God’s Salvation Bestowed

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Transcript:

Well, this being the Sunday before Christmas, I’ve had gifts on my mind a lot. We’ve already done two of our family Christmases, and I don’t know, Charlo, we’ve got, what, 19 left? Lots to buy, lots to wrap, lots to deal with.

And even though we know that Christmas is about Jesus, I think if we’re honest, we have to all admit there’s at least some thought to gifts. Our minds are on that a little bit. what we have to give, what we have to write, what we might receive.

There’s some thought about that. I’ve been thinking this week about some of the gifts I’ve given in the past, not just at Christmas but different gifts that I’ve given. Gifts that I’ve given my wife even.

I was thinking this morning about this little flag lapel pin that I bought her about a year ago. I’ve never seen her wear it. You’re probably thinking, Charla doesn’t wear lapel pins.

No, she doesn’t. I bought it for her just as a little hey, I’m thinking about you thing and had it sent to her. It was a Norwegian flag, which I know sounds incredibly random.

But I bought it for her because about a year ago we had done that Ancestry DNA and we’ve done 23andMe. All of those show that our nationalities and percentages are almost identical. And actually we’ve discovered that our families apparently have been neighbors for about 500 years and never intermarried that we know of. So we’re good.

So everything was nearly identical, except she was Norwegian and I wasn’t. And she was very excited about that because for years we’ve gone to tribal events. We’ve gone to, well, just different tribal events.

And I tease her about, you know, we brought the nahalo with us, which is the Choctaw word for white person. I’m not being racist. It’s my wife. I’m just teasing her.

Of course, the funny, ironic part is that we’re indistinguishably pale from each other. All right? But I tease her.

Nahalo, European whatever. We brought the nahalo with us to the Indian taco sale. So she was so excited now to have this DNA test that showed her that she’s something I’m not.

So I got her this Norwegian flag. I was just sitting here at work one day, and I stopped to eat lunch, and I got on Amazon, as you do sometimes, and that’s dangerous. And I saw flag lapel pins, which I enjoy wearing, and I decided I’m going to get her this Norwegian flag lapel pin.

I didn’t say anything about it for about a week until it came. And she called me and said, do you know why a flag pin arrived at the house? I said, is it the flag of Norway?

She said, I don’t know. I said, does it look like such and such? Yeah.

I said, well, I sent that to you because I figured you’re tired of being the naholo, the odd one out, so someday you can wear it and take me to Norway and I’ll be the Ootlander. I looked that up so I could tell her in her native language, not her native language, but her ancestral language, that I’m the foreigner now. So it was just a little trinket, just a little I’m thinking of you, something that I sent her, a little gift.

It didn’t mean all that much other than just I’m thinking of you. And so it didn’t bother me to send it, and I don’t know when it’s coming. I don’t know who’s bringing it.

But there are some gifts that are so vitally important, you want to deliver them yourself. I remember when I gave my wife her engagement ring. Not only was it important because it’s an engagement ring, but that gold had been in my family for a number of years.

I think part of it was my grandmother’s engagement ring. Part of it was my mother’s engagement ring. They had been passed down to me.

I had those melted down and reshaped, and I had the ring made for her. And so it had significance because it was going to be her engagement ring if she said yes, but it had the added significance of, you know, it was passed down to me. There’s no way I was going to mail that to her.

Are you kidding? How’d you like to get an engagement ring in the mail? Will you marry me?

Check yes or no. Send it back. Make sure you send it certified. Make sure they sign for it.

Right. There’s no way. Are you kidding?

there’s no way I was going to send that to her through the mail. There’s no way I was going to have FedEx take that. Nothing against FedEx or the U.

S. mail, but that was a precious item. I wanted to give that to her myself.

And you know this, there are some gifts that either because they’re so expensive, you don’t want to send them through the mail, or just you want to see the look on somebody’s face. There are some gifts that are so precious. They matter more than other gifts.

They’re so precious, you would only want to give them in person. Well, the gift of salvation, ladies and gentlemen, is a gift that is so precious, God could only give it to us in person. I’m going to ask you to turn with me this morning to John chapter 3.

John chapter 3. We’re going to look at a passage this morning that’s one of the most familiar passages in Scripture, at least verse 16, where we’re going to start. But we’re going to look at some more of the passage that comes after John 3.

16. And as we’re in this series of messages through the month of December called God with us, and we’re exploring what Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem and his life on earth, what they mean for our relationship with God today, I wanted us to come to John chapter 3 and explore what it means that Jesus delivered this gift of God in salvation himself. salvation was a gift so precious and is a gift so precious that God could only deliver it in person.

