Advent 3: Love | Exodus 34:6–7
"The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin,"
(Exodus 34:6–7 ESV)
"Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is Love. In this, the Love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins."
(1 John 4:8–10 ESV)
Introduction
This week, we come to the Advent theme of Love. This is a wonderful season when we try to slow down and examine how our world is different, and how our experience and relationship with God are different because of the Advent (the coming) of Jesus on that night when God took on flesh. Here at Main Street, we tend to follow along with the historic Christian Advent themes of:
Hope
Peace
Love
Joy
But it's interesting that each of the traditional Advent themes is all somewhat nebulous words in English. We use all these words in so many ways—maybe especially the word love! We can love a movie, our spouse or family, and our time alone in the car. Those are all very different types of Love! Our goal as Christians is that we want to know how God talks about these ideas, not our regular use of them in English. We want to care more about what God and Scripture say about hope, peace, Love, and joy than what WE think. Many of us have learned by now that our way of understanding the world often needs to be corrected by Scripture. That was Demer's goal in talking about hope, Jack's goal in talking about peace, and that is my goal this morning as we look at Love this Advent season. We want God to define what he means by these ideas, not us. We want God to show us this morning what Love really looks like.
And I think we need to recalibrate how we think about Love. Love is much bigger than we want to give it credit for. God has blessed us by giving us a love that is much larger than we could have ever imagined. God has given us Love that is a feeling, but it is also much more than a feeling. In fact, what we are going to see is that Christmas demonstrates to us that Love is much, much more than a feeling. This morning, I want to encourage us all that:
Love is not merely a feeling; rather, Love is a steadfast, relational "for-ness" towards others demonstrated tangibly.
Fore-ness, meaning that someone truly has your best interests in mind. That they are "for" you. Yes, that comes with a feeling, and that Love should be expressed tangibly, perhaps even in gifts. To truly understand Love, we have to know that:
Love is a Feeling
Love is a Gift
But Love is still even more than that! God has given us Love seen tangibly in gifts, but God's Love is greater than any gift we could have ever anticipated. If TRUE Love is a tangible relational for-ness demonstrated towards you and me first and foremost from God, then we see that Love most clearly IN the person of Jesus! What we see is that Love is more than just a feeling, more than just a mere gift:
Love is a Person
Jesus himself is the tangible embodiment of the Love of God, and the person we should hold onto when the feeling and gift don't seem to be enough anymore. We should turn to our personal relationship with our Savior and find true Love embodied!
Love is a Feeling
To start on this journey, talking about Love today, we most often think of Love as a feeling—floating pink hearts above people's heads, warm tingles, puppy dog eyes, and mushy words of affection. As Jack said last week, we think of Love, and we think of Hallmark movies (not that there is anything wrong with that—and I tend to cry more and more at movies like that the older I get).
We tend to think of Love first and foremost like this:
Picture of Ryan & Katie's Wedding
Look at that young couple—one of them wasn't even old enough to drink alcohol yet, let alone commit the next 60-70 years of her life away! (Our laws are odd sometimes when you think about it that way.) This is often the type of image we have in our mind when we think about "love." We think about the emotions that we often have that can mix and mingle with infatuation, desire, contentment, enjoyment, and happiness. Love is the feeling we have towards others when we are satisfied, enjoying, and happy with one another. And that is a very good thing and is part of what Love is. Part of Love is a feeling.
I pray that most of us have had a moment where we have had the "feeling" of Love. It may have been when someone important in your life told you they appreciated you—a parent, a friend, or a spouse. In that moment, you probably felt something that we would call Love. It may have been when you realized how much you appreciated someone else and noticed how you felt—that you felt loving towards that person.
And I think many of us have had the experience of feeling loved by God. I pray every Christian in this room has had those moments where you realize and know the very Love of God in your life through His Holy Spirit on you! That is what we are praying when we pray the great Aaronic blessing from Numbers chapter six:
The LORD bless you and keep you;
The LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
The LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.
(Numbers 6:24–26 ESV)
That idea of God's face shining on us and being gracious and giving us peace is the idea that we would experience the Love of God tangibly. That we would feel the radiance of the warmth of his smile on us as he looks on us in Love in Jesus Christ. That we would know that he is happy with us as he looks towards us. It is a beautiful image and relational reality that I think God gives us way more often than we deserve as Christians!
Just listen to Zephaniah 3:
The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his Love; he will exult over you with loud singing."
