Our first lesson from God's Word comes from the 45th chapter of Isaiah, beginning in verse 20 and reading through the end of the chapter. Come, gather together, and approach, you fugitives of the nations, those who carry their wooden idols and pray to a God who cannot save, have no knowledge. Speak up and present your case. Yes, let them consult each other. who predicted this long ago, who announced it from ancient times. Was it not I, the Lord? There is no other God but me, a righteous God and Savior. There is no one except me. Turn to me and be saved all the ends of the earth, for I am God and there is no other. By myself I have sworn truth has gone out from my mouth, a word that will not be revoked. Every knee will bow to me, and every tongue will swear allegiance. It will be said about me, righteousness and strength are found only in the Lord. All who are enraged against him will come to him and be put to shame. All the descendants of Israel will be justified and boast in the Lord. And then from the third chapter of John, a familiar passage to many of us, starting in verse 16 of John 3. For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment. The light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light, because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God. Heavenly Father, we ask that You would open our hearts to receive this good seed, that it might grow, mature, and bear fruit unto eternal life. For the glory and praise of your name, and of our individual well-being, and the health of our families, and our church community, and indeed the world around us as we live in pagan darkness. Granted for Jesus' sake, we pray. Amen. You may be seated. Well, I know it seems like we just started 2024, and now we're done with it, or as good as. The last Lord's Day of the year, and we've come through the Advent season, and depending on how you do your counting, we started Christmastide on Christmas Day, so we're almost halfway through the 12 days of Christmas. This is the fifth day of Christmas. And those of you who know the song, that's the five gold rings, right? That's good, because that's the only part of the song that I can remember. I get lost before it, I get lost after it. But here we are with five gold rings. I don't remember exactly when I was introduced to the idea of five questions that you have to answer when you're writing something. It might have been in a writing part of an English class in high school. Certainly, when I had a little instruction in journalism, they said, there's five W questions that you have to answer when you're writing. Who, what, where, when, and why. Any of you learn that? Yeah, OK. Have the five questions changed? And the idea is, if you cover all of those things, you'll tell the story, and you'll help the reader understand why you're telling them the story. And it occurred to me, as I was thinking about ministering to you and what I might choose as a text, that this passage really gives us the answer to that fifth question, why. Now, again, we've gone through the Advent and the beginning of the Christmas season. We've heard the stories from Luke 1 and 2, from Matthew 1 and 2, maybe the prologue to John's Gospel. We've been told the story, and that tells us who, what, where, and kind of when. We're not quite sure that it was in December or December 25th, But we know that it was, by definition, in the first century, because we mark our time from the advent of our Lord Jesus Christ. And it implies, at least if we listen, we were watching with our grandchildren last night a special that was done in the late 70s with John Denver and the Muppets. And that's why I remember Miss Piggy singing Five Gold Rings. And he even, surprisingly enough on national TV, had a segment at the end of that special that gave a quick run through on the Christmas story. The traveling of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, the child born and laid in the manger, the angels announcing that birth and so forth. So we know the storyline more or less. It gets distorted in some tellings. But it does at least answer those first four questions and implies an answer to the fifth. But when we're left to our own devices to draw the conclusion, what's it all about? Why Christmas? You know, you could say, well, the food is good, maybe you'll get the present that you want, it's a nice time for families to gather together, and all of those things are true. But is that why Christ came into the world? Is that the answer to that question? And actually, some people have drawn some attractive but distorted answers to the question why. Jesus came into the world to make us better people. We have the potential in us, but it needs to be drawn out. And the sentimentality of this poor family, no place to lay their baby. Everybody loves a baby. He's not very threatening when he's a newborn. And so they think, if we just moved by the sentiment of the story, maybe we'll become a better person. Something like this, oh my heart, ever show a pure and noble love and dwell at last in heaven with the angels above. I'm basically a good person, but I need something to draw that goodness out, that natural love. Or, of course, the famous gospel according to Charles Dickens in his tale, A Christmas Carol, where basically you become a good person, a generous person, a kind and thoughtful person, because you've been scared to death that you're going to die and be forgotten, and all your