Merry Christmas. Well, this is the last Sunday in Advent. And what that means is that in less than a week, Christmas will happen. So, a very exciting time. It's a joy to be here this morning and be with you this morning. What an amazing, you know, it's a little dreary outside, but it's amazing the joy that is part of the Christmas season with, you know, I have the unfortunate circumstance of following up children's singing. That's really hard to follow. But this is a wonderful time of year. I love this time of the year. The past three weeks we've been building to this crescendo of Christmas, of looking at peace during the Christmas season, the Advent season, hope, and also joy. And this morning we're going to follow that up with love and what love means in Advent and looking forward to Christmas. It's been an absolute pleasure to hear the other men speak before me. They did a wonderful job and it was a huge blessing to me to hear their messages of art and Ron and Todd Stewart last week. So following in their pattern, I'll start with a brief bio of myself. My name is Ben Markey. And if you don't recognize that last name, that's because I'm an import from York County. Markey is not a Lakester County name. In York County, we're kinda all over the place. Just go over the river and things change. I'm married to my wife, Katie. We've been married for 11 years. My amazing and beautiful wife. We have three children. One in third grade, one in first grade, and one in preschool. So, as you can imagine, this is a very exciting time in our house right now, with those ages. We don't have any pets. So, I know all the other guys gave you a rundown of all their pets. I'm not gonna say anything more about that, because I've found that the less I talk about pets, the better chance I have of keeping that number at zero. Throughout the week, I spend my time working as the human resource manager at a local company. And for some of you, the way you were probably first introduced to me here at NBC was I was an intern here about, well back in 2010, for about a year. Before we get into our message this morning, let's go to the Lord in prayer. Father, as we open up your word, We do want to open up our hearts as well and expectantly wait to hear from you. I ask that you give me the words to say and the strength to say them and that you would get all the honor and the glory in Jesus' name, amen. Well, love is an important part of Christmas. There's a quote floating around on social media that I've seen some different variations of. And it goes something like this. It says, as a grownup, I've learned that all the Christmas magic I felt as a kid was really a mom and dad who loved me so much. Christmas is a wonderful time. I was definitely blessed as a child to have those feelings of Christmas magic or Christmas spirit, the all and wonder of Christmas, whatever you wanna call that. My family had some of the typical Christmas traditions of decorating our house, making Christmas cookies. We would go to a candlelight service on Christmas Eve every year. It was the one time or one of the few times during the year that my dad would go into the kitchen and make his famous chocolate peanut butter fudge. I have fond memories of my brother and I sneaking down the stairs with our flashlights on Christmas morning to peek at the presents. Many and many times way before we should have ever been up. But it all takes a lot of work, right parents? And right now I'm sure a lot of parents are feeling that right now. But to see the joy in our child's eyes during this time makes it all worth it, right? It seems like every year Katie and I have the same conversation of how can we keep things off her plate that she's used to doing the rest of the week so that she has the time to do all those extra things that are part of the Christmas season. What I've described is the merry and bright side of Christmas and I realize that I am incredibly blessed to have that as part of my past, to have those Christmas memories, to have that joy during this time And now, to be able to create those joyful memories with my own family, I realize that for many people, the Christmas season, and especially this notion of love during the Christmas season, is a realization that love is missing in some capacity during this time. Whether it's a broken family, a fractured relationship, someone missing around the table, or the quietness of a lonely home, Those are thoughts and feelings that cut to the very fiber and core of our being. But this morning, I'm here to tell you that Advent, that Christmas, is a story, a chapter in the ultimate story of God's love. And no matter what you may or may not be facing right now, God loves you, and that means everything. Love is one of the most confusing words in the English language, not because it is inherently complicated, though it does have its complexities, but love has become a minefield of meaning, right? It communicates how much we enjoy something. I can say that I like Christmas cookies, or I can say that I love Christmas cookies, right? And I certainly eat enough to say that I love Christmas cookies. Love is often presented as the solution to every problem in our society. As the Beatles suggested, all you need is love. And if I started quoting songs that mention love, we would probably be here the rest of the day. But as we know, the statement, love is the answer, can mean very different things depending on who is making the statement. I think if you surveyed large portions of our society and asked them what the definition of love is, the most common response would be some variation of a strong feeling of affection and care for someone or something. A strong feeling of affection and care for someone or something. You really like someone or you really like something. It's a feeling of deep regard or fondness. Unfortunately, love is also communicated in some rather misleading ways in our society, right? It's used to mean limitless acceptance. If we just love and celebrate anyone, regardless of the circumstances, that that's love, we're told to love ourselves. And with the number of people that have negative thoughts about themselves, you would think that that would be a good solution, right, if we're just using logic. But this is certainly a command of the world and not a command of scripture. And of course, in romantic relationships, falling in love is a widely used concept. If you fall in love with someone, the relationship has suddenly reached this new hemisphere, right? The