We turn to our second reading, our sermon text for this morning, which is a familiar one, but I invite you to turn there in your Bibles to John 3, on page 888 of your Pew Bibles. And we are going to read John 3.16. I invite you to stand out of respect for the reading of God's word. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God abides forever. Amen. You may be seated. There's a children's book that we read in our family, and it's titled, Guess How Much I Love You. Maybe you're familiar with it. You've got a rabbit. His name is, I think it's, Big nut brown hair. And then you have little nut brown hair, his son. And they're talking with each other and they're trying to outdo each other and expressing love. And little, little nut brown hair says, I love you this much, dad. But big nut brown hair extends his arms even further because he's got bigger arms. Right. He says, I love you this much. And then little nut brown hair says, I love you to the moon. And his dad says, I love you to the moon and back. And it's a wonderful story that really explores how hard it is to measure such a thing as love. How do you measure love? How do you measure God's love for you? John 3, 16 gives us words, words where it's hard to measure such a thing as love. let alone God's great love. How do we even begin? Well, John 3 16 in this famous passage tells us of God's Christmas gift, the gift of his only son. God gave his son to us. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son. This is the measure. This is the expression of God's perfect love. And what we see here in John 3, 16, is that we measure God's love in the greatness of the giver of the love, the object of the love, and the expression of that love. And it can be represented in three different words. Words found right here in our passage. God the world gave. This is how we measure God's love. It's as if in this passage, God is saying to us, guess how much I love you. And here he gives us his wonderful answer. Let's lean in. First word here is God. For God so loved the world. And here you see That the greatness of the love, we measure love by the greatness of the lover. And is there any greater lover than God himself? God is the ultimate lover. For all eternity, our God has perfectly loved, guess who he's loved for all eternity? Himself. You say, well, wait, are you really supposed to love yourself? I mean, that's a little selfish, isn't it? Not for God. For God, there would be no greater object of his love than his very self. He is the most beautiful and perfect being in the whole world. For God to not love himself would be impossible. For all eternity, God has poured out his perfect love on himself. And we see this, of course, in the fact that God's love is Trinitarian love. Father, Son, Holy Spirit love. Later on in the Gospel of John, Jesus gives us just a little window into this. He's praying that beautiful high priestly prayer. And in John 17, he says, Father, I thank you that you have loved me before the foundation of the world. See, Jesus is giving us here this window into a perfect love in which for all eternity, before we existed, before the world was made and reaching back to endless successions of really apart from time itself, that the Father has forever loved the Son. The son is of the father's love begotten, we sing around this time of the year. The father has forever loved the son and the son's love has forever radiated back to the father. And then the Holy Spirit, too, has shared in the satisfying love within the relationship of the Trinity. The Father loving the Son, the Son loving the Father, the Father loving the Holy Spirit, the Son loving the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit loving Father and Son. And in this three-fold cord, this strand of love wrapped around itself, you see God loving His very self. One God, three persons, one divine love, three eternal expressions of loving devotion. Now we can't really wrap our minds around this, can we? But what it means is that before you and I showed up on the scene, before we were created, God has forever been the ultimate lover. And that love has been wrapped up in his very being. And what this means is that we were not created so that God would have someone to love. Have you ever thought of this? Sometimes kids, you know, we're thinking about God and we say, why did God make us? Did he make us because he was lonely? Did he make us because he was bored? Did he make us because he wanted someone to love and he was just all alone there in the universe? And the answer is no. God didn't need to make us. He didn't need someone to love because he's always in his very being been full of perfect Trinitarian love for himself. It was not loneliness that led our God to love us. Rather, it was his free choice to spill over his divine love as a gift to creatures who he had made. His love from the very beginning towards us is a gift. The ultimate lover, God himself. Guess how much I love you, he says. I made you, I brought you into this, I invited you into the love which I had within myself and I didn't have to do that. Isn't that beautiful? But there's more. God so loved the world. Now here we go from the greatness of the lover to the object of his love. And notice something about love. The greater the lover, the greater the love. The lowlier and the uglier and the more despicable the object, the greater the love. Am I right? We see it here with the world. God so loved the world. And in this one word, world, we see the ugliness of the object of his perfect