So we’re going to start looking at John 3. 16 and we’re going to read through John 3. 21 this morning.

John 3. 16 says, For God loved the world in this way, He gave His one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

Anyone who believes in him is not condemned, but anyone who does not believe is already condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God. This is the judgment. The light has come into the world, and people love darkness rather than the light, because their deeds were evil.

For everyone who does evil hates the light and avoids it, so that his deeds may not be exposed. But anyone who lives by the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be shown to be accomplished by God. Now, if you have a red-letter Bible, you may notice that all of those words were written in red.

Those are words that Jesus spoke himself. That’s what the red-letter Bible means. Jesus was talking to a man named Nicodemus, who we’ve studied before, but Nicodemus was a Pharisee.

Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, and I’ve told you before there’s all sorts of speculation about why Nicodemus came to Jesus in the middle of the night, and the bottom line is we don’t know for sure why. The Bible just tells us that he did. He came in the middle of the night.

And Nicodemus came to Jesus, and in the beginning of chapter 3, he addresses Jesus as somebody who’s a teacher sent by God. Nicodemus came to Jesus because he believed that Jesus was a teacher who spoke for God. What he didn’t realize was that Jesus is more than that.

Jesus is not just a teacher who speaks for God, but Jesus was the Son sent by God.

a little bit difference there right you can be a you can be a godly teacher and be just an ordinary human being but jesus was more than that he was the son of god that was sent by the father and nicodemus thought that jesus might be able to show him into the way show him the way into the kingdom but he didn’t realize that jesus himself was the way into the kingdom so nicodemus comes to him saying good teacher what must I do what what can I do to get into the kingdom now he didn’t actually ask what can I do to get into the kingdom that’s what jesus answered because jesus knew that was what was in his heart he comes to jesus and says rabbi teacher we know that you’re a teacher sent by god and in the very next verse jesus says you can’t get into the kingdom of god unless you’re born again and I’ve told you before there’s this disconnect where we we almost feel like jesus and nicodemus are having two different conversations but the answer there is if jesus is God the Son.

He knows what Nicodemus is thinking. He knows where this conversation is headed, and he’s just, he’s not beating around the bush. He’s jumping over the bush, jumping over all the obstacles, and headed right into the heart of the conversation.

So Nicodemus came to Jesus thinking he was a a teacher sent by God who could show them the way into the kingdom. And Jesus makes it clear throughout chapter 3 that he is God the Son, that he’s sent by God the Father, and that he is the way into the kingdom. And so we get to the part we read today, and Jesus has made it clear that he came to bring God’s gift of salvation to mankind.

God had been promising in promises and pictures and prophecies going all the way back to the Garden of Eden. God had been telling his people that he was going to send them salvation. And Jesus was saying, I am the fulfillment of all of that.

I’m the one that’s come to save you as the Father promised. And we look through this passage here in chapter 3, and we see how he’s outlined this need for salvation that we have and this gift that God has given. And we need to always remember that that’s the point of the Christmas story.

I’ve said for many years in many messages, you may be tired of hearing me say this if you’ve been here for any length of time, That a lot of times at Christmas we think of the baby in the manger and we think that’s the importance of the story. But we need to take the baby out of the manger and let the baby grow up because that’s the importance of the story. What God did, what the Father did sending His Son by the power of the Holy Spirit to be born of a virgin and laid in a manger, that is an incredible and miraculous story, but its real importance is found in the context of what that baby came to do.

Otherwise, it’s just an amazing story. the point of it is found in the reason why he came which was to go to the cross and so Jesus outlines this for Nicodemus I kind of look at it backwards because Jesus in the beginning of this passage lays out the solution and then explains the problem we’re going to look at this kind of backwards and start at the end of the passage where he outlines the the problem and see the solution okay we see in verses 19 through 21 that mankind was was lost in sin that’s sort of the default position of mankind we are lost in sin and I’ve I’ve believed since I was a child that this is what the scriptures teach that we’re we’re born sinners it’s in our nature but I really became convinced of this in a different way when I had children if you’ve ever raised a child you should understand the sin nature very well.

Nobody, nobody takes your children, I hope not, but nobody takes your children and sits down and gives them lessons on how to do bad things, right? They are born knowing. My goodness, we were at one of the grandparents’ houses yesterday for a Christmas celebration, and the kids started watching Home Alone 2 from back when I was a kid.