problem is that if you fall in love, there seems to be a justification for falling out of love. and often that is used as a basis for ending a relationship. And it's predominantly based on feelings. So to clarify, to start this morning, to clarify, we wanna clarify what we mean by the word love. There's certainly different types of love, and when we use the word love, sometimes we use it as a noun, as a thing, and sometimes we use it as a verb, as an action. And as the video said, you can love your mom, and you can love pizza, and hopefully you don't mean the same thing when you say both of those things. And of course there's also romantic love, as I kind of already mentioned. And we won't be talking about romantic love today specifically, but it's really not that different than the picture of love that we're gonna be painting. Our focus this morning is a brief and broad overview of biblical or Christ-like love, especially as it relates to Christ coming to this world during this time of Christmas that we're celebrating. We're not gonna be able to get into the nitty gritty of the the characteristics of love, necessarily. But we're gonna, again, just present a broad overview, and then apply that to God's love for us, and then our love for God and others. As the video stated, these forms of love are not a feeling that happens to us, but it's primarily an action. When I was in college, I actually became so frustrated with this notion of love being a feeling that if you would have asked me during that time what love was, to present a definition of it, I pretty much would have just told you that love is commitment. And while commitment is certainly an important quality of love, I think we're not doing it justice and that there's definitely more depth to it than just that. I really liked the definition that was presented in the video. The video said that love is a choice to seek the well-being of someone other than yourself without expecting anything in return, especially from people who are in difficult situations who can't repay you even if they wanted to. In this definition, love is absolutely an action and as the first line says, love is a choice, which goes right along with last week what our brother Todd Stewart said that joy is, that joy is a choice, love is a choice as well. Well this definition of love is actually nearly identical to a definition that I've had committed to memory for a number of years, and so we're actually gonna use a different one this morning besides this one. The one that we're gonna use comes from Paul Tripp, and it comes from his marriage study, What Did You Expect? And I first learned this definition a couple years ago when we did this study in our sunny school class. and we're actually doing it again this year in our Sunday School class, in the new Newly Marrieds class, so this is a bit of a spoiler alert to our class. We haven't gotten to this lesson yet, so I'm sorry, guys. We won't cover it too much or too in depth today. But this definition from Paul Tripp, again, is very similar to the other one, and we're gonna use it basically for my benefit because this is the one that comes to mind for me when I think about the definition of love. Tripp's definition is willing self-sacrifice for the good of another that does not demand reciprocation or that the person being loved is deserving. Willing self-sacrifice for the good of another that does not demand reciprocation or that the person being loved is deserving. So as we look at God's love for us, and then our love for God and others. This is what we're gonna use as our basis, and we'll unpack that as we go. So first of all, the Advent and the Christmas story is an important chapter in the bigger story of love, right? God's redemptive story of love. So what is the significance of love in Advent? To understand that, we begin with our text for today, and our primary text is gonna be in 1 John chapter four. You can turn there if you'd like, or it will also be on the screen behind me. And we're gonna start with verse nine. It says, in this, the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only son into the world so that we might live through him. How do we know that God loves us? He sent his son. It's just that simple. But we must consider what that actually entails, right? What sending his son actually meant. Jesus Christ, one of the three persons of the Trinity, God himself humbled himself in obedience to the Father and took on human form. My favorite Christmas passage is actually Philippians 2, and if you wanna keep your finger in 1 John or mark your spot there, we're gonna go to Philippians 2 very quickly here. Starting in verse six, it says, Jesus Christ, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking on the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. The God of the universe in the form of a helpless child. even before his birth, the Lord Almighty growing in the belly of a peasant girl named Mary. The one to be the king of kings and lord of lords, he's the long-awaited Messiah who will be the savior of the world. This is the one that the prophet Isaiah said would be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father and Prince of Peace. And yet he chooses to enter the scene in complete humility, leaving his home, his heavenly home, for a manger to live in a stable. This idea of emptying himself in verse seven, it's saying that Christ emptied himself is a phrase that somehow or sometimes gets inaccurate notions, that somehow Jesus was less divine when he came to this earth. This isn't true, however, and Colossians 1 tells us that in Christ, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. No, this little baby born in a stable was not a fraction of the heavenly Jesus. He was the whole deity with the addition of a fully human body. He made himself less by adding a finite body. Fully God and fully man, the Christ child was born in a stable for you and me. He took on physical flesh, skin and bones, organs and tissues. His beating heart within his chest pumped blood throughout his veins so that when he grew up his flesh would be beaten and his blood poured out for you on the cross to forgive our sins. Scripture tells us that without the shedding of blood that there would be no forgiveness of sins. Christ wouldn't have even had that blood to shed if he hadn't had taken on flesh. The actions of Jesus are the basis of our definition of love. And if we continue in Philippians, look at verse eight very quickly, it