love. If you were to look at all the places in the gospel of John, and even in John's epistles, 1, 2, 3, John, where he speaks of the world, we see that when John speaks of the world, he has in mind a place of darkness, sin, greed, pride, idolatry, This is the same world that John, in one of his gospels, places right alongside the flesh and the devil. The world, the flesh, the devil. When he looks at the world, yes, he sees a globe, but he sees a globe that has rebelled against God and said, I don't want you, I don't need you, I want to live on my own terms. And we've seen it in the book of Genesis, haven't we? From the very beginning, starting with Adam and Eve, rebellion against God. We can figure this out without you, God. We don't need you to make sense of reality. We don't need a creator. We want to be our own creators. And then you see it in the Tower of Babel just last week, building a tower to make a name for ourselves. Man constantly conspiring against God. This is the world. And you don't need to look around to see it. You can look around to see it. I've looked at the headlines just this week and I've heard of cars running into marketplaces in Germany. And I've heard of public demonstrations celebrating ungodliness. I've heard of murders. I've heard of suicides. I've heard of horrible things. This is the world. A world which is turned against its God. A world which hates God. And you see it in your own hearts, don't you? You see within your own hearts this sense that perhaps I can be in charge. Perhaps I can push God away. Perhaps I don't have to look at him. Perhaps I don't have to recognize him. Perhaps I can be my own creator. This is the world. This is the world. which John chapter one says that God sent his son to, and what did the world do? It did not know him. It refused to know him. And even the very nation to which the son of God in his humanity came to belong, rejected him and put him on a cross. There's a book that I read in college, it was called All the Light We Cannot See. And this book was about all the goodness in man that gets overlooked, all the goodness that you would find if you just gave people a chance. But the Bible wants to write about something else. The Bible wants to tell us not all the goodness, not all the light we cannot see, how about all the darkness that we cannot see, all the depravity that we cannot see, all the rebellion that we overlook. Genesis 6 7 said this every intention of the thoughts of man's heart was only evil continually That's us Tower builders searching for meaning and pleasure apart from God Babylonian hearts turned against God and like like a child who who is obsessed with his Christmas gifts and such that he refuses to say thank you to his parents for giving him those gifts. That's what we're like. We're like a world that has rejected its creator. We wanna just grab all his gifts and wanna make of them what we will and enjoy them, but we'd never wanna look at him. We would never wanna look at him and say, thank you. I'm gonna live more fully in obedience to you. It's thanks for the gifts, God, but I don't need you. I don't want you. And so the world deserves not God's love, but it's his wrath, his curse. Oh, what great love that he pours out therefore upon the world. The despicable world, the ugly world, the rebellious world, this is the world to which God says, but I love you. Guess how much I love you, God says. I love you even when you're ugly. Even when you hate me. Even when you would seek to nail me to a cross and kill me. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son. And then this final word, this giving God, he gave his son. This, this is one more way to measure the depth of God's love. and it's in the gift itself. Remember what we said at the very beginning, that you measure love and you measure God's love by the greatness of the giver of that love. Also, you could say the ugliness of the object of that love. And then finally, the costliness of the expression of the love. We know this is true with gifts. There's a world of difference, isn't there, between a handmade gift, one that's been prepared or purchased at great cost. You had to save up your money to get it, to give it to someone that you love. And you know, a world of difference between that and, oh yeah, I guess Christmas is tomorrow. I guess I need to go find what's still on the shelf. Right? Last minute gifting. Everyone knows that this is not the best expression of love. A love which is bought at a cheap price, right? Everyone knows that this is not the most extravagant expression of love at this time of the year where we give gifts. And so it is with God that his gift to us is so costly that we can barely put words to it. I want you to notice something. There's something that you can only bring out in the original language here. And when I notice that, I try to make a note of that for you when it's really helpful. Now, For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son. This is how we have it brought out in the English language. But in the Greek, there's this word here, and it's the word houtos. And I remember in Greek class, my professor grilling me, what does houtos mean? And I would say, thus, so, in this manner. Good, okay, 100 points on that question. You got full points on that answer. Houtos, thus, so, in this manner. For God so loved the world that in this manner, this is the manner in which God loved the world, that he gave his only son. How did God love the world? How does he show it? What's the expression of