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Dec 19, 2021

Incarnational Love

Preacher: John Repsold

Series: Advent 2021

Keywords: incarnation, trinity, humility, love of god, vulnerability

Summary:

This third in the series of four Advent messages deals with God's powerful love demonstrated in the incarnation of Jesus. The love of every member of the Trinity comes to us particularly through the incarnation. This message looks at how that is and what the implications are for us in loving others.

Detail:

Advent Week 4:  The LOVE of God

Dec. 19, 2021

Today is actually the 4th Sunday of Advent…but for our preaching series purposes, we’re making it our third.  With Christmas next Saturday, I’ll be wrapping up this 4-week series with God’s heart about PEACE next Sunday.  But fear not, we’ll light all 4 Advent candles today! 

INTRO: Every one of the 4 themes of Advent not only touch on things every one of us longs for—joy, hope, peace, love.  They also express essential elements of the nature of God.  Since experiencing God in all His glory is the biggest need of the human soul, engaging these aspects of God’s nature is essential—not just for a fulfilling Christmas season but for a fulfilling LIFE!

            Just as the nature and quality of character of the people we hang around all day significantly impacts the kind of lives we lead, the same is true of those of us who choose to “hang out with” God ever day.  Let’s think of it on the human plain first. 

            How does it affect you to spend most of your time/life with people that are…

  • Greedy?
  • Hateful and hurtful?
  • Angry/mad/irate?

We tend to mirror those we hang-out with.  “Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future” is a phrase parents often say to their children. 

  • Happy/joyful?
  • Peaceful?
  • Givers/giving?

We could talk about this all day.  Suffice it to say that most of us want to hang out with people who reflect the holy and life-giving nature of God rather than the sinful, dark and damaging nature of sin-soaked humans, right?  This may be why the longer someone is a follower of Jesus, the less contact we tend to have with people outside of Christ and the more time we end up spending hanging out with each other.  It’s not that we aren’t sinners anymore; it’s just that now as “saints” who have the life of Jesus at work in us, we are hopefully more like Christ and thus more enjoyable to be around and less like our former sinful, hurtful, damaging old-self. 

            A couple of weeks ago, some of you know that Sandy and I went on vacation to Hawaii.  Yes, we arrived on the day they got 12-15 inches of rain!  But that’s another story for another day.  The day after we arrived was Dec. 7th, 2021.  Ring any bells?  It was the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  It was a bit surreal literally dining at Pearl Harbor that week knowing that we were at a place that 80 years earlier had been responsible for being THE defining event in our parent’s lives and their entire generation. 

            One of the things I like to do most on vacation is READ.  So, I’d taken along a book that Alfred & Jewel had loaned to us entitled Through The Valley of the Kwai.  It was the story of Ernest Gorden, a British POW from WWII, held by the Japanese for some 3+ years in some of the most appalling and inhuman conditions imaginable. 

Just to give you an idea of how badly treated Allied POWs were by the Japanese compared to the Nazis, while some 17% of American POWs died in Nazi prison camps during the war, somewhere between 40-50% died in Japanese POW camps. [https://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1778.html#:~:text=Even%20though%20nearly%2050% 20percent%20of%20the%20POWs,to%20think%20up%20of%20more%20ways%20to%20escape]  One of the worst uses of POWs came with the building of a Burma-Thailand railway. Some 61,000 prisoners were sent to work on it.  They were forced to build the 260-mile railroad all day long, 7-days a week.

It was estimated prior to the war that it would take over 3 years to build this railway.  During the war and with POW slave labor, it was built completely by hand in less than a year. 13,000 POWs died working on that one railroad. 

In this book, Gorden describes in disturbingly honest language the horrific state of most POWs and of himself in particular in the camps.  At one point, the story focuses on Gorden, who was suffering from severe malnutrition, malaria, typhoid/cholera, beriberi, tropical parasites and who knows what else.  He’s clinging to life lying on the floor of the hospital hut, coming in and out of consciousness, unable to eat or care for himself.  By his own request, he had been placed at the end of the hut right next to where all the corpses were stacked every night of the men who had died. 