clarifies for us that being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. As I said, the actions of Jesus are the basis of our definition of love. So if we kind of workshop our definition here and look at what Jesus did, first thing, willingness. This was the God of the universe, right? The omnipotent, all-powerful one. He doesn't do anything against his sovereign will. It was his choice to do this. Self-sacrifice, this world has known no greater sacrifice than Christ taking on fragile human form and then growing and laying down that finite life on the cross. For the good of another, Jesus' actions were more other-focused than any human action in history, and they were exactly what we needed. that does not demand reciprocation. Christ's sacrifice doesn't demand repayment. It is given to us freely. It costs us nothing. Furthermore, there is absolutely nothing that we could ever do to repay what he has done for us. This gift is so immense and we have no means by which to make repayment. And the final point, or that the person being loved is deserving. This part hits me maybe the hardest. Romans 5.8 is clear, that God shows his love for us and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And if we go back to our passage in 1 John, chapter four, It continues in verse 10, in this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. It's important to remember that we didn't initiate the action. It was God's love that initiated the love. He first loved us and sent Jesus to satisfy the wrath of the Father for us. That word propitiation means satisfying the wrath of the Father. So if God has so loved us, what should be our response? In simplest terms, we're told that we are to love God and to love others. I think it's important, though, before we look at that a little further, that we make a major distinction between God's love and our love. God's love is perfect. It's unfading and it never fails. Romans 8, 38 and 39 says, for I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. In our home, we've used the Jesus storybook Bible as a tool to introduce our kids to scripture and to the Bible. And in the Jesus storybook Bible, it describes God's love as the never stopping, never giving up, unbreaking, always and forever love. What a great description, simple description of what God's love is for his children. If you are in Christ this morning, you are the object of the unrelenting love of God who is fully committed to you, cares for you, and calls you his child, which is an amazing, amazing thought. It is this ultimate and perfect love of God that compels us to love God and to love others. And the reason that we know that that is our appropriate response is because Jesus tells us this, right? In Matthew 22, seven and nine, this is where Jesus is asked, what is the greatest commandment? And he responds that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. And that you should also love your neighbor as yourself. This morning, I'd like to take a moment, I'd like you to take a moment and ask yourself, what is my vertical relationship with God like right now? God loves you. Do you love God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength? Is your vertical relationship a two-way street? Are you daily speaking with him and spending time in worship with him? or are you missing out on fellowship with the God of the universe? I said that salvation is free and that it will cost us nothing. In one sense, that's true. In another sense, it will cost us everything. See, when we turn to Christ for salvation, he wants all of us. He wants our head, he wants our heart, and he wants our hands. We could say so much more about what loving God looks like, but in the simplest terms, loving God is a personal relationship between us and God that transforms the way that we live. Our final verse from 1 John 4 for today is verse 11. It says, Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought to also love one another. This won't be perfect love, like the love of God. We're going to make some serious mistakes in loving other people. We're going to have bad motives. We'll choose bad ways of being loving. And we're probably going to focus way too much on ourselves while we do it. But the bottom line is, if we love God, we will love our neighbor as ourselves. We will consider others more important than ourselves, and this includes helping those who could never repay us even if they wanted to. And probably most difficult, as Jesus described loving others, he included loving our enemies and praying for those who persecute us. This is a real challenge and test, right? It's easy to love those who love us, but the test is are we able to love others when we know that they're not gonna love us in return? Our culture is consistently asking us to demonize other people groups, and when we see people living in sin and celebrating it, that's really hard, right? But our call as followers of Christ is to hate sin and love the sinner because we are all equally deserving of eternal judgment from our own sin apart from Christ. So this morning, I'd also like you to reflect on your horizontal relationship with others. What are they like right now? And to help us do that, I'd like us to use our definition of love that we presented. So to start that, first I'd like you to think of the relationships in your life, the ones that are really close to the people that you do life with all the time, whether it be a spouse or a child, your best friend. Think about the relationships that are a little bit out further, like a coworker. Think about those friend relationships, people you pass on the street that you barely know. And then finally, think about people that you would maybe even consider an enemy. And I want you to think through this definition of how well do you willingly sacrifice yourself for their good without expecting anything in return, knowing they are flawed, they are a flawed person that at least at times will be undeserving? Well, to answer this question, it really helps to think through how sacrifice, that action that's actually being done, what that might actually look like. actions can look like serving them by doing daily tasks like maybe doing the dishes or raking leaves. It can look like carrying someone's burdens by listening to them as they go through trying times. It can look like discipling. It can look like teaching someone how to read the Bible. It can look like giving financially. Even looks like confronting sin and speaking truth. And certainly