loves even in the face of resistance, even in the face of evil behavior where another emotion might be more expected. God’s love will love in the face of rebellion, in the face of rejection, even in the face of perverse evil.  

Read the Old Testament. Though the nation of Israel acted horribly toward God, God still loved them. And it was God’s own people, the Jews, who murdered Jesus, His only Son.

God’s love is not based on the loveliness of the object. It’s based on some quality within Himself because God is love. In a sense, God can’t help Himself, though He does choose it. God loves because He is love.

That means that God loves losers, bad to the bone people, and His enemies. We could spend years studying God’s love and only scrape the surface. Let me share some wonderful terms about God’s love that I hope stick with you. Because many times we feel very unlovable, but God still loves us.

God’s love is uncaused. 

Last Sunday we had a dedication for Trevor and Angela Warren’s daughter, Wrenley. It’s easy to love babies.

Our experiences in life teach us that we must earn love. Henri Nouwen explains: The world says: ‘Yes, I love you if you are good-looking, intelligent, and wealthy. I love you if you have a good education, a good job, and good connections. I love you if you produce much, sell much, and buy much.’ There are endless ‘ifs’ hidden in the world’s love. These ‘ifs’ enslave me, since it is impossible to respond adequately to all of them. The world’s love is and always will be conditional. As long as I keep looking for my true self in the world of conditional love, I will remain ‘hooked’ to the world—trying, failing, and trying again. It is a world that fosters addictions because what it offers cannot satisfy the deepest craving of my heart.

Even fairy tales communicate that you must be attractive, talented, intelligent, or athletic to be loved. Many children long for the day that they transform from an ugly duckling to a beautiful swan.

The ugliest thing about us is our sin. The Bible says, “But God proves His own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8 CSB). God didn’t say, “When you obey the Ten Commandments, you’ll earn My love.” No, thankfully, God loved us while were sinners and sent His Son to die for us. It’s an uncaused love.

God’s love is unreasonable. 

Who’s the evilest person you can think of? When someone wants to say someone is terribly evil, they compare them to Hitler or Osama Bin Laden. Can you imagine a Jew loving Hitler? Or a family of someone killed in the World Trade Center bombing loving Osama Bin Laden? You’d say, “That’s nuts.” No, my friend that’s God!

Dan Allender writes, If Christ had practiced the kind of love we advocate nowadays, He would have lived to a ripe old age. God’s love for us is unreasonable. That’s why His love is sacrificial.

God’s love is unlimited. 

God’s love for you existed deep in the depths of eternity even before time began. Since God is both beyond us and beside us, His love exists beyond us and beside us. His love for us is as the sea is to a fish. The sea is huge and expansive beyond the limited range of any fish, yet in it the fish lives, moves and has its very being. That’s God’s love for us.

Psalm 139 is a Hebrew hymn about the omnipresence of God, but its observations are true for His love as well. Where God is, His love is. Let me illustrate that by replacing the terms for God designating His love.

Where shall I go from Your love? Or where shall I flee from Your love? If I ascend to heaven, Your love is there! If I make my bed in Hell, Your love is there! If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, Even there Your love shall lead me, and Your love shall hold me. If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,’ even the darkness is not dark to You; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as Your love (Psalm 139:7-12).

Psalm 139 reminds us that God and His love are always present with us. In Jeremiah 31:3, God says, I have loved you with an everlasting love; Therefore I have drawn you out with kindness.

In his book The Pleasures of God, John Piper shares why God’s love is superior to any other love we will find here on earth:

Sometimes we joke and say about marriage, ‘The honeymoon is over.’ But that’s because we are finite. We can’t sustain a honeymoon level of intensity and affection. We can’t foresee the irritations that come with long-term familiarity. We can’t stay as fit and handsome as we were then. We can’t come up with enough new things to keep the relationship that fresh. But God says His joy over His people is like a bridegroom over a bride. He is talking about honeymoon intensity and honeymoon pleasures and honeymoon energy and excitement and enthusiasm and enjoyment. He is trying to get into our hearts what He means when He says He rejoices over us with all His heart.