(Zephaniah 3:17 ESV)
God is singing over you and me today in Jesus. For those who have put their faith in Jesus, God is THE mighty one who has won a great victory, and he is jubilant as he looks at you and me—the spoils of his conquest. That is amazing!
Love is a Feeling
Part of experiencing the Love of God is coming to know and sense God's joy, happiness, and thankfulness for you.
And yet, at times, we don't feel that Love of God. Even worse, not having that feeling can be crippling for us. As one writer has said:
Our greatest desire is to be known and loved.
Our greatest fear is to be known and unloved.
As we each put ourselves out there in this world—as we work hard, as we connect with others, as we share our thoughts and our dreams—our desire is that we would feel and believe we are loved by others when they know us more. One of the hardest and most fearful things we can experience is to believe we are known by others and, ultimately, they don't love us.
That is the interesting thing about Love. The feeling of Love comes and goes. I imagine many of you this morning may not feel loved. That can happen whether you are single or married, young or old. It can happen if you have your dream job, or you feel like every day is just slogging through work. It can happen when your health is good and when your health is bad. The feeling of Love comes and goes repeatedly in our lifetime. It can be fleeting like the snow on a sunny winter's day that melts so quickly in the noonday sun. And the problem is that when we don't feel loved, we begin to wonder if it is because people have started to know us and no longer love us:
Our greatest desire is to be known and loved.
Our greatest fear is to be known and unloved.
Do they know us, and now they don't love us? We might even worry that this is true about God. When we don't feel the tangible Love and presence of God, we may worry, and we may even despair that he no longer loves us. We worry that God has now, after all these years, finally seen what we are really like, and now he has decided he really doesn't love us. We are truly known and unloved.
If you have been a Christian for any length of time, you mentally know that can't be true, but we feel that way, nonetheless. This is why our image of God's Love has to grow beyond just a feeling.
True Love: Hesed
When we turn to Scripture to help us define Love, we see the idea of Love talked about more than 500 times throughout the Old and New Testaments. And many of the passages we see in Scripture seem to be talking about a feeling. We have places where the Psalmist talks about Love, the prophets express Love, and even the entire people of Israel cry out to God in praise and worship in ways that seem tied to the feeling of Love. And yet, in other areas, Love seems to be much deeper than just a feeling. That is what we see in our first passage this morning in Exodus 34:
"The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin,"
(Exodus 34:6–7 ESV)
Here in Exodus 34, like many other places in the Old Testament, God's Love is expressed with the word "hesed."
Hesed
And hesed is a very complicated word to translate. We most often translate it as steadfast Love, but it is a love that has a much larger dimension than just a feeling. It is a love that endures. A love that is particular in its goal. A love that is specific in who it is directed towards. Here in Exodus 34, Moses was on Mount Sinai, and God had asked Moses to cut tablets of stone and present himself before God on the mountain. And as Moses was there, God himself passed before Moses and said this very statement about himself. This is God's own description of himself—there isn't a better place we could go to know more about how God understands himself and what he means by his Love than his own words!
Here God says that he is slow to anger and abounding in hesed—steadfast Love. Yet he also tells us what that means. God's hesed-love is tangible. The phrase "forgiving iniquity and transgressions and sin" is what it means for God to have steadfast Love towards you and me. God's very nature is that he, himself, will be the one who forgives all our sins. He will forgive all the ways we have fought against him. He will forgive all the ways we live in the sin that started clear back with Adam and Eve. When God talks about his own Love, his own character of Love, he doesn't only talk about a feeling, he talks about the tangible way we will see this Love in our lives. That is why I think it is safe to say that:
Love is not merely a feeling; rather, Love is a steadfast, relational "for-ness" towards others demonstrated tangibly.
Love is a Gift
In addition to a feeling, God gives us something to hold onto when we don't feel that Love. Notice what is so often paired with the emotion of the Love that God has towards us—it is the same in Exodus 34 and in other places in Scripture:
"For the LORD takes pleasure in his people; he adorns the humble with salvation."
(Psalm 149:4 ESV)
"He brought me out into a broad place; he rescued me, because he delighted in me."
(Psalm 18:19 ESV)
God's delight, God's pleasure, God's Love is shown for us tangibly in our salvation! God's steadfast Love is shown towards you and me in a very tangible way through the work he did to save us. From the beginning, God has shared with us that this was his plan. He loved us so much that he promised he was going to save us despite our rebellion against him. In Genesis 3, God promises that he will save his people through the seed of the woman. To Abraham, he promises that he alone will keep the covenant he has made with Abraham to make him a great nation and bring about his salvation through the ONE descendant. He promises to David that God himself will place a king on the throne forever to rule rightly and justly over his people.
It is because God loves us that God saves us. It is because God loves us that he did everything necessary to save us. And it is because God loves us that his Love is tangible and visible.
Love is a Gift
How amazing it is that God loves us enough to not only let us know his emotional disposition of smiling and joy towards us in Jesus, but also to give us the very tangible gift of salvation through Jesus! Ephesians 2:8-9 says:
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
(Ephesians 2:8–9 ESV)
What an amazing gift salvation is! But is knowing the Love of God as his emotional status towards us and the tangible gift of salvation a broad enough understanding of Love for us? Will the emotion and the gift itself sustain us?
I remember not liking birthdays and getting birthday gifts for a good chunk of my childhood. They seemed superfluous, fake, and odd to me. When this came back to my mind recently, I tried to remember why I felt that way—I mean, what kid doesn't like birthdays and birthday presents?! And I think I remember that my feelings changed around the time I was very sick with several illnesses in the second and third grade, and missed much of those years of school.
Some of you have heard those stories about how I went from illness to illness and had open sores on my head and lost all my hair. For a kid who was already nerdy and lacking a lot of friends, being very sick and having open sores on my head meant I didn't have many friends to speak of. And I think that physical gifts, in that moment, became quite secondary to me. I desperately wanted to feel loved. I wanted to feel like even if people saw me—sickness, open sores and all—that they would still love me. Sure, a gift given to me expressed a kind of Love, but that wasn't what I really wanted. I wanted to feel and know their Love in a tangible way in my life, yet in a very specific way. I didn't want to experience that Lovethrough a gift—though that was good and tangible—but I wanted to experience that Love through THEM. I wanted to know PEOPLE were with me. The best way they could express their Love tangibly to me would be to be with me—to play with me, talk with me, engage me. The gifts stopped feeling loving when I realized I needed something more than a mere gift—that I needed people.
Maybe you have had that feeling as well. Gifts don't always satisfy. We find that feelings can fade, and gifts fall flat. Maybe you, too, have realized that while there are feelings of Love and ways to express Love by receiving gifts, there is Love that is deeper than a feeling or a thing you receive. There is a love that only comes with the presence of a person.
One of the problems with viewing the tangible Love of God only as a gift is that it might lead us to view it like a get-out-of-jail-free card. Something we have looked for, found, and now hold onto simply as a thing to use when we need it. A gift like that, a He-Man action figure that I eventually didn't care much about. I had it, it served its purpose, but I didn't see it as love much longer than my attention span lasted at seven.
In Scripture, when our salvation is described as a gift, it is to counter our idea that we can work for our salvation. We can't earn our salvation—salvation must be given to us by God as a gift. But our salvation is much more than just a gift as well. God's Love is more than a feeling; it is shown to us tangibly in our salvation. But Love demonstrated in our salvation is not just a thing, not just something to seek and to have, rather, it is much more than that. In fact, God's Love is so tangible that God's Love IS a PERSON. If:
Love is not merely a feeling; rather, Love is a steadfast, relational "for-ness" towards others demonstrated tangibly.
Then it is important that we see that:
Love is a Person
Love is A Person?
It's right to note that God does love us in the sense of an emotional connection and care for us. It's also one thing to say that God's Love will have a tangible expression. That is clear from Exodus 34, Ephesians 2, and many other places in Scripture. But are we sure that God's Love truly is embodied in a person? In Jesus? You have probably heard that said, but is that really true? Perhaps God's Love is just shown towards us in tangible ways through Jesus. Like Jesus saving us. Like Jesus taking our sins. That may be how you have read passages like Romans 5 before:
For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his Love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
(Romans 5:6–11 ESV)
It may also have been how you read John 3:16:
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
(John 3:16 ESV)
Surely, Jesus came to die for our sins, Jesus came to reconcile us to God, and Jesus came to save us from eternal death to eternal life. That is all clearly love towards us! But do you view it as only an emotion or a thing he did for you?
What makes Romans 5 so beautiful is that Love was not merely a feeling, not just a thing Jesus did, but this is describing the tangible Love of God for us IN Christ Jesus himself. Christ is more than just loving towards us. What we see in part and murky in the Old Testament, we see more perfectly and completely in the New Testament: God's Love is so tangible that the gift is not a thing or an action done for us, it is a person—the person of Jesus. God's Love takes human, relational form so that we might not just have a thing, but rather that we might have God himself. That we might be in a relationship with God. Look again at Romans 5 and John 3:
More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
(Romans 5:6–11 ESV)
We rejoice not in the salvation itself, but in our LORD JESUS CHRIST, through whom we are now in relationship with God.
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son,
(John 3:16 ESV)
God doesn't just give us salvation, he gives us HIS ONLY SON. The emphasis in both of these passages is on the tangible, relational person we were given, not just the gift of salvation as a thing.
That is what we see described more fully in our second passage this morning in 1 John 4:8-10:
"Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is Love. In this, the Love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is Love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins."
(1 John 4:8–10 ESV)
This is the miracle of Christmas right here in 1 John 4:8. God IS Love. And the Love of God was MADE MANIFEST among us. How is it made manifest? In that God sent his Son into the world.
There, in a smelly, loud, uncomfortable manger in a backwater town of a backwater country that no one cared about, God chose to enjoin himself to humanity and make Love tangible. Not just tangible in a feeling or a gift or actions or solutions that you and I received as a thing, but as a person! A person who was THE manifestation of Love. To be truly God and truly man meant that Jesus himself was Love in the flesh. That is more than you or I could have ever dreamed or ever hoped for.
Application: Come to Love
Too often, this Christmas story is so familiar to us that we forget what a miracle this was! If we wanted to know if God loves us, we would see His love most clearly on Christmas morning in Bethlehem. And for us to truly know the loving smile of God upon us, for us to truly receive the loving gift of salvation and loving joy of reunion with God, God gave us a person—Himself! God demonstrates his relational "for-ness" towards us by showing us how Love is a person!
Love is not merely a feeling; rather, Love is a steadfast, relational "for-ness" towards others demonstrated tangibly.
Love is a Feeling
Love is a Gift [but ultimately]
Love is a Person
It is important that in Genesis, when God begins creating, we see that he puts his very presence in the very midst of creation. Here, at the start of the New Covenant, a new creation, God is recreating you and me by again starting with his very presence, his very person. At Christmas, during Advent, what we celebrate is a tangible, embodied love that is forever ours now through faith in Jesus, who has come to us. The Love of God is emotion AND a gift because Jesus gives us Himself and a relationship with him.
We know Love because Love has loved us.
No fleeting feeling. No gift to lose meaning. Tangible, relational Love for you and me was first found in the baby in the manger.
That is what we are celebrating when we talk about Love at Advent. Love, the very tangible for-ness of God given to us that comes from his unwavering feeling of Love for us, his unending gift of Love to us—love embodied in the God man Jesus! Where our sense of the emotion of Love may falter, God's does not. Where our tendency may be to treasure what we get from God, God keeps giving. Today, because of Christmas, we have the very tangible person of Jesus as our own savior and relationship with God through his Holy Spirit, and forevermore face-to-face in the new earth. Love is made tangible for you and me at Christmas!
For many of us, we start and stop with our understanding of Love with a feeling. God wants us to know that he does love us in that sense of a feeling, but we all need to take another step. We need to realize God has offered each of us the tangible gift of Love through salvation through faith in Jesus. And this Love is not merely a gift of a thing, rather, it is the gift of a person—Love made manifest and embodied in the God-man Jesus, whom you and I get to relate to today through the Holy Spirit of God.
Our first application this morning is to simply:
Application #1: Behold the beauty of the manifest Love of God at Christmas
See in the baby that was born that morning, the God-man who would go to the cross and know that God has smiled on you through faith in Jesus's righteous life, death, and resurrection for you. God's Love is overflowing, running over, spreading out so far beyond anything we can imagine, as He has chosen to give us Jesus that we might see His Love to us. Tangible Love given in the gift of salvation. But most importantly, Love is a relationship with a real person. When you are struggling to remember that God loves you, come back to Christmas. See there in the manger the fullness of the Love of God that radiates his emotive Love for you, his tangible gift of Love for you in salvation, and see that Love in his Person of Love—Jesus.
Here is what that looks like practically: You and I have a God who has shown us love in a person. Love embodied in the God-man, Jesus Christ. Just like any other relationship you have, if you are not feeling loved by God, if you have lost the wonder of the gifts you have been given by God, run back to the very person of God who is Love for you. Run back to Jesus! Come and find his Love expressed in his love letter to you—his word in the Bible. Come see and read again and again about the gifts God has given you, especially the gift of salvation, and the great cost it was for him. And come and see that you have not just things and feelings from God—you have a relationship with a person. You now get to walk back into a relationship with God because God came to you and me on that Christmas morning.
Do you know that Love this morning? Love that is a feeling, a gift, and a person? God is offering that to you right now. Like a gift on Christmas morning, in hearing what God has done for you at Christmas, God is offering you that salvation and that relationship with him solely through faith. Simply put your faith in the Love of God made flesh. I'd love to talk to you this morning if you would like to make that decision.
Application: Be Manifest Love
And there is a second application this morning to seeing Love at Christmas: Love made manifest that morning in a manger changes everything for us in our relationship with God. And it changes everything about how you and I relate to one another and a watching world as well.
Remember what Jesus said to Peter after he had risen? After Peter had failed Jesus and denied him?
When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?" He said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I love you." He said to him, "Feed my lambs." He said to him a second time, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" He said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I love you." He said to him, "Tend my sheep." He said to him the third time, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, "Do you love me?" and he said to him, "Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you." Jesus said to him, "Feed my sheep."
(John 21:15–18 ESV)
Every time Jesus asked Peter if he loved HIM, he directed Peter to then love God's people. Jesus says this another way in John 13:
A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this, all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have Love for one another.
(John 13:34–35 ESV)
Just like God, our Love is meant to be shown tangibly:
Love is not merely a feeling; rather, Love is a steadfast, relational "for-ness" towards others demonstrated tangibly.
This is true for us as well as for God. In fact, it is true for us BECAUSE it is true for God. That is our second application this morning:
Application #2: Be the beauty of the manifest Love of God at all times.
God has chosen to make Love an embodied reality in Jesus; therefore, we are to make it an embodied reality in our lives. I would dare say that a major reason why we struggle to know the Love of God is that many Christians do not experience the tangible, embodied Love of God towards them through others. As we see again and again, Love God, Love Others, Make Disciples of Jesus is not just a fun tag-line, it is God's plan for his people as we live out his purpose for us in his place, indwelt by his presence. None of us perfectly lives out the embodied Love of God here and now, but we are promised we will see it more fully in the future:
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in Love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth [of God's glory], and to know the Love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
(Ephesians 3:14–19 ESV)
Being rooted and grounded in Love, Paul's prayer is that we might have an ever-expanding understanding of the Love of God with all the saints. Isn't that a beautiful picture—our understanding of God's Love for us is meant to help us join with all the saints in an ever-expanding, increasingly-consuming understanding of God's Love for all of us.
In seeing the embodied Love of God, we are to become embodied Love ourselves. I'm going to invite the worship team up now to play some music for us in a moment, but I want to end by giving you a visual representation of this idea of embodying Love this morning and what it looks like in our lives and the lives of others. Paul says that as we are rooted in this embodied Love that we gaze on in the baby in the manger at Christmas, God wants us to embody along with the rest of the saints that same Love. We are to embody Love towards one another, and we are to embody it to those outside the church. In doing so, we truly love God as he has loved us, by being embodied Love.
First, I want us to sing this song as our response to what we have just heard. Really sing this to the Lord as your response to beholding the beauty of God's Love, both emotionally, in gift, but mostly as a person! Enjoy that God has given us Himself as Love—a person—at Christmas.
That is not that odd a response. But here is my hope this week. When the song is done, I'm going to ask you to take a look around you at the people near you. And I'm going to ask you to start praying out loud for them. You don't have to know their name, and you don't need to yell, but I want to ask everyone who loves Jesus here this morning to simply begin to pray for those around you out loud. I want everyone here this morning who is a believer to know that they are loved, that someone sees them, and that they are being lifted up before the Lord. If you are here and you are not yet sure if you put your trust in Jesus, maybe consider this morning the type of Love God has shown you and, perhaps, if you want to reciprocate that Love. You don't need to pray, but I will be up here, and I would love to pray for you in particular if you want to come and talk with me. If any of you are feeling the weight of life this season and would like to be prayed for, the elders will be up here as well and would love to pray for you. Please come up and receive the embodied Love of Christ for you this morning if you need it.
Pray
Communion
Love had to be embodied so it could be broken for us. See in Jesus's death the ultimate Love that we received because Love was a person.
Benediction
The LORD bless you and keep you;
the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
the LORD lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.
(Numbers 6:24–26 ESV)