it? Thus, so in this manner, he gave his only son. This is how God loved an unlovely world. He gave us his son. What a costly gift. He gave us the eternal object of his divine love. He gave us the very one to whom his love had spilled out in constant uninterrupted succession before time began. He gave us himself. This is the beautiful message of the incarnation. The beautiful message of Christmas, Isaiah 9 6, for to us, a child is born to us, a son is given. This is the manner in which God loved the world, he gave us the most costly expression of his love possible, and we remember the depth that this took. We remember the cradle. The eternal Son of God, what did He do? In the fullness of time, He took upon Himself a human nature. Not by subtracting His great divinity, but by adding to Himself the lowliness of humanity. And it's one of these things that the great theologians of old love to talk about and just work their way around the mystery, saying, how can it be that the One who created the world is walking amongst us by virtue of his humanity limited by the world. The one who poured out his divine love is himself amongst the object of created love. It's amazing. The word who spoke the world into existence is himself lying in a manger, crying. As a little baby. The great humility in that act, as God takes upon flesh and places himself within a cradle as if it were he were wrapped up as a gift and saying, here I am, here you go, a son given to you. Come look at me, come behold me, come touch me, come worship me. I'm here with you. What great love. And then we remember that this doesn't stop at the cradle, it goes to the cross. That's what all this was for. He wasn't just taking upon flesh so that he could merely commiserate with us. He was taking upon flesh so he would come and do something. And what he came to do is to deal with the ugliness of the world. He came to deal with our sins. And so in the fullness of time, he not only took upon flesh, but he went and was nailed to a cross and there he died. And there his hands were outstretched this big. That was his love. He showed us how very much he loves us. God gave us his own son into the hands of this wicked world so that by Jesus's death, God's wrath could be satisfied by his own loving gift. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man should lay down his life for his friends. Such great love. And when we realize that we are now God's friends, but then we were his enemies, well, then it's even greater, isn't it? And the gift just doesn't stop because what Christ gives us as he rose again from the dead is he gives us life, eternal life. Life forever with the giver, encircled by the perfect love of the Trinity. If you go back and read John 17, this is what Jesus says. He says, Father, I had that love with you before the world began. I want them to share in it. I pray for these ones whom you've given me. Bring them into our love. Bring them into the love of the Trinity. Pull them into this. Father, it's the delight of my very being. I want them to know this. I want them to share in it. We get to, this is what salvation is all about. It's not just, oop, got into heaven, that's great. It's I get to spend eternity knowing to greater and greater depths the perfect love of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. And now we get to, in this way, that created beings can step into that and share in it. Eternal life, what a gift. This is the gospel, the good news. In fact, you can kind of have, I've heard this acronym for the gospel, G-O-S-P-E-L. God, our sins, paying everyone life. God, the great lover. of the universe. Our sins, the world and its despicable ugliness and rebellion against God, paying, he sent his only son to take the penalty that our sins deserve, to take the wrath and curse that our sinful world deserves, to take it upon himself so that everyone who believes in him Everyone who places their faith in him and says, that's my savior. I'm not going to play creator anymore. He's my creator. He's my lord. I cannot save myself. I need him. I need the gift. And what do we get? Life. Life. God, our sins paying everyone life. You see, when you unwrap a gift like that, It's like everything else fades away. All the other anxieties and relational issues you're working through, marital conflicts, health concerns. It's not that these things don't matter. It's not that God has nothing to say to these things, blessings to give to these things. But when we realize that he who did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? This is our God, the great giver, the great lover, and the greatest gift he could give us. He has set before us this morning, we need only grab a hold of him by faith, the Lord Jesus Christ. Beloved in the Lord Jesus Christ, guess how much God loves you. He loves you all the way to the cradle, even to the cross and back. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for an unmeasurable gift, the gift of your Son, the gift of yourself. Lord, in a season where sentimentality seems to reign supreme and it's happy feelings about the weather and Christmas symbols, we pray that we would Yes, find joy in these things, but Lord, so, so much more so would find joy in the Savior. For apart from him, there is no hope. Apart from him, there is but wrath and curse. We pray, Lord, that we would be found embracing this gift and loving the gift, but ultimately loving the giver. For in the great mystery of the incarnation, you, the giver, are the gift. We thank you for this in Christ's name, amen.