Love for the world

John chapter 3, verse 9. Nicodemus said to him, how can these things be? Jesus answered him, are you the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know and bear witness to what we have seen, but you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, How can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?

No one has ascended into heaven except he who has descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

Now, a few years ago, I was speaking to some Christian friends, and they were parents, and they had a lovely Christian home. But as I spoke to them, they were distraught. One of their children had decided that he was going to plunge themselves into a very obviously anti-Christian lifestyle. And as they’d done it, they’d said something about the fact that they really felt that they needed new parents. The fact that their parents couldn’t affirm them in their choice of lifestyle, it more or less broke the contract between their parents and them.

Speaking as a father, that’s more or less my nightmare, that there might come a day when my Christian faith might come into such collision with the whole direction of my children’s life that I might not be able to affirm them in it. And of course, the thing that makes it so difficult is that we live in an age where love and affirmation are seen to overlap so entirely that they come down to the same thing. A little while ago, I was speaking to a relative of mine at a family party, and he was genuinely perplexed by the fact that he had been speaking to a minister, and this minister said something about the fact that God’s love is not entirely unconditional. And the thing that perplexed my friend was that in his mind, unconditional love, especially when it comes to God, is the only kind. Love is not love that changes where it alteration finds.

And the thing that is so tiring about being a Christian in a culture that thinks that love and unconditional affirmation are the same thing is that it doesn’t look like we love people. It doesn’t look like Jesus loves people. We have to keep apologising for the fact that, yes, God is a God of love, but no, he doesn’t welcome that. Jesus loves you and I love you, but I’m not going to wear the lanyard. And it’s exhausting.

And actually, it runs deeper than that, doesn’t it? Because slowly, slowly, we absorb the biases of our culture and we begin to think that any love worthy of the name always affirms. Always accepts, always includes, always supports. And if the love of Christ is not like that, it is not love. Of course, you can get the same problem the other way around.

In our culture, the burden is all on the parents, it’s all on the society to affirm the individual, to affirm the children. But in other parts of the world, you can flip that. And the burden is on the children to line up with their parents. If you love them, you will keep their religion. If you love them, you will be filially pious.

You’ll be ready to hold the joss sticks. You’ll be ready to say the prayers. You’ll be ready to affirm them. And again, it makes Jesus the bad guy, doesn’t it? If he were really loving, Well, how could he set a child against their family?

And whichever way around it is, whether it is setting parents against their children or children against their parents, we might just wish that Jesus would leave us in peace.

Well, we’re working our way through Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, and at first blush, you might think that Nicodemus has precious little to do with everything that I’ve just been talking about. I’ve been filibustering for a few minutes. What does this pillar of the Jewish religious establishment have to do with rainbow laces and newly converted Taoists? Surely this is a different sort of conversation. But as we’ve seen over the last couple of Sundays, if you peel back just a layer or two, this is exactly the question that Nicodemus is asking.

The thing that he is struggling to grasp is the box-breaking radicalism of the kingdom of God. Couldn’t we have the joy without the judgement? Couldn’t we have the kingdom without the chaos? Couldn’t we just be a little bit more affirming, Jesus? And if you want a one-line answer to all of that, I think you can’t do better than the verse that we have in front of us this morning.

It is objectively the most famous Bible verse in the world. Apparently, 2 million people search it up every month. And Jesus wants us to understand that all of the chaos and the collision and the confrontation is actually the sign that the love of God has burst into the world, offering life to all who believe. John chapter 3 and verse 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. It’s an astonishing verse, isn’t it?

We’re used to thinking that the love of God towards the world is a given, but of course it’s not. If the world was the way that God first made it, bursting with life and peace and joy and righteousness, then I guess fair enough. But God sees this world, this world that makes us so cynical and despairing, with all of its brutality, and its ignorance and corruption and violence. And he loves it. It’s not a given, it’s a miracle.

But the emphasis on this verse is on how he loves the world. God loved the world in this way, in this way. Of all of the ways in which he could have loved the world, he loved the world like this: he gave his only Son. And that’s the first thing that we need to understand this morning. God’s love for the world is a Son-giving love.

Now, from one perspective, that’s just retracing everything that we saw last week. And so we looked briefly at verses 13 to 15 last Sunday morning, and of course those verses are all about the Son. I guess if you ponder for a moment who the Son of Man in verses 13 to 15 must be, it’s obvious that a Son who descends from heaven and who is lifted up and who ascends back to the throne of heaven again must be a unique, one-of-a-kind, only Son of God kind of a Son. And so in some ways he’s just summarising everything we saw last Sunday. But what’s being brought into sharper focus here is the fact that the arrival of that Son is not just an epic box-breaking journey through the heavens, it is the gift of the God of love.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. I guess it ought to go without saying that this is an extraordinary and an astonishing kind of love. We’re used to the thought, aren’t we, that gifts might be an expression of love. Let me rant for a minute. This is why I’ve always found wishlists a bit difficult to bear.

