His Love

(This is an excerpt from a chapel I gave to teens)

“How He Loves” is one of my favorite Christian songs. I think the message is so simple, but so deep at the same time. It affects me because it’s so true.

I looked up the original artist of the song to see if he had said anything about why he wrote the song.

It turns out that he wrote the song after his best friend died in a car accident. He was trying to make sense of everything. He was incredibly mad at God for taking his friend away, and he realized that God still loved him through his anger. He said that the love he’s singing about is a messy, difficult love. Realizing that God loves us no matter what; He isn’t offended when we’re mad at Him.

So the song is a celebration about the fact that God wants to hang around us through our messiness and despite of how we can act sometimes. He wants to be in our lives regardless. He wants to be with us.

Most of the times when I talk to teens, I tell them about the dangers that the world has and how to stay away from them. In fact, it seems to me that I spend a lot of time telling teenagers what not to do; drugs, drinking, premarital sex, and making sure that they’re a good example to the world around you.

All of those things are vital to your Christian walk. Don’t misunderstand me, those things are very important. But something else is true too. If you don’t understand why you should live this way, why you believe what you believe; if you can’t explain what it means to be saved, if you don’t understand how critical your salvation is, it will be tough to hold onto for the long haul.

And at this time, and with this generation, I think you need to be the ones to remind the rest of us what it means to have a sold-out relationship with the creator of everything. As the world gets scarier and Christ continues to be assaulted, if you dig in now to understand what and why you believe, you will be the brightest lights on this earth.

I don’t think it’s possible to have an encounter with Jesus Christ and stay the same person you were. My desire for you today is to begin thinking about your beliefs, and why it’s so important to really know what it means to be saved, and to be born again. And to fall in love with the one who saved you.

Before I was saved, you could never have convinced me that I needed to be saved. I thought I was good enough. I gave money to charity; I helped people when I saw they needed it. I didn’t say anything awful in front of pastors or priests. But that wasn’t enough to save myself.

And just like Jesus told Nicodemus in John chapter 3, people who are living in the dark want to remain in the dark, where their sins are hidden from the light. The idea of church was something that I didn’t want to think about. Christian music drove me crazy. And now I know it was because it brought light to my darkness.

Same thing with Christians that were around me. They talked to me about Jesus, and when I was listening I would hear the passion and love in their voice for their Savior, but I didn’t want any part of it myself. I was happy they had found it, but I thought I was happy with my life the way it was.

But I shouldn’t have been. I was in a pit for a very long time. And there were many reasons why; my parents were divorced, my mom was ill, my father rejected me, and I just wanted to cover my pain and my sin up. The fact was that I had a lot of junk piled up over the years.

When Jesus saved me, I realized where I was before him and it made me sick. I wanted to be cleaned up because he cared enough for me to rescue me and I wanted to shine for him. I didn’t do it out of obligation, but rather, I did it for love.

Ok. So our main bible verse today is john 3:16. You know this one; “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

We have heard this one so many times, do we still stop and think about what the words really mean? What does this say about who our Father is? And why do we need to be saved?

I have a bunch of reasons why we need to be saved.

1. We are dead in our sins. We are spiritually dead. We are following around the world, but we can never experience God for who he is.

2. Without God, we are extremely selfish and self-centered and demanding.

3. We hate what we should love and love what we should hate.

4. We cannot please God if we are not saved. There is nothing we can do that will bring him joy or glory when we are not living as a child of His.

5. We cannot understand the things of God because we find them foolish.

6. We are slaves to our sin.

So basically we are spiritually dead, selfish and guilty before God. Remember that God doesn’t send anyone to hell; we choose to go there ourselves. We were born on a fallen world and we need to seek out Christ.

And what does Jesus tell Nicodemus he will not have if he is not born-again? The kingdom of heaven. We will never get to spend eternity with Jesus.

But if we are saved, amazing things happen.

When we are saved, our faith is awakened and we become united with Jesus. We are adopted into his family and called the children of God. He produces a love like we have never had before. And most importantly, we will spend eternity with Jesus.

And so what happens to us when we are saved? Most importantly, we instantly receive a new life. We were dead because of our sin and we become alive in Christ. We have the experience of the Holy Spirit living inside of us. Stop and think about that for a minute. We have a living Holy Spirit that has taken residence inside of us. He helps bring our new life into the light. He hears our praying and knows our hearts.

Think about it for a minute. The verse we said, For God so loved the world…” I have to tell you something, if someone asked me to allow my son to be crucified for someone else, I’d have to say my answer would be no. I couldn’t do it. But God did.

And God knows that our salvation doesn’t bring perfection. He knows that our lives and our love for Him will still be messy; that we’ll still get upset with Him, we’ll still question why things happen, and He’s okay with that. He’s a big enough God to handle every emotion a human goes through.

And that’s why he sent his son to this earth. As a baby who needed to be raised just like you guys were raised; everything we experienced he knows about. If you read through the gospels you can see many of the emotions that Jesus went through; love, sadness, righteous anger, loneliness, anguish.

So, with all we know about Jesus, our only response to his message is with an overwhelming sense of love.

And love has become a word that has lost much of its power. How many times a day do we use the word? I love pizza, I love that show. I love my cat. I love snow. I love coffee. I love my husband and children. I love Jesus Christ.

None of those are the same kinds of love, are they?

The love that Jesus is talking about in john 3:16 is love in its deepest sense. The love that God had for us in sending his son to earth. He did that because it was in His nature.

And the love he wants back from us isn’t a love that comes from feelings. Feelings come and go. Think about your own feelings, I bet as teenagers they change quite a bit, don’t they?

Well, if you are saved, the love that you have should come from God loving us first. It isn’t a love that the world is used to. In fact, it’s a love that some would call crazy.

Love as used of God expresses the deep and constant love and interest of a perfect Being towards entirely unworthy objects, producing a love in them towards God and a practical love towards other believers and a desire to help others to seek God.

What that’s saying is our love should be so overflowing that it should cause others to wonder what we have and how they can have some for themselves.

And that’s what I want to leave you with tonight. Peter tells us to always be prepared to give the reason for the hope that you have. Do we display the love that Christ has for us to others, so that we might tell them about the one who has saved us?

Does anyone ask us why we are full of love and hope?

My prayer for all of us is that we are so filled with the love of God, and the joy that comes from knowing we are saved, that everyone who comes into contact with us wants to know why we are so peaceful in a world that’s so angry.

But I know that all of us will have bad days, days when we feel like the man who wrote How He loves. Where we question where God is and why things have to be so rotten some days. But if we love God with the love that flows from Him, we know that we can ask him to forgive us.

So, this whole message means this; that if we are born-again, if we are saved, our lives change because of that incredible love we are filled with.

1 john 5 tells us that “This is the love for God; to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world? Only he who believes that Jesus is the son of God.”

We show the world that we love God by obeying him out of love, not obligation. We should want to bring him joy because of the joy he brought us first. When he saves us, he breaks the bond that the world has over us. We don’t desire to live like that anymore. The world loses it shine and God shines in our lives instead. What God wants for our lives becomes what we want for our lives too. We obey him with joy.

And those aren’t just words. We love God through the good days and the bad days because He gave us His son so that we could be saved and live with Him forever