stuff, your worldly treasure, is going to end up in a junk shop someplace. And you don't want that to happen to you. you wake up on Christmas morning and you find out you have another chance. I think they ought to write a sequel to A Christmas Carol to ask the question, how long was it before Scrooge's fear faded and he went back to business as usual? What is the reason for the coming of Christ into the world? And here John and it's consistent with the rest of the New Testament, gives us the answer. And it's in those very, very familiar words of John 3.16. We can, many of us, recite it by heart. I learned it in the King James, so I get a double version. For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. John tells us in these verses that the gift of God's Son, the sending of the second person of the Trinity into the world of humanity, His becoming one with us in our nature, demonstrates the saving love of the Creator God. That's why Jesus came. That's why He was sent. And Jesus was very deliberate, very self-conscious about that mission and fulfilled it to the point of death on a cross. And then He rose again in glory. So I want us to think a little bit about this passage and what John has to say about the reason for Christmas. The reason why Jesus came into the world. And we can start with that word, world. Kosmos. You've heard that word from the Greek before. It can mean The whole created order, as Genesis 1 puts it, the heavens and the earth. Whatever has been created, visible and invisible, that is not God himself, things that have been made by God and are subject to God's sovereign lordship, that's the world. And so sometimes it's just used in that general sense of the creation. But in John, and elsewhere, often The word world refers to the world of human beings, and particularly human beings fallen in Adam and living out their lives in rebellion against God the Creator. Our world is broken, and everybody sees it, but unbelievers cannot account for it. That's why you get these kind of strange versions of the Christmas story. Is there something in us that just needs improvement, just needs a breath to fan the flame? Or are we really as bad as the Bible says we are? Fallen, condemned, guilty? And the worst of it is we don't even know it. And when we get a little sense of it, Or we see it in somebody else. It's always easier to see it in somebody else, isn't it? We suppress that knowledge as quickly as we can. We're lost, Jesus says. The world is like sheep without a shepherd. And it's God's love for that world, the fallen world, that John is speaking to me." This world is hostile to God. Later on in chapter 7, verse 7, Jesus says, the world hates me. So this fall in humanity, their default setting is hatred against God, trying to suppress the knowledge of God any way that they can. Again, Jesus says, if the world hates you, which it will, remember that it hated me first before it hated you. In John 12.31, Jesus says that Satan is the ruler of this world, in that sense that we follow a leader that is as corrupt and as rebellious as we are. We certainly learn that from the opening chapters of Genesis. Though the special creation of God, human beings like you and I, made in the image of God, we have become rebels. We have fallen into sin. And we refuse to acknowledge God as the Lord. It's not just ignorance. It's the ignorance of someone who wants to be ignorant. You know, in the world of alcoholism treatment, they often talk about denial. Well, this is denial on steroids. That you can't help someone with a substance addiction when they keep saying, I don't have a problem. I don't have a problem. I can handle it myself. They have to come to the end of themselves. Even secularists understand that. But we can never come to the end of ourselves until God opens our eyes. And he does that in connection with presenting the good news of Christ to us. John says again, thinking about his describing Jesus' relationship to the world. Right in the beginning, He was in the world. The Word was in the world. The world was made through Him, and yet, the world did not know Him. In John 17, verse 25, O righteous Father, Jesus prays, even though the world does not know You, I know You, and these know that you have sent me." He promises the giving of the Spirit, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees Him or knows Him. So you see the picture. This world is fallen and it's always pushing back against God's overtures of grace, whether it comes through the creation around us or our own unique humanness. or through the preaching of the gospel in one form or another. I mean, you've all had experience, no doubt, even in a low-key presentation of the gospel to someone else, giving a reason, maybe telling someone else what difference God has made in your life. The best you can expect from them typically is, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm glad, that's good for you. But it can evoke real hostility as well. Stop preaching at me. It's always funny to me that we try to figure out how to be the most gentle and thoughtful and careful presenters of the Gospel, but since the Gospel is a stink, there's no way you can take the stink off a stink, and that's how the unbelieving world receives the message. It smells bad. to them, and there's no way you can present it that's going to make them say, oh, that's it. Unless, again, as we said in Sunday school, the Spirit of God is creating some