It was there that he encountered two men who were very different from all the other POWs he had known during his months in captivity.  You see, even most supposedly civilized “Christian” Allied POWs, robbed of their dignity, their health, their freedom, and literally all starving, became as selfish, as ruthless, as thieving, as willing to see someone else die rather than themselves as the most ruthless jungle savage.  They didn’t care whether they buried their dead in mass graves or personally marked graves.  They stole from each other in life and in death what little there might be from the corpses of their fellow servicemen.  They fought like dogs over the discarded garbage scraps of their captors.  They neglected their own personal hygiene and allowed their living quarters to become filthy vermin-infested hovels.  They lost their sense of purpose, lost their dignity and lost hope. 

But these two men were different.  And they started a change in the camp that led many a man to change his view of life, of death and of God.  They didn’t do it by preaching.  They did it by loving.  They started sharing their food when they were starving.  They started rubbing the useless, atrophied, dying muscles of dying prisoners.  They started bathing their sore, scab and pus-covered arms and limbs.  They took care of others in what few hours they had when they were not being driven to work by their captors.  They cleaned their bed mats, emptied their latrine buckets, bartered and bribed extra food for others. 

And little by little, some men got better.  Little by little the entire tone of life in the camps changed.  Little by little, Ernest Gorden began to think about God.  He began to read a Bible.  And he eventually put his faith in Jesus Christ.  After the war, after returning to England and eventually going to seminary, Ernest Gorden became a professor and pastor at Princeton University in the U.S. 

The book is really a testament to two men:  Dusty Miller and Dinty Moore—humble yet true Christian men who chose to die daily to themselves so they could live daily for Christ.  Dinty was ultimately killed when the unmarked POW boat he and hundreds of other POWS were on was sunk by Allied forces.  Dusty Miller died at the hands of retreating Japanese captors who hated him all the more for the way he loved his fellow captives and changed the spirits and hearts of fellow POWS.  They hated him so much that they crucified him to a tree. 

But both of these men had, well before their deaths, abandoned their lives to Christ, taken up their crosses daily and followed Jesus Christ.  They had found that in embracing death rather than running from it, they could bring the power of the life of God into the darkest hell-hole of WWII.  They found that the love of God in Christ was more powerful than the hatred of their captors and the slavery they inflicted.  In literally giving their lives away to others—their food, their energy, their sleep, their time…everything—they gained life no one thought possible in such darkness and suffering. 

Genuine, God-like LOVE has a way of being all the more visible and powerful the darker the evil life surrounding it becomes.  

Just think for a moment how much of the love of God Adam and Eve knew before they experienced sin.  They knew the perfect creative love of God in a creation unmatched in human history.  They knew the warm fellowship love of God as they walked and talked with God at the end of a day.  They knew the providing love of God in every fruit and vegetable they enjoyed day after day. 

But what of the love of God DIDN’T they know?  (Answers?)

They had no idea about the love of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit in their combined work to save wretched sinners like us. 

They had no idea of the love of God in the incarnation of God the Son, Jesus. 

They had no idea of the love of God in the crucifixion and death of Jesus. 

They had no idea of the love of God in the adopting work of the Holy Spirit, or of His indwelling work, His sealing work, His guiding and comforting work. 

As much as we may think God has erred in allowing his most treasured creation, human beings, to rebel and create such horrific evils as we daily do in hurting and abusing and destroying each other, the fact remains:   We would never know the depth of the nature of God’s love if it were not for the dark hideousness of our sinfulness.  Seeing the love of God in the context of the evil of this fallen world holds more lessons on real love for us than the sinless Garden of Eden ever would. 

The incarnation which we celebrate at Christmas actually defines love for the whole human race and places that love at the center of our Christian faith.  Other religions may talk about love as a part of their relationship with God and people.  But compared to the love of God in Christ, it is an impoverished, weak, secondary and non-essential love.  It is not the self-sacrificing, self-abasing, self-humbling, God-giving love of the incarnation. And the results are palpable whether in a POW camp or on the streets of Spokane.  We simply cannot have the Christ of the Bible without the love of God.