That’s after at the same grandparents’ house right after Thanksgiving, they watched Home Alone 1. They’d never seen these movies before. And I kept making sure Charlie’s not in the room at this time because I said, he’s going to stand here and start taking notes on what to do.

If you’ve not seen Home Alone, he beats up the bad guys with all these booby traps around his house. We don’t need Charlie getting ideas, all right? It’s already bound in the heart of our sin nature to do bad things.

Nobody has to sit down and give them lessons. I certainly don’t need Home Alone to give them lessons, but nobody taught our kids how to lie. Nobody taught our kids how to blame the other one for something they did wrong.

Nobody taught our kids how to hit or steal toys from each other. There’s no workshop for that, no seminar they’re attending. It’s inherent.

It’s that sin nature. And when you start to realize that, I know they look so sweet and innocent. Yeah, that’s part of the mask.

I love my kids, I do. But they’re sinners just like daddy, right? We’re all born sinners.

And Jesus teaches that mankind was lost in sin. He said in verse 19 that we were all in darkness. He said, and people loved darkness rather than the light because their deeds were evil.

That even when God’s light shines into the world, we don’t just come running after God because our condition is such that we sin. We’re not just sinners. We like our sin.

And so we’d much rather hide over here in the darkness where we think we can’t be found by the light of God. We’d much rather hide over here so our sins can’t be seen, we think. So we can continue in that sin so that we can embrace that sin.

Jesus said we were in darkness and we avoided the light. Verse 20 says, for everyone who does evil hates the light and avoids it so that his deeds may not be exposed. There’s a reason why so many crimes happen at night.

because it’s harder to see. You can hide under the cloak of darkness. Incidentally, it’s the reason too why if you’re hunting deer and you don’t have a permanent spot to do it, you want to try to get in there under cover of darkness and get everything set up under cover of darkness before the deer start heading back to wherever they bed down.

You want to be able to hide in the darkness because you don’t want to be seen. And Jesus said that’s how we were with our sin. Everyone who does evil hates the light and avoids it.

You know, you get the light shown on what you’re doing. It’s not exactly a comfortable situation, is it? Especially if you’re doing something wrong.

so jesus said we we would avoid the light because we’re sinners but avoiding the light means avoiding god it means keeping god at an arm’s length but we’re sinners that’s that’s what that’s what our sin nature would rather have is to keep god at arm’s length we it and and it means we rejected god and we rejected his ways because verse 21 says, but anyone who lives by the truth comes to the light so that his works may be shown to be accomplished by God. It shows the work of God in us when we’re in the light and yet we reject that light. We reject that work of God.

As sinners, we want to get as far away from God as possible because His light shows all of our flaws and all of our defects. the reason why people like candlelight. If you’re having a romantic dinner, you want candlelight.

Almost everybody looks good in candlelight, right? When I get under the fluorescence here, I can see the beginning of crow’s feet. I can see every flaw.

I can’t remember if I’ve told this story or not. One of my children, I won’t name them by name because I don’t want to embarrass them. My children had gotten their faces painted at some kind of fall festival. And we got home and we were cleaning them up and they had to shower.

It was a Saturday night and I said, you’ve got to get that face paint off for church. And one of them had been painted up like a tiger. And they start taking a baby wipe and wiping it all together.

Well, that black and that orange smeared together and looked like a sickly brown color. And then they got in the shower and they said, I need help. So I went in there and I’m using a sponge and trying to get all of it off without scrubbing their skin off.

And finally, I think it looks good. We’ve got the light bulb in the bathroom under that. It looked good.

We got to church the next morning. I didn’t think a thing about it under these fluorescents until Mama showed up at church and said, Have you seen our child? Okay, I get here and I’m talking to Kathy.

I’m talking to Ken. I’m talking to LaWanna. I’m running 56 different directions.

I’m vaguely aware the children are here with me until Sunday school. No, I haven’t paid attention to the face. And she said, well, come out here and look.

And under the fluorescence, I see that no matter how hard I scrubbed, there is a thin veneer of this sickly pale brown color all over the face that made the child look like they had jaundice or some kind of liver disease. I promise you, I’m not just a neglectful parent. It did not show up at our house under the dim lights in our bathroom.

but you get here under the fluorescence, you could see every speck of that paint. And so Charla, you know, again, is down there in the bathroom with baby wipes and got the child in a headlock because they’re trying to get loose, trying to scrub all of that off while I’m in here trying to focus on doing the announcements, and it’s just a mess. You see what I’m saying?

Under the bright lights, you can see every single flaw. I love that story, and I will continue to tell that story until the day that I die because it so perfectly illustrates that point. No matter how badly my kids hate it.

Under the bright lights, we can see every flaw. And that’s how the light of God’s holiness is. When this flood of the light of God’s holiness shines down on us, we begin to see every flaw in who we are in comparison.

And in our sinful nature, we recoil from that. And we want nothing to do with that. And we’d rather hide in the darkness and embrace our sin.

than acknowledge what God’s light shows us to be true about ourselves. So Jesus paints this picture at the end of this passage, at the end of his conversation with Nicodemus, of mankind being lost in sin. Not only lost, but really unwilling to be found, uninterested in being found.

That’s our natural condition, that we want to keep God at arm’s length because we’d rather embrace this sin. You may question whether that’s true or not, but isn’t that what Adam and Eve did? God gave them one rule to follow.

Hey, you can have all of this. It’s all yours. There’s just one rule for you to follow.

Stay away from the fruit of this one tree. What is the first thing they went and did? As far as we can tell from the Scriptures.

No, I think I want to have that tree. I think I want to have that fruit. Of course, there’s a little interference by Satan there, twisting God’s word and confusing them, but they still knew what God had said and they chose to do it anyway.

They wanted to embrace the sin and reject God’s ways. Now the problem with that is that sin brings condemnation. We see in verse 18 that we stand condemned before God by default.

It’s because of who we are. We stand condemned before God. He says in verse 18, anyone who believes in Him is not condemned, but anyone who does not believe is already condemned.

We’re condemned because of our sin, every one of us. You don’t have to go out and commit one of the big sins, whatever that means. Yet murder would be a good example.

But I’m just saying that the Bible teaches that all sin is enough to condemn us, and yet we seem to reserve that only for the murderers, the rapists, the child abusers, that sort of thing. We categorize these sins. We don’t realize sometimes, I think, that any sin is enough to condemn us because God’s holiness is absolute, and He says, be ye holy as I am holy.

It’s like there’s a sign at the entrance to heaven saying you must be this holy to get in, and the standard is absolute 100% sinless perfection, and even one sin is enough to bring us short of that. And so we stand condemned because of our sin. He said anyone who does not believe is condemned already.

People say, what kind of loving God would send people to hell just because they didn’t believe in Jesus? Nobody, that was not the charge against us. He said those who don’t believe are already condemned.

Now, he does say they haven’t believed on the name of the Son of God. Well, that’s because that’s the only escape from this condemnation. But we’re destined for separation from God in hell because of our sin, because of our rebellion against Him, because we’ve rejected Him and we’ve fallen short of His holiness.

And let me tell you, God could have looked at us as creatures who had every advantage and every opportunity to love Him and enjoy perfect fellowship with Him, And yet we shook our fists in His face and said, no, we’d rather have sin. We’d rather embrace everything that’s the opposite of who you are, God. We don’t want you.

We want our sin. God could have looked at us and said, fine then, enjoy your sin. Enjoy hell.

I’m done with you. He could have said that. That could have been God’s attitude, and He would have been entirely justified in sending us off to eternity without Him, because that’s what we chose.

It’s what every one of us choose. When we know by the law of God written on our hearts, as Romans talks about, even if we’ve never read the scriptures, the law of God is written on our hearts. And when we know there’s a right and wrong and we choose to do wrong anyway, we are rejecting the God who is the author of right and wrong.

We’re rejecting him. God could have looked at us and would have been completely justified to say, you know what, you chose hell? Not my fault.

Not my problem. Yet we see in the scriptures that God, as much as He’s holy, as much as He’s just, He’s also merciful. And He’s also loving.

And that’s why Jesus presents the solution in verses 16 and 17. Where He says, God loved the world in this way. He gave His one and only Son so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life.

For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Verse 17 tells us that God did not desire our condemnation. He desires for us to be saved.

If God desired our condemnation, then he didn’t have to do anything else. We were already headed that way anyway. God didn’t have to lift another finger to do anything about condemning us.

We took care of that with our sin. But God didn’t desire for us to be condemned. God didn’t create us for us to be condemned.

God created us to enjoy perfect fellowship with Him. God created us for this relationship with Him. God created us.

We talked about this on a Wednesday night recently. God created us, I believe, because He’s loving, as 1 John 4 says. He is love, and He created us to have someone to love.

Did He need us? Absolutely not. But He chose to create us to have someone to show that love to.

And not because we’re good, not because we deserve his love, but just because he is loving. He didn’t desire our condemnation. He desired our salvation.

Verse 17 says, God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. And that’s why we come to John 3. 16.

And it says that he gave his one and only son so that everyone who believes in him would not have to perish, but would have eternal life. And it says that’s the way he showed his love toward us. See, some of your Bibles may say, for God so loved the world.

And that’s not an inaccurate translation, but sometimes we misunderstand the word so and what it meant a couple of centuries ago. And we think that’s describing the depth of his love, and I think it does that, but we miss something else. When he says so, he really means in this way.

This is how God showed it. This is how God proved it. Does that illustrate the depth and the breadth of his love for us?

Absolutely. It tells us how much he loves us, but if that’s our understanding of it, he loved the world so much, we miss the point where he’s telling us, this is how I showed it. This is how I showed it, by sending Jesus to die for your sins.

How much does God love you? He loved you enough that he was willing to send his only begotten son. The father was willing to send the son.

God the son was willing to come and be crucified for your sins. I love you all, but I can’t imagine giving up either of my sons. I can’t imagine that.

And I would hope you would say the same about me. Yeah, I love you, but I’m not giving up my children for you. Good luck.

I would understand. I’m a parent too. Especially not for somebody who’s declared themselves your enemy.

Imagine somebody had committed a terrible crime against you, terrible crime against your family, and now they’re set to be executed. Think of how much you’d have to love that person that you’d send your only son to be executed in their place. I can’t even begin to fathom that kind of love.

That God said, this is how much I love you and this is how I’m proving it. Some people still today say, I feel like God could never love me after the things I’ve done. To quote a phrase that I hear a lot on the radio nowadays, facts don’t care about your feelings.

You feel like God can’t ever love you after the things you’ve done. But the fact is, God loved you and sent his son to prove it. If you ever question, does God love me?

Can God ever forgive me? You remember the proof that God gave you. Remember the lengths that he went to to purchase your salvation and to prove his love.

Jesus Christ came and brought salvation to us, and it was a gift from God so precious that God had to deliver it himself. God didn’t send a proxy to purchase our salvation. God didn’t call Amazon and have them deliver it.

I don’t even know if you can call Amazon. But God didn’t type in Amazon. com and have them deliver it.

God didn’t call in a third party. God the Son came at the behest of God the Father, came to this earth as a tiny baby, born to a virgin through the miraculous work of the Holy Spirit, knowing full well that His purpose in coming was to live a perfect sinless life and nevertheless be abused by the people He was coming to save and then to be put to death in the most humiliating and agonizing way possible for people who did not deserve it. But such was his love for us that he did all of that anyway.

At Christmas time, we talk about God with us, Emmanuel, God with us. Jesus Christ is God with us because the gift of salvation was so precious that God came to deliver it himself. And apart from what Jesus Christ did on the cross, apart from this whole sacrifice that he made on the cross you and I would be condemned to an eternity in hell separated from God that’s not the position of our church that’s not the opinion of the preacher that’s what the Bible says in black and white and some places in red and white that we would be destined for eternity separated from God in hell and the fact that Jesus Christ came to earth to die on the cross and be our one and only savior is the only basis for you and I to have a relationship with God.

It’s the only basis, it’s the only reason God can forgive us because that sin’s been paid for in full. That sin that we’ve committed, that treason against the king of the universe, that sin that separates us from him by causing us to fall short of his holiness, all of that was laid on Jesus’s account. He took responsibility for it at the cross, and he was nailed to the cross and shed his blood and died in our place to pay for that sin so it’s no longer held to our accounts.

And in this conversation that we’ve looked at, in John chapter 3, Jesus was talking to a seeker named Nicodemus, and he was calling this seeker to put his faith in Jesus for salvation because that man stood condemned before God because that man had sinned, and his only hope of salvation was in Jesus Christ. And I’m here to tell you today that Jesus is still calling out to seekers yes we embrace the darkness we embrace sin but we know that something is missing we know that we’re separated from God and this morning if you if you know that you’ve sinned against God and you know that you’re separated from him because of that if you know that that relationship is not what it ought to be and you know because the Bible says that you’re going to be separated from him for eternity you need to understand today that your only hope of salvation is not in Trinity Baptist church.

It’s not in your good works. It’s not in any check you write to our missions program or anything else, anything that we’ve talked about today. Your hope for salvation is not found in anything that you can do or earn or deserve.

Your only hope for salvation is found squarely in Jesus Christ alone because of what he did on the cross. And Jesus is still calling people just like Nicodemus to put their trust in him for salvation.