new life and new receptivity in them. So the world in this fallen state should only expect one thing from the Creator, and that is absolute and total judgment. And one of the reasons we get the flood so early in the human history is that it reminds us this is what our sin as a race and as individuals deserve. Total annihilation. And it gets total annihilation, but with the rescue of Noah and his family. Not because Noah and his family are the only good people in the world, but because they are the ones upon whom God has put His gracious, saving favor. And so we should expect condemnation. Indeed, as Jesus goes on to say in verse 18 of our text, you, each one of you, and me, as a fallen human being, stand condemned already. We're the prisoners on death row. And if you want to go to hell forever, you don't have to do a thing. Just keep on doing what you're doing. You stand under the wrath and curse of God. You got that from Adam. And every human being that has ever walked the face of the earth, except for Jesus of Nazareth, is under that condemnation. We stand condemned. We shall not see life, says verse 36, but the wrath of God remains on you. One of the reasons people don't receive the good news as genuinely good news is because they don't really believe the bad news is that bad. They're not that guilty. And the guy next to him is always worse. And as for judgment, that hellfire and brimstone, we got rid of that a long time ago. No worries. When we die, we die. End of story. Or we all go to heaven when we die, because we're basically good people. Jesus, who is the one who should know, is the one that assures us that judgment awaits, and there's only one way of escape. So the fallen world. if it admits its own condition, should expect condemnation. It should expect judgment. But what does this text tell us that we receive instead? And this is the good news, that we will not perish, but have everlasting life through the Son that God sent into the world. God has offered to us in Christ a way of escape, a way of salvation. Look at verse 17. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him. You see, judgment could have fallen on the whole human race without exception from a distance. God could simply say, let the judgment fall, and it would. But to rescue us, He had to insert himself into our world and into our humanity so that he might provide the representative substitution that alone can bring about deliverance. And why did God do that? Because of his great love. God so loved that fallen, rebellious, corrupted world. Now, I have to just say here, we're modern people. We all think love is a good thing. But we've so cheapened it that that cheapness tends to attach itself even to the love of God that is expressed here. We can't seem to take in the magnitude of the love of God, because for us, Love can mean just hitting a little heart sign on the internet when somebody posts something. I love this. Let me give you a heart. I love it a lot. Let me give you three hearts. Boom, boom, boom. Well, if that's love, then what's the big deal about the love of God? Or when people can stand up in a marriage ceremony and pledge their love to one another as long as they both shall live, and sue for divorce six months later? Well, if that's love, what's the love of God? It's interesting that in the first century world, love was not a big deal. The pagans didn't celebrate love. They didn't make songs, all you need is love. There was certainly love between men and women, and maybe parents and children, but it wasn't considered to be a thing like it is for the modern world. And so in a sense, we have to strip away everything we think we know about love and think about the love of God like a light shining in a dark place. Any of you ever been in a cavern or in a mine? When we lived in Northern California, there were gold mines, and they had tours of some of them. And in some of them, they would take you down to the depth of the mine, and then they'd turn the lights off. And usually in a dark room, you know, you wait a little bit and you can begin to see outlines at least. You get a little bit of light. But if you are in absolute darkness, your eyes never adjust. And you experience what it's like to be totally blind. And then they strike a candle, strike a match and light a candle. And suddenly, it looks like the sun. The love of God for us, our fallen world. is that kind of love. There's nothing like it. And even though we use the word, we cannot begin to take it in until you start thinking about how hard it is to love your enemies. Easy to love the people that love you, right? Anybody have a problem with that? They're telling you you're so great, and they're really glad you're part of their family, and okay, that's fine. But you just think right now, here's your little mental exercise, Who's your worst enemy right now? Who's the person that has dishonored you, betrayed you, or maybe physically harmed you, or someone in your family? The person who you would have to say, boy, it's really hard for me to love that person, and so usually we just water down love, and we'll say the words, but not have the real, genuine article. See, it's the love that finds its source completely in the lover, in this God who John says is love. And he sets his love sovereignly on people who could never in a million years deserve it. And what's more, they would never in a million years care to have it if that love didn't come flying