So, for a few minutes today, I want us to look at how the Godhead demonstrated love to each of us in the incarnation…and what the implies for us as we seek to experience that love daily among ourselves as His family, His children.  We’ll spend most of our time with Jesus, both babe and crucified man.  But let’s begin with the Father and His love in the incarnation. 

As we look at the love of the Trinity in the incarnation, I want us to drink in some aspects of love that the Bible may not come right out and use in definitions of love such as we have, say, in 1st Corinthians 13—love is patient, love is kind, love rejoices with the truth, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 

            A couple of passages about the Father’s love in the incarnation is all we have time for today.  The first is one we all know well:  John 3:16 & 17-- “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but so that the world might be saved through Him.”

            So here is the first quality of the love we celebrate at Christmas:  Incarnational love GIVES the best we have and are.  Just based on this profound reality, how should we define love?

  • Giving, not taking.
  • Self-giving, not just stuff-giving.
  • Personal involvement, not proxy distancing.
  • Costly, high-stakes giving.
  • Self-sacrificing giving: glory (visible proof of greatness), position, closeness, convenience, comfort, wealth, etc.

WHAT did God the Father’s incarnational love give?

  • Relationship, not stuff. (Good to keep in mind at Christmas.  The best we can give is usually not the presents, nice though they are.)
  • Life—eternal life.
  • All that He is: himself, his character—forgiveness, mercy, kindness, shepherding, healing, etc.
  • Salvation (vs. 17)

APP:  If we are going to experience the love of God at Christmas, it must be much more than the presents we give.  In fact, it may not require a single present other than what we can shower on others with our PRESENCE.  Our presence, our friendship, our love, our listening ear or our time…even to those to whom we give wrapped presents…is far more needful than the things people will put under a tree and unwrap.  Let’s make sure we give ourselves this Christmas.  That may be the most costly gift we ever give away.

            Now to one more passage about the Father’s love in the incarnation:  Ephesians 1:3-5.  “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, 4 just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love 5 He predestined us to adoption as sons and daughters through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will….”

            Incarnational love PLANS AHEAD for BLESSING others.

Isn’t this part of the fun we have at Christmas—planning to bless others in advance of when they actually experience the blessing.  Some of us, unfortunately, don’t plan ahead enough.  Just ask my family about some of the “late” presents I’ve given. But God-type love does involve planning—planning for the betterment, aid and blessing of others.  Paul points in this passage to how God “chose us in Christ before the world and mess of our sin even came into being.  “In love He predestined us to adoption….”  God made plans to bring us into and keep us in His family.  The love we celebrate at Christmas is the love of an adoptive father for children who didn’t stand a ghost of a chance of being close to Him let alone enjoying the closeness of His perfect family.

ILL:  I’m so glad I’ve been able to experience adoption in this life from the standpoint of a father, not just an adopted kid.  (I’m getting the latter now and forever from God.)  When we “chose” Mikias and Yohannes, there was a lot that happened before they ever met us:  months of paperwork; thousands of dollars; hours of interviews; thousands of miles traveled; a place prepared for them, the house reorganized; our plans for an earlier “empty nest” rearranged.  They had no idea of all the plans that went into their inclusion in our family.  But we made plans to share our family with a couple of strangers we knew very little about. 

            And while I had met the boys in Ethiopia (while speaking at a Pastor’s Conference south of Addis Alibaba) just a few months earlier, I sent the love of my life (Sandy) along with my eldest son (Daniel) to go complete the plan.   

            Ours was a speck of “planning ahead”-love compared to the Father’s “predestining” and “choosing” love towards every one of us “in Christ”.

APP:  It’s a blessing to be among brothers and sisters who spend so much of themselves to love others.  Whether it is planning meals to bring to people…or planning Bible studies or Children’s crafts, planned loving is truly Christ-like. 

ILL:  (missions) Some of you are planning on rearranging your lives dramatically over the next few years to go to other countries to minister the Gospel. Others are planning to limit your self-spending so you can be a part of their support team.  Planned expenditure of our lives for others is a godly endeavor.  Let’s not be afraid of making some costly plans this new year.  Doing so will help us experience the planned love of the Father that we’re celebrating this season.   

So, let’s move to the love of God in the 2nd person of the Trinity—Jesus Christ.  Let’s start with Philippians 2:5-7.

Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, 

6 who, as He already existed in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,

 7 but emptied Himself by taking the form of a bond-servant and being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death: death on a cross.

            Everybody in our world seems bent upon moving UP in status and position.  Whether it’s the preschooler who wants to hoard more toys they really didn’t want to play with until their little brother or sister wanted to OR it’s the young person who wants better grades than the next student OR it’s the career ladder-climbers who are all about the next promotion or raise or company, our selfishness seems to drive us to want to step UP, not down. 

            But the love of God is fundamentally a HUMBLE love. It is a love that drives us DOWN…down into serving others, down into lifting them up, down into caring more about their success than ours.  As 1 Cor. 13 says, it does not “seek its own,” it doesn’t “parade itself” nor is it “puffed up.”  All those descriptive phrases speak one word:  HUMILITY. 

            In a way, this is one of the most strikingly different things about God’s love.  The one Being in the universe who has a right to be proud about His perfections is the very God who stepped away from His incomprehensible glory, stepped away from his most exalted position in and outside the universe…all to squeeze his deity into the single cell multiplying in a virgin’s womb, to be born a human, to live among us in this sin-scarred world and to ultimately suffer the worst human indignities…just so we would know the depth and breadth and height of His love for us. 

            None of that would have been possible without HUMILITY—not denying or letting go of the greatness of who He is but veiling it behind very common, very ordinary human flesh.

            Isn’t there something very attractive about people who have accomplished tremendous things in life or may be very wealthy or may be brilliant BUT they don’t parade any of that about.  They drive an older, plain car.  They listen to you when you speak.  They greet you as if you are the highlight of their day.  They don’t talk about themselves but want to hear you talk about yourself.  Humility is attractive…and God is the most humble being ever.    

APP:  How will we express this humble love of Christ to others this Christmas?  What will we decide to do that is “beneath us”?  What of ourselves will we hide so that others can experience the humble love of Christ? 

Humility will inevitably lead us to another aspect of God’s incarnational love:  VULNERABILITY.  I wish there were a way to love and not get hurt.  I wish there were a way to be like Jesus and not suffer.  There simply isn’t.  Love in a broken, sinful world will always make you vulnerable to others.  And others will never be perfect in their response even to the best love in the world. 

In Romans 8:35ff Paul focuses upon the things that we humans tend to think prove that God has forgotten about us or at least isn’t acting in a very loving way towards us.  Interestingly, every one of the things mentioned are things that Jesus himself experienced while living among us.  They are the things that He became vulnerable to precisely because he chose to love us by becoming human. 

35 Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or trouble, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? 

Jesus knew every one of these difficulties.  He walked through every one being fully loved by the Father.  He lived through every one fully loving us.  It is precisely his love for us that required him to be persecuted, to go without food, to hang naked on a cross before the whole world, to experience danger being hunted as a baby by wicked King Herod and to be pursued as an adult by wicked religious leaders. His human body was pierced by a Roman sword.

            Paul himself experienced these very difficulties and evils in the course of his life as well.  But he could say to us and every person who suffers because of following Jesus… 

37 But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

            Paul specifically points to God’s love being in Christ Jesus our Lord.  When life wants us to think God’s love is farthest from us, God wants to tell us that nothing this world or the unseen world can throw at us can come between us and His love…as long as you are in Christ Jesus. 