With God, the honeymoon never ends. He is infinite in love. He has no trouble sustaining a honeymoon level of intensity in His love for us.

God’s love is unchanging. 

God says, “I love you.” No, if’s, ands, or buts. God loves us in our vile sinful condition. In Revelation 1:5 the Bible says Jesus loves us and washes us from our sins. Notice the order. He loves us, then He washes us. He doesn’t say, “I have to clean you up before I love you.” No God loves us in our dirty sinful condition.

God’s love is what we call immutable. That simply means it never changes. Have you ever had someone say that they love you, but now they hate you? What happened to their love? It changed. God’s love isn’t like that. God will never stop loving you. As James 1:17 says, Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning. God never changes.

The other day I was talking with a friend in law enforcement. One of the struggles for law enforcement and for the church is how to help those with mental health issues. Many Christ-followers struggle with mental health.  

Let me share a few sentences from a book by Kathryn Greene-McCreight. She’s a college professor from Connecticut with a PhD from Yale, a leader in her church, and many come to her for counsel…but she also struggles with mental illness. In her early thirties, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She wrote a book called Darkness Is My Companion, using the last line of Psalm 88. She points out that though we can’t just read from the Bible and expect someone to feel better immediately, it’s ultimately God’s love that brings healing. So, she writes: If it is the love of God that we see in the face of Christ Jesus that has promised to pull us through, a love that bears out to the edge of doom even for the ugly and unlovable such as we, then the statement that love heals depression is, in fact, the only light that exists in the dark tunnel. It’s God’s love that can pull us out of the darkness in our own souls. His love is unchanging! Please remember that!  

God’s love is unconditional. 

If you’ve ever blown it so bad and maybe everyone has walked out, and you wonder, “Does God still love me?” My friend, please read Romans 8:31-39. God’s love is unconditional!

God didn’t stop loving Adam and Eve even after they disobeyed Him. God didn’t stop loving Noah even after he got drunk. God didn’t stop loving Abraham after he lied twice, denying Sarah was his wife. God didn’t stop loving Moses even after his temper tantrum. God didn’t stop loving David even when he committed adultery and had the husband murdered. God didn’t stop loving Peter though he denied Jesus three times. My friend, God won’t stop loving you! Please say that with me: God won’t ever stop loving me!

3. God’s love means…

One of the earliest, most famous atheists was Madeline Murray O’Hair. In 1966 she was the one responsible for having prayer taken out of public schools. After her death in 1995, some of her possessions were auctioned off to pay some of her tax bills. One item that was auctioned off was her personal journal. Over and over again this Madeline Murray O’Hair who seemed to possess such a hatred for God, wrote in her private diary these words. Please, won’t somebody somewhere love me? You’re probably not an atheist, but you may be feeling like that today “Won’t somebody love me?” My friend, God loves you. Let’s end with three important ways we know that God loves us.

We know that God loves us because He sees us. 

Have you ever been to an event and it feels like no one sees you? Jesus saw individuals that others didn’t see or were purposefully ignored. He healed a blind man named Bartimaeus that everyone else was telling to shut up. He saw Zaccheus, a hated tax collector, who climbed up a tree just to see Jesus. Whoever you are, God sees you and He loves you!

I work to see people, but I have to be honest, there’s one group that I try not to see. When I’m in an urban area, there may be panhandlers with signs, “Please spare a little cash.” And I don’t know if they’re telling the truth or if it’s a scam, so I avert my eyes, to not make eye contact. I try not to see them because I don’t want to enable someone, particularly an addict. I’m concerned about giving someone cash who will abuse it. Jesus never looks the other way. He always sees them and He sees us.

We know that God loves us because He hears us. 

Isn’t that one of the major disagreements in our marriages? “Are you listening to me?”