through their lives like a freight train, a runaway freight train. God didn't send His Son into the world to condemn. That day of judgment is coming. We'll come back to that in a moment. But He loved our undeserving and undesiring race. Paul tries to get at it in Romans 5. God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, sometimes people think, well, I've got to clean up my act. I have to be a better person. will love me and He will receive me. No, no, not at all. I mean, it's good to strive to please God, but it's while we were sinners. You see, when Jesus died on the cross, you didn't even exist except in the mind of God. And He set His love on you and He sent His Son while we were sinners. But more than that, while we were enemies. And we were reconciled to God by the death of his son. Have you got a mind big enough to begin to take in this story? The love of God, the infinite love of our Creator for us in our lost condition. There was a hymn written in the early 19th century became a popular one during the Welsh revival in the early 20th century. And ever since I ever came across it, I thought, these lyrics kind of get at it. Just let me share a couple of verses. Here is love wide as the ocean, loving kindness like a flood. We had a hurricane come through East Tennessee and Western North Carolina back earlier in the year, and it flooded many of those valleys and wiped people out completely. Well, you can think about a flood of devastation, but what about a flood of loving kindness? When the prince of life, our ransom, shed for us his precious blood, Who his love will not remember? Who can cease to sing his praise? He can never be forgotten throughout heaven's eternal days. We begin to grasp this love that God has for us. It's not going to be so easy for you to forget this, Jesus. Get busy with your work, or your fun, or your family, and Jesus is just kind of in the background. He's there. when I first met my wife, she wasn't my wife then, but we were children. And when we were in a group setting, the only person I could see was her. Might be 50 or 100 people in the room, but I would scan and I saw her. Do you see Jesus? Do you love him who first loved you? That's the question, that's the challenge. Again, back to that hymn. On the Mount of Crucifixion, fountains opened deep and wide. Through the floodgates of God's mercy flowed a vast and gracious tide. Grace and love like mighty rivers poured incessant from above. And heaven's peace and perfect justice kissed the guilty world in love. Why? Why the incarnation? Because this God, who has such love, wants to lavish it on people who are not interested, don't want it, and push back, unless the Holy Spirit opens our hearts to receive it. Well, as I said, the result is, though we deserve to perish everlastingly, we will not perish, but have everlasting life. Instead of the eternal condemnation and punishment of hell, we are offered, given, in and by the Holy Spirit, the life of the age to come. If anyone is in Christ, he's a new creation. The old passes away. The new has come. And we parse this out theologically in terms of justification, how are we brought into a right relationship with God, the subjective transformation of a human being that we call sanctification and adoption, having a place of privilege in God's family, and those are all results of this great love of God, but they all flow from our union with Christ, and back to the Sunday School lesson for those of you who are here, the principal acts of saving faith are accepting, receiving, and resting upon Christ and Christ alone for justification, sanctification, and adoption in accordance with the covenant of grace. Well, if all of this is true, And John affirms that it is true. How should you respond? You must believe in the One who first loved you. Love the God who first loved you. You know, it's often mentioned, but just to emphasize here, John really wants you to understand that what he is saying is true and reliable. You know, again, it's kind of a thing in our modern world to say religion by definition, nobody really knows the answers, right? There's so many religions, they contradict one another. Maybe it's just better to say there's no religion. Imagine there's no heaven. But John says that he has seen these things. And he reports them. At the end of the incident with so-called Doubting Thomas, remember? He says, if I don't see and touch, I won't believe. And Jesus says, OK, satisfy yourself. See and touch and believe. And then he says, but blessed are those who believe even though they have not seen and touched. And then he says this, now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples which are not written in this book, but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing, you may have life in His name. And he repeats that in the next chapter and he repeats it in his first letter. Why is that? Because he wants us to see the Gospel Not as good feelings or good advice, but as genuine good news. Christianity is not a head trip. It's not a fantasy. It's headline news, if you will. Some of you get headlines on your devices. And because it's headline news, because it changes everything, we must respond to it. Think about it. If those of you who have children, if you're going to school on your own or sending children to school, if you had reliable information that there was going to be a shooter at the school tomorrow at 10 o'clock, would you send your children