praying for someone would be a loving action, right? We can make a very long list here of what the action might be, but three things should generally characterize these actions. It should be done willingly out of choice, not under compulsion or out of guilt. Secondly, it should be out of care for the other person. And thirdly, it should be freely out of grace, expecting nothing in return. So here the brownie point system and the if I scratch your back, you might scratch mine, those systems don't apply here, right? A quick word of caution to the checklist, the get it done, the doers among us that are sitting out there. This isn't necessarily a challenge to do more. It's first of all a challenge to make sure that what we're already doing is loving. And for those among us that are more like myself, that may have more of the tendency to sit back and be more self-focused with our time, this is a good time to evaluate how we're using our time for our own interests. and how much we're using our time and resources to benefit other people, to serve other people. My final challenge to you this morning, to each of us this morning, is if the Spirit hasn't already placed someone on your heart, I'd like you to pick someone that you'd like to show more Christ-like love to throughout the rest of this year. So rather than making a New Year's resolution, I'm asking that you make an end of the year resolution to finish 2021 strong. Will you commit to identifying someone, praying for them, and doing things for their benefit? There's no need to be extravagant or go over the top, especially since when we do that, we tend to make it more about ourselves anyways. But would you commit to praying for them and caring for them in ways that you know are for their benefit. Knowing that God has done so much more for you in sending his one and only son to this earth. This morning, as we reflect on what Christ has done, we're going to celebrate that around the table, around communion, And as we transition to that, I'd like to share a reading from Augustine, a Christmas reading from one of his sermons that deeply struck me at the beginning of the Advent season when I read it. This reading is a call to truly remember the reason for the season. So this morning, you may have started this Christmas season with a lot of excitement, and as the time has gone along, you've become tired and overwhelmed. Maybe you've been distracted with the demands of work and you haven't taken time to remember the meaning of Christmas. Perhaps you've just been overwhelmed with the trials of life. Or maybe even this morning you're in a good place and that's great. But regardless, as I read these words, I'd like you to use them as a chance to recenter your thoughts around the significance of what Christmas is and what Christ has done for you. The words, I'll read them aloud, and they'll also be on the screen behind me. Awake, mankind. For your sake, God has become man. Awake, you who sleep. Rise up from the dead, and Christ will enlighten you. I tell you again, for your sake, God became man. You would have suffered eternal death had he not been born in time. Never would you have been freed from sinful flesh had he not taken on himself the likeness of sinful flesh. You would have suffered everlasting unhappiness had it not been for this mercy. You would never have returned to life had he not shared your death. You would have been lost if he had not hastened to your aid. You would have perished had he not come. Let us then joyfully celebrate the coming of our salvation and redemption. Let us celebrate the festive day on which he who is the great and eternal day came from the great and endless day of eternity into our own short day of time. Let's pray. Father, this morning we are so eternally grateful for your sacrifice in sending your one and only son to this world. a sacrifice we can't even begin to imagine. But Father, we thank you for that. We thank you for your love for us, and we ask that you would give us a great love in return, that you would prepare room in our hearts for you, and that you would give us an abundance of love to overflow into others. Father, this morning, as we have identified people that we want to demonstrate love to, Father, I ask that you would help us to be true to that commitment. You would help us to find meaningful ways to show your love to those around us. We thank you in Jesus' name. Well, this morning, as we gather around the table of the Lord in celebration of what Christ has done for us. We remember his love in coming to this earth as a child, for living a sinless life, and dying a criminal's death. We also celebrate his resurrection knowing that the grave could not hold him, and on the third day he rose again from the grave, conquering death. by rising from the dead, and today he is seated at the right hand of the Father as our advocate. God's love is what allows us to have peace amid the turbulence of life, hope when we don't see the way forward, and joy in any circumstance. This morning we invite all who are trusting in Christ alone for salvation to participate in communion. And we remember Christ's sacrifice in the way that Jesus instructed his disciples. The Lord Jesus, on the night when he was betrayed, he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, this is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for sending your son, Jesus. We thank you for his body, which was beaten. And we thank you that this morning we can celebrate with joy what you have done. If I can open up this packet here. And if you would hold the bread in front of you, and we'll repeat the words, thank you, Lord Jesus, for your body which was given for us together. Thank you, Lord Jesus, for your body which was given for us. In the same way also, Jesus took the cup, saying, this cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. Father, we thank you that you saw fit to send your son and to lay down his life on the cross. Thank you for shedding blood that is able to cleanse sin once and for all. And thank you that we can celebrate that forgiveness this morning. If you hold your cup in front of you, we'll repeat the words, thank you Lord Jesus for your blood, which was shed for us. Thank you Lord Jesus for your blood which was shed for us. So may the Lord lead you where you're weary and help you to see more clearly as you walk with him as you go. May you love with all your heart and soul and mind and strength. So go in grace and peace and love this Christmas week.