It feels to me like they turn what ought to be a display of thoughtfulness and affection into something that’s kind of a bit of a mercenary quid pro quo. I know that people don’t want to end up with a whole lot of gifts that they don’t want, but to be honest, I just love it when people buy me tat. If it shows that they love me. And so the fact that when our friends Tim and Nicole knew that we were going to leave Singapore, the fact that they thought that this was the best possible thing to buy me, this durian cushion, I love that. And I love the fact that my son Elijah saw this Good Morning Sunshine mug and thought of me.

And I love the fact that when Nat Lee found out that Jenny and I didn’t know what a zester was, It exercised her so much that she went to go and buy one. And can I say that I— barely a week has gone by where I haven’t used this several times in the years since. Gifts are an expression of love, aren’t they? That’s obvious. And of course, the greatest love comes with the greatest gift, not just some thought— yourself.

And so when I married my wife Jenny, I said to her, all that I am I give to you, and all that I have I share with you. Don’t take my things, take me. And God loved the world in this way, that he gave his only Son. We mustn’t hear that as God giving a third party, sort of like Lord Farquaad in Shrek, where he says, some of you may die, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. You know, I really love you, world, and so I’ll throw my son under the bus.

I didn’t like him that much anyway. No, when we say that God gave his only Son, what we mean is that God, the Holy Trinity— Father, Son, and Holy Spirit— gave himself.

And of course, it’s extraordinary for God, a son-giving love, is a self-giving love. And this is the shape of God’s love for the world. He gave his Son.

But I think that the real force of this verse actually comes when you put it into the context of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus. You know, the whole pretext of this chat is the thought that it might be nice if Jesus were just a bit less radical. If he made less radical claims on Jesus’— on Nicodemus’s life, you must be born again. And if he made less radical claims on Israel’s life, destroy this temple and I will rebuild it in 3 days. And as we said at the beginning, that kind of box-breaking confrontation does not feel like love.

Watching Jesus march into the temple with a whip of cords and drive out the cattle does not feel like love. And we might sometimes imagine that we’re the first generation in the history of the world who finds the contradiction, so-called, between unconditional affirmation and Jesus’ love a bit difficult, but that’s nonsense. There’s always been a flavour of thought that the duty of love is just to embrace and to accept people as you find them. But Jesus says, no, this is the manner, this is the shape of God’s love for the world. This is the measure.

Do not look for what it is willing to affirm. Look at what God is willing to give. And God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. Now, when you pause to think about it, it’s obvious, isn’t it, really? Of course, what someone is willing to give is a better measure of whether they actually love you than whether they’ll tell you that you’re perfect just the way you are.

It would have cost Jesus nothing to leave the traders in the temple. It basically costs nothing to wear a lanyard. It costs most people nothing to let an alcoholic drink themselves to death. But to give yourself, to give your only Son to death, the eternal Son, hoisted up like a bit of bronze on a pole. Of course, that is a better index of God’s love for the world.

The real measure of someone’s love for me is not that they will tell me that I’m fine just the way that I am. It is that they’re willing to pay the cost to actually help me.

And of all of the ways that God might have loved the world, he loved the world in this way: he gave his only Son. He loved the world too much to stand back and affirm it. He loved it enough to pay a price. God’s love is a Son-giving love.

But the reason that he paid that price is because God’s love is a life-giving love. John 3:16, for God loved the world in this way, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. And again, you can see straight away that that is an explanation of what Jesus and Nicodemus have just been talking about in the previous verses. We didn’t have time to dwell on it last week, but if you went home and read Numbers 21 and read the bit about the snakes on the stick, you will know this. It is a storey all about life and death.

And so the people of Israel were under God’s judgement and they were therefore affected by a plague of poisonous snakes. But they were given a way out and Moses fashioned a bronze snake and he put it on a pole so that anybody who looked at that snake didn’t have to die but could live. And that’s the point of the comparison with Jesus. He has been lifted up, the Son on a stick, the Son of God on a pole, so that people who would otherwise perish might look to him and live. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

And the crucial difference is that phrase eternal life. It’s actually a very significant moment in John’s Gospel. This book, the Book of John, is a book that intention is to give whoever reads it life. If you read to the end, you’ll see that life is a very important theme, but eternal life hasn’t been mentioned until John chapter 3 and verse 15. And the adjective matters because Jesus has not come into the world to save us from venomous snakes— that won’t surprise you— or to reverse a scary diagnosis, or to help us to live our best life now.

No, Jesus has come so that those who might otherwise perish could have eternal life. In other words, Real life, life in fellowship with the God who made us, and unbroken life, and not for this fleeting moment under the sun, 10 or 20 or 50 years, but something that starts now and lasts forever. And new life, not this sorrowing life, but life that is full of the joy and the peace of a whole new world. And Jesus says, listen, if you want to understand the kind of love that I’m telling you about, if you want to understand why all the box-breaking, temple-clearing, rebirth radicalism is actually the work of a loving God, you need to understand that God loved the world in this way. He gave his one and only Son, and he did it so those who were otherwise doomed to perish might have real, unbroken, new, eternal life in the kingdom of God.