to school? Or would you say, well, I don't know how I feel about that. That's probably nothing. I'll risk it. But people are risking their eternal souls every single day because they think this is just fantasy. John says, I saw him. I saw him bleed out on the cross. And I saw him, I heard him say, blessed are those who haven't touched me. But they believed my testimony and acted accordingly, and they will have eternal life. Most who celebrate Christmas have already more or less moved on. Football games will do that to you. They just keep coming and then he screamed. Christmas is in the rear view mirror. Here's New Year's. And it's back to business as usual for people, except for those credit card bills that are going to have to be paid. They live out their lives tragically. They live out their eternity under the wrath and judgment of God. Judgment Day is a reality. You need to understand it as a reality. And you need to flee from the wrath to come. And for people who have been sitting in church maybe their whole life long, and hearing the gospel and just kind of letting it roll over them, they may assume that because they breathe the air of the church, they're okay. That can't be so. Each of us have to receive that challenge. flee from the wrath to come. And that's why Jesus came into the world. Look at verse 18. Whoever does not believe is condemned already because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. I mean, we all could fantasize about what Judgment Day will look like. And when we stand before the God who plays the videotape of everything that you've ever done, everything you've ever said, everything that you've ever thought or felt, all the secrets are exposed, and you have to give an account. Any balance sheet justification, well, yeah, I did some bad stuff, but look at all the good stuff that I did. When we are exposed, what can we say? What will we say? John says the only thing you can say is we have a Savior, a high priest who sacrificed himself for us. Yes, we did all of that and those sins were laid upon Jesus so that we might be forgiven and accepted by God. I hope none of you are living that dream that John Lennon is saying about. Imagine there's no heaven. No hell below us, above us only sky. Nothing at all to worry about. He's been dead a long time now. Long since he learned that he was wrong in the most bitter and tragic way. Will you be that way? Or will you believe? Will you hear this word and accept it? When God says, this is why I sent my son, you'll say, that's the answer that I needed. That's what I must believe. That's what I will believe. And then make a commitment to follow Jesus. Verse 15, whoever believes in Him will have eternal life. Whoever believes will not perish, but have eternal life. And down in verse 36, whoever believes has eternal life. See why I did the Sunday School lesson on faith. Believing is just the action of faith. Faith is not some commodity, you know, like a coin you can put in your pocket. It's something that you do. Back in the first chapter, John said, to those who received Christ, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God. No longer a part of that world under judgment, but now in the family of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. Truly, truly, says Jesus, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life. So we can answer the question, why? The text answers the question. But the bigger question is, so what? If these things are true, where do I stand in relationship to God, who is already my judge and has the power and authority to cast me, body and soul, into hell forever? But he sent his son. And whoever believes will not perish. You will not perish, but have everlasting life. That's probably why people don't really want to answer the question why, because then you're forced to do something with it. And it's much easier to just set it aside, pack the decorations away, and move on, greased with a couple of football games, and pretend like none of this is true. John says it's true. And being true, you must respond. repent and believe the gospel. Lord, we understand from your word if our hearts are open, we get why we are so stubborn and resistant, why we will not believe. But you've told us again today, if we have ears to hear it, that that is a disastrous response to the story of Christmas. that we have seen your great, great love for a world so dark, so rebellious, so uncaring, so resistant. And it's not just out there with them, oh Lord, our own hearts. Maybe some of us know from our own experience what that kind of rebellion was before you finally did get hold of us and take away our heart of stone and give us a heart of flesh. but now you've invited us. And I pray for each one of us here that we might be able to rejoice in the knowledge that we do believe and we have this hope, but for those, I think particularly of children raised in the church who may think that they're just coasting, and somehow their parents' commitment will do, and they're just counting the days when they can get out from under and walk away from it completely. Oh God, please, in the power of your spirit, the power that the spirit has to raise the dead, will you have mercy upon each one of us? Mercy in the form of faith, being able to see and understand and appreciate and receive this free offer of the gospel that is given to us by John in this and other passages. Lord, help us, we pray, for Jesus' sake. Amen.