Author, Deborah Tannen shares a wonderful story about her great aunt. Listen as I read it: “My great-aunt, for many years a widow, had a love affair when she was in her seventies. Obese, balding, her hands and leg misshapen by arthritis, she did not fit the stereotype of a woman romantically loved. But she was—by a man, also in his seventies who lived in a nursing home but occasionally spent weekends with her in her apartment. In trying to tell me what this relationship meant to her, my great-aunt told of a conversation. One evening she had had dinner out with friends. When she returned home, her male friend called and she told him about the dinner He listened with interest and asked her, What did you wear? When she told me this, she began to cry: Do you know how many years it’s been since anyone asked me what I wore? When my great-aunt said this, she was saying that it had been years since anyone had cared deeply-intimately–about her, that someone had actually listened.”

Jesus always listened. God is always listening. One of our great problems is that we don’t listen, particularly if someone is not from our team or tribe.

We will never win a lost world, unless we like Jesus, listen. We need to listen to that woman who is pro-choice, or the gay person, or Muslim or opposite of us politically or someone from another generation, young or old.

Jane and I are working to build a friendship with a Muslim who creates all of our banners here at church. I want to share Jesus with Ehab, but it won’t happen if I don’t first hear him. People don’t want us to share if they don’t know first that we care. Like Jesus, we show we care by listening to them.

We know that God loves us because He touches us. 

Seeing or hearing is one thing, but God touches our spiritual diseased lives because He loves us.

Recently, I had a friend share how her mom had been in the hospital off and on for months. Her illness was bloody and gross. She asked me, “Is this too graphic for you?” Listening to it was fine, but my friend in love for her mom, touched her and cleaned her up. And that’s what Jesus does. He doesn’t love us from a distance. He touches what most of us are repulsed by.

Leprosy was the AIDS of Jesus’ day. But in Mark 1, Jesus reaches out and touches a leper. Leprosy was highly contagious. Jews were forbidden to touch lepers. Jews weren’t even allowed to breathe the same air. It’s why lepers had to cover the bottoms of their faces. But Jesus touches this man. It’s beautiful. Jesus touches the leper before He healed him, and God in His love does the same for us. What area of your life is diseased by sin today? Let God touch it with His love and heal you.

Because God loves us, He sees us, He hears us and He touches and heals us.

Conclusion

So loved…. On August 16, 1987, Northwest Airlines flight 225 crashed just after taking off from the Detroit airport, killing 155 people. But one survived: a four-year-old from Tempe, Arizona, named Cecelia. When rescuers found Cecelia they didn’t believe she’d been on the plane. Investigators first assumed that Cecelia had been a passenger in one of the cars on the highway on which the jet crashed. But when the passenger register for the flight was checked, there was Cecelia’s name.

Cecelia survived because, even as the plane was falling, Cecelia’s mother, Paula Chican, unbuckled her own seat belt, got down on her knees in front of her daughter, wrapped her arms and body around Cecelia, and then wouldn’t let her go. Nothing, I mean nothing, could separate that child from her mother’s love! Not tragedy or disaster, not the fall or the flames that followed…neither height nor depth, neither life nor death.

And that’s God’s love for us. Jesus left heaven, lowered Himself to become one of us, and covered us with the sacrifice of His own body to rescue us.

God’s love though doesn’t help you unless you personally receive it. What are the results of His love? Should not perish but have everlasting life. If you receive Him, if you trust in Him, you will have, not might have or hope to have, you will have. You will have the certainty of everlasting life.

What’s everlasting life? It’s not just quantity or living forever. It’s quality and begins the moment you put your weight on Jesus Christ, the moment you say, “God, forgive me for my sins, come into my heart, be my Lord, and Savior. I believe in you. I trust in you. I receive you.”

That very moment, the life of God comes into your soul, and you have new life. It’s a life on a new level. Knowing God’s love personally is eternal life.

Have you accepted God’s love for you? Do you have God’s life in your soul? Have you accepted His forgiveness and gift of love for you?

For God SO LOVED the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.