The Biggest Lie Ever Told

 

The biggest lie ever told to humanity is that God doesn’t care about you or your problems. That is a lie from Satan himself that he has spread for generation.

And for generation people have said “God doesn’t care” and he doesn’t understand how miserable my life is, but he does.

Let me say this: The wrath of God has not fallen upon us, but on Jesus at his cross. Our savior absorbed into himself the justice we deserve. Now we receive what we don’t deserve, our Father’s compassion and his gift of eternal life.

· It seems that we can only praise the creator when we are feeling blessed,

· Do we only believe he is great when he gives us our daily bread and heals are aching bodies?

· Is not the Creator great from everlasting to everlasting?

John 3:16

INTRODUCTION: EXPERIENCING GOD’S LOVE

The topic of God’s love is truly an overwhelming subject to try and tackle in only one message. There is so much that the Bible has to say about the love of God that I doubt anyone has ever come close to fully comprehending it.

In John 3:16 Jesus said, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

It is only one sentence. And that sentence contains only twenty-five words. Yet that one sentence is packed with so much truth that we literally will not have time to fully unpack its contents this morning.

But I will try. From this one verse we can find at least seven truths about the love of God.

1. THE LOVE OF GOD IS UNCONDITIONAL. For God so loved the world,

The Greek word for world (kosmos) is defined as “the ungodly multitude; the whole mass of men alienated from God and therefore hostile to the cause of Christ.”

1. This is the world that God loved.

2. It doesn’t say that God loved all the good people.

3. Or that God loved all the Jews.

4. Or that God loved all the saints. It says, “For God so loved the world.”

So God’s love clearly isn’t based on our spiritual condition or our moral predisposition. It isn’t based on our behavior or our attitude toward him.

Rather we see here that God’s love for mankind is universal and unconditional. He loves everyone. And this is one of the things that set him apart from every other god held up by every other world religion.

What is unique about Christianity? The answer is Grace.”

Christianity uniquely claims God’s love comes free of charge, no strings attached. No other religion makes that claim.

1. Buddhists, for example, follow an eight-fold path to enlightenment. It’s not a free ride.

2. Hindus believe in karma, that your actions continually affect the way the world will treat you; that there is nothing that comes to you not set in motion by your actions.

3. Someone else observed the Jewish code of the law implies God has requirements for people to be acceptable to him.

4. And in Islam God is a God of judgment not a God of love. You live to appease him

Only Christianity dares to proclaim God’s love is unconditional.

An unconditional love that we call grace, grace is all about God and God freely giving to us the gifts of forgiveness, mercy and love.

So God’s love for us is unconditional. It is as Philip Yancey once wrote:

There is nothing we can do to make God love us more. There is nothing we can do to make God love us less.”

But this doesn’t mean that a person can continue in sin and please God, God’s love helps us to turn from sin.

2. THE LOVE OF GOD IS SACRIFICIAL; he gave

God shows us that true love has nothing to do with what you can do for God, but everything to do with what God can do for you.

And what are the results of God’s sacrificial love?

When we repent and turn to God our sin is forgiving and transformed from us to Jesus who paid the price for our forgiveness.

John 15:13-14

Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends.

14 Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you.

3. THE LOVE OF GOD IS VALUABLE.

Here we see the value of the Father’s love for us. Not only was he willing to give, but we see here that he was willing to give his best.

When you give to someone out of your abundance that is one thing, but when you give out of your poverty that is quite another.

When what you give is a sacrifice it is pleasing to God. How many times have you heard or even said yourself:

“I can’t give you that because it’s the only one I’ve got.” We’ve probably all said that.

But we learn here that God didn’t have a backup, God didn’t have a spare. But he loved us so much that he was willing to give us Jesus.

“The power and passion of God’s love comes across, not through a supposed special meaning of the Greek word involved, but through the length to which God was willing to go for the sake of the world.”

To give his “one and only”

4. GOD’S LOVE IS PERSONAL.

God’s love is not merely some concept. It isn’t just a philosophy or a theological thought.

God’s love was made manifest in this world through the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ came into this world to reveal to us the love of God in human form.

A child was once trying to quote from John 3:16 in the King James Version, which says, “his only begotten Son.” But the child misquoted it and said, “His only forgotten Son.”

It was one of those slips of the tongue that carried more truth than we would care to admit. For by most people in the world today Jesus Christ is truly forgotten.

His life is forgotten. His love is forgotten. His sacrifice is forgotten. It is our job as Christians – as God’s ambassadors – to help them remember.

Joe was an alcoholic, miraculously converted in a street outreach mission. Before his conversion he’d gained a reputation as a derelict and dirty wino for which there was no hope.