  • When you are walking through the shadow of death, either your own or a loved one, if you’ve “in Christ” by simple faith, His love has you.
  • If you’re being attacked by the powers of darkness, it is the love of Jesus Christ that holds you tight.
  • Mental illness? Can’t separate you from God’s love when you’re “in Christ.”
  • Family crisis? Jesus is the love-connection between you and God Almighty.
  • Financial disaster? Can’t come between you and God’s love in Jesus. 

The incarnation of God the Son in the birth of Jesus Christ is meant to be history’s “stake-in-the-ground” about the love of God.  And it was meant to prove to all humanity that the love of God is more powerful than ANY evil, any sin, any government, any person, any spiritual powers…ANYTHING!  And that love has been conquering human lives one at a time for over 2,000 years now. 

 

Let me end with a couple of life-giving realities about God’s love that has come to us because of the incarnation, what has come to us through the 3rd Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.  Without the redeeming work of Jesus Christ, none of us would have the Holy Spirit residing permanently in us.  That gift of the Holy Spirit and all He teaches us about the love of God only happens because of Jesus.

  • The Spirit’s work in us comes to us because of the promise of Christ to give us a personal Counselor and Comforter.
  • The new creation we have been made and are becoming is because of the indwelling work of the Holy Spirit.
  • The fruit of the Spirit, which includes the love of God being born through us, is only a reality because we abide in Christ.

According to Titus 3, the kindness and love of God that comes to us in Jesus Christ produced the work of the Holy Spirit that continually cleanses us and “regenerates” or makes us new.  The Holy Spirit’s work of renewal in our lives, day after day, year after year, generation after generation, is because of the love of God our Savior, Jesus Christ.

4 But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, 5 He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we did in righteousness, but in accordance with His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, 6 whom He richly poured out upon us through Jesus Christ our Savior.”

            It is the love of God through the incarnational work of Jesus that even makes continual spiritual renewal possible in our lives. 

            Anyone ever feel like you need renewing, spiritual revival in your life?  I feel it every moment of every day.  And many days I feel God renewing me in small and big ways.  That is proof positive of the love of God for me.  Any work of the Holy Spirit has come to me because “God so loved ME that he gave...”—gave His Only Son…gave the Holy Spirit…gives revival and renewal… and on the list goes. 

I close with one final verse about the love of God in Christ and the Holy Spirit found in 1 John 4.

10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 

Now John moves to what must be the effects of that kind of love on the true believer. 

11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God remains in us, and His love is perfected in us. 

In essence, the invisible love of God is made visible by the living out of the love of God between US!

13 By this we know that we remain in Him and He in us, because He has given to us of His Spirit.

Again, the hallmark of a child of God is the fact that the Spirit of God, given to us because of the love of Jesus, is at work producing a love among us that is not found in the lives of those without Christ. 

  • This is why a lack of love between us and any other member of the body of Christ ought to concern us deeply and leave us sleepless at night…whether that ‘someone’ is in our family or in our address book.
  • The mark of the true church…the true follower of Jesus… has always been LOVE…not any love but the deeply humble, deeply vulnerable, deeply sacrificial, abundantly generous and continually renewing love of God modeled and given us in Jesus.

It is this love and this love of God alone that will transform a POW camp, transform a family, transform a church and transform a city like ours. 

            The themes we have looked at this Advent season—joy, hope and love—are not just nice words to think about and then move on from.  They are the very life of God that is meant to permeate every fiber and every season of our life.  It is the very life we are invited to experience with one another, week after week, year after year.

            IMAGINE what would happen to this block, our downtown core, your family, our places of work IF these 3 words, these 3 realities of life in Jesus, were what we experienced every time we gathered together?  Imagine if the love that propelled Jesus Christ to invade our world in the form of a little baby and drove him daily to the cross that bought our salvation, our adoption, our transformation as human beings propelled us into each other’s lives at every turn? 

            Nothing has power like the love of Jesus Christ… NOTHING! And nothing can triumph of it—not war, not death, not demons, not pandemics, not hatred, not military might… nothing.  Let’s enjoy that love.  Let’s drink it in more every day this year.  And let’s pour it out like never before so that the fullness of God will really be experienced among us, right here, right now. 

PRAY