God’s love is a life-giving love.

And again, when you stop to think about it, it’s so obvious, isn’t it? Because the problem with affirmation is it doesn’t actually change anything. A ward full of cancer patients does not need a doctor to come in and tell them in her most soothing voice that they’re just perfect. If that’s all the medicine that they get, they will die. They don’t need affirmation.

They need treatment. They need to be given something that actually changes them, even if it hurts. Of course, it is cruel to withhold affirmation from people who deserve it. It’s cruel for bosses to withhold affirmation from their faithful employees. It’s cruel for parents to withhold encouragement from their children.

But it’s also a kind of cruelty to see people labouring under burdens that they cannot lift, to see people destroying themselves through addictions that they cannot break, to see people killing themselves in their slavery to sin and do nothing about it and tell them that you love them and let them die. That’s cruel.

It might feel kind to say, look, we welcome you whoever you are, you’re perfect the way you are. But if all you’re doing is affirming people in death, there’s nothing kind about it. But God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him might not perish but have eternal life.

The problem with affirmation is that it doesn’t actually change anything. And that’s fine if things are basically okay. But when Jesus comes into the world and when Jesus breaks into our lives, he doesn’t arrive to discover a scene where everything is basically okay. He arrives amongst the dead and the dying, the enslaved and the ignorant. He arrives as the light in the darkness.

And that might feel confronting. It’s also just true, isn’t it? Of course we’re perishing. I just look around us in this building right now. I look at the walls.

We’re in a mausoleum. We’re surrounded by plaques to remind us of all the people who have died, who’ve sat here before us. And we’re no different from them. Of course we’re perishing. And if God just affirms us where we are, well, he’s just patting us on the head as we march merrily into the grave.

And it might be more comfortable It’s not love. But God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him might not perish but have eternal life. Whoever, anyone at all, come to the Lord Jesus and listen to him and trust in him, and you can live Do you know, even this morning, even this morning, that could be you. Jesus isn’t here to wreck your life or to make it miserable. He’s here to save us.

And even this morning, we can turn to him and find life.

It’s a life-giving love. And you know what, I do think this is a great help with Nicodemus’s question. And so it’s a help to those of us who are here this morning who have found the Jesus that we have encountered over the last few weeks a bit much. And perhaps even if you’ve grown up in a Christian home, you’re not sure. Whilst Jesus was only laying claim to a compartment of your life, well, we could see the appeal.

But like Nicodemus, all the confrontation’s a bit too much. We don’t want our lives turned upside down. We don’t want to be born again. And here’s what we need to know: all of the disruption, all the chaos, it’s not the sign that Jesus is hard or that God is cruel or that the gospel is unpalatable. It’s the sign that God loves us enough to give us the thing that we actually need.

In fact, it’s just the shockwave of the resurrection of the dead. And if we actually think about this, we want this. We want this.

I suppose it might be that we’re actively hostile to Jesus, And I guess there will be people for whom the claims of the Lord Jesus Christ are much too bold, and we would rather have the life that we’re living, or the relationships and the patterns that we’re enmeshed in, than the Lord Jesus Christ. If he won’t affirm us, well, frankly, to hell with him. And again, Jesus is saying to us this morning, I’m not backing away from the confrontation. I didn’t just come for my friends or for my fan base. God loved the world in this way.

The world, with all of its fixed opposition to God and its hatred of God’s ways. God loved the world by giving his one and only Son. So that even those enmeshed in the world might not perish but have eternal life. It’s not affirmation. But he didn’t do it for hatred.

He did it for love. He did it for you. Don’t you want this?

And I think it also helps those of us who are just tired, who wish Jesus would make our lives a little easier. And be a bit more affirming. And we’re tired of being the bad guys, and we hate having to answer questions from people who charge us with being judgmental and bigoted. And we’re tired of telling people that they need to turn around and watching them pay the cost. And we want to be able to wave the flag and to tell everyone that we love them just the way they are.

We want to be the nice guy. Who doesn’t want to be the nice guy? And that’s not new. Christians have always found it difficult to be the bad guys.

But Jesus Christ did not come into the world to be nice. He didn’t come into the world to be nice. He came to raise the dead. He came to love the world. And thank God that he did.

And thank God that he loved me. Let’s pray.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. Father, we praise you so much that as we come to the Lord Jesus, we meet the embassy of the God of love. And we praise you that your love is not content to just pat us on the back and tell us that we’re fine as we are. We thank you that you have given us what we actually need, your crucified and risen Son. We thank you that you have given life to those, all of us, who were perishing.

And we pray that you would help us to see your love for what it is, and to see your Son for who he is and to turn to him and to have life in his name. And we ask it in the name of the Lord Jesus. Amen.