· But following his conversion to Christ, everything changed.

· Joe became the most caring person at the mission.

· He spent his days there, doing whatever needed to be done.

There was never anything he was asked to do that he considered beneath him. Whether it was cleaning up vomit left by some sick alcoholic, or scrubbing toilets after men had left them filthy

Joe did it all with a heart of gratitude. He could be counted on to feed any man who wandered in off the streets, undress and tuck him into bed, when they were too out-of-it to take care of himself.

One evening, after the mission director delivered his evangelistic message to the usual crowd of sullen men with drooped heads, one of them looked up, came down to the altar and kneeled to pray, crying out for God to help him change.

The repentant drunk kept shouting, “Oh God, make me like Joe! Make me like Joe! Make me like Joe!” The director leaned over and said, “Son, wouldn’t it be better if you prayed ‘make me like Jesus?”

After thinking about it for a few moments, the man looked up with an inquisitive expression and asked, “Is He like Joe?”

What a great story and what a powerful way to live.

Are you living your life in such a way that you are reminding people of the only ‘forgotten’ Son of God?

God’s love is personal, because it was made manifest through a person – Jesus Christ – but also because it is bestowed on a person – you.

Max Lucado writes:

There are many reasons God saves you: to bring glory to himself, to appease his justice, to demonstrate his sovereignty. But one of the sweetest reasons God saved you is because he is fond of you.

He likes having you around. He thinks you are the best thing to come down the pike in quite a while… If God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it. If he had a wallet, your photo would be in it.

He sends you flowers every spring and a sunrise every morning. Whenever you want to talk, he’ll listen. He can live anywhere in the universe, and he chose your heart. And the Christmas gift he sent you in Bethlehem? Face it, friend. He’s crazy about you!

5. GOD’S LOVE IS ACCESSIBLE that whoever believes in him

1. The really good news about God’s love is that it is not limited to a select few.

2. It is not available only to those who were born with right color of skin or on the correct continent.

3. Nor is it difficult to obtain. It is not reserved for only the intellectual elite or the power brokers or financial wizards.

The love of God is accessible to “whoever believes in” Jesus – the only Son of God.

From the human perspective, when you compare [God] to the other gods of the other religions in the world, you have to say our God is really sort of odd.

He uses the most common of people, people that aren’t any different from any of us here; he comes in the most common of ways.

· He’s not the Above-Us-God, too holy to come down.

· God’s love is so immense that he wants to come down.

· And he has proven his love by the fact that he did come down and gave His life for ours.

God has come down to our level. Not in the sense that he has lessened his holiness or lowered his standards.

But only in the sense that he has made his love accessible to the average, ordinary person like me and like you.

He is not a distant God who loves us only from some mystical, far-away place that is completely removed from us. Rather he has entered into our world and he longs to enter into our lives.

Will you believe in his Son who made the ultimate expression of God’s love by giving his life on the cross for your sins?

A. By choosing to believe in him you access the love of God,

B. The grace of God and the forgiveness of God.

C. By believing in him you access the new life that only he can provide.

6. GOD’S LOVE IS NONJUDGMENTAL.

God’s goal in sending his Son from heaven to earth was not to condemn you or to show you how bad you are, how unworthy you are or how hopeless you are.

God’s only desire in sending Jesus was to show you his love and draw you into a love relationship with him.

1. Jesus didn’t come into the world in order to rebuke you. He came to rescue you.

2. He didn’t come to criticize you. He came to cleanse you.

3. He didn’t come to punish you. He came to pardon you.

4. He didn’t come to destroy you. He came to deliver you.

However this does not mean that God is not a God of judgment. For there is a huge difference between recognizing right and wrong and being judgmental.

There is a difference between judging the unrepentant sinner and being judgmental.

Being judgmental means that one has a critical spirit that only looks for the bad in people and then is quick to condemn them when it is found

God on the other hand will judge us for our sins and even sentence us to hell, but only as a last resort – only over his Son’s dead body – only if we refuse to accept his offer of forgiveness.

Another way of looking at it is that it isn’t so much that God sends us to hell as that we choose hell over heaven – we choose Satan over God – we choose sin over righteousness.

But as a result of God’s love each of us can have an eternal life.

If you think God doesn’t love you because you have faults and have sinned I want to tell you that God himself came in flesh to experience what you go through every day and he understands you better than you realize.

So if you don’t know him as your Savior, I make this invitation to you, come and let him show you just how much his love can help you.

REPENT AND BE BAPTIZED AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE THE GIFT OF THE HOLY GHOST.

Col 1:27 The Holy Ghost is Christ in you, the hope of glory: