How Much God Loves You! by Brett Hickey, sermon #1067 2 of 5
How Much God Loves You!
When I decided I wanted to preach on the topic “Oh, how much God loves you,” I started reading some classic sermons on this and similar topics from the 1800’s. It intrigued me to read Charles Spurgeon’s introduction to his sermon titled, “Immeasurable Love.” Spurgeon writes,
“I was greatly surprised the other day, in looking over the list of texts from which I have preached, to find that I have no record of ever having spoken from this verse. This is all the more singular [or peculiar – BH] because … It has been my one and only business to set forth the love of God to men in Christ Jesus.” The text to which he referred was John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” One of the takeaways for me is how easy it is to take the fundamentals of the faith for granted. Even the most obvious of Bible themes, though I feel as if the truth of that subject is emblazoned on my heart and mind does not mean that I have devoted ample time to the topic in my preaching. More than that, the grand themes of Scripture are those that I need to be addressing again and again for I can never grow weary of them and I can never plumb their depths. In addition, just because I have a firm grasp on the subject does not at all mean that my audience will know it adequately or feel completely its significance for their own life.
How true it is that we cannot fathom the depths of God’s love, but the more we read of it and contemplate it, the more fully we can comprehend and appreciate it. The late Karl Barth is recognized by some in Christendom as the greatest Protestant theologian of the twentieth century. The Roman Catholic pontiff, Pius XII, called Barth the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas who lived in the thirteenth century. Considering such weighty accolades, when a student asked Barth to summarize his life’s work in theology at a 1962 lecture in Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago, the audience, no doubt, expected some brilliant, seldom if ever expressed and perhaps even over-their-head pronouncement. Barth must have stunned the crowd, when instead he responded, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” Let that sink in. There is quite a lesson here, I believe. If ever we get so weighted down with books about the Bible and so bogged down with technical examinations of fine details in Hebrew and Greek that we lose sight of this great fact, we, like Ephesus, according to Revelation 2, will have lost our way. Oh, How Much God Loves You, after our song…
The love of God is so overwhelming. The default setting for this topic in my mind is set on the Frederich Lehman song written in 1917. The first two stanzas are Lehman's and they are very good, but the third verse, in my opinion, is one of the greatest verses ever put to music. The third he added is based on lines "found written by a demented man on the wall of his narrow room in the asylum where he died." And where did mentally ill man who had amazing moments of clarity acquire those words? They are a translation of an Aramaic poem, "Haddamut", written by Jewish Rabbi Meir of Worms, Germany, nearly a thousand years ago. The lyrics read as follows:
The love of God is greater far Than tongue or pen can ever tell;
It goes beyond the highest star, And reaches to the lowest hell;
The guilty pair, bowed down with care, God gave His Son to win;
His erring child He reconciled, And pardoned from his sin.
When hoary time shall pass away, And earthly thrones and kingdoms fall,
When men who here refuse to pray, On rocks and hills and mountains call,
God’s love so sure, shall still endure, All measureless and strong;
Redeeming grace to Adam’s race— The saints’ and angels’ song.
Could we with ink the ocean fill, And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill, And every man a scribe by trade;
To write the love of God above Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole, Though stretched from sky to sky.
Refrain:
Oh, love of God, how rich and pure! How measureless and strong!
It shall forevermore endure— The saints’ and angels’ song.
We are flooded with evidence of God’s love, but just how much does God love me? How much does God love YOU? Obviously, we can only begin to explore this great topic and with so many directions one can go, where does one start? Genesis seems to be the best place. God loved us SO much that He created man in His own image. Genesis 1:27, “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” We may understand imperfectly the idea of being created in God’s own image since it is not spelled out in Scripture, but we can understand our uniqueness in general. After creation, God surveyed the scene and pronounced it good and very good: the sun, moon, and stars; the sea and the land; all the plants and animals of the earth; but only man is made in God’s image. What great love and what great honor is showered upon us!
The animal kingdom is captivating: their beauty, color, variety, order, intelligence, yet the animals are inferior when taken together in intellect, adaptability, creativity, and power. There is no comparison; man is the crown jewel of creation. How foolish of man to deny this truth! Richard Dawkins, a scientist with no intellectual limitations in accepting the truth is hampered instead by evolutionary blinders that lead him to make statements like the following: “We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes. Our common ancestor with the chimpanzees and gorillas is much more recent than their common ancestor with the Asian apes — the gibbons and orangutans. There is no natural category that includes chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans but excludes humans.” -- Gaps in the Mind. This planet is decisively NOT the planet of the apes!
Man is made in God’s image. Like God, we have the gift of precise communication; we have the gift of moral discernment – the ability to know right from wrong. We have, even in the heat of the moment, the ability to pause and reflect before we respond to another’s words or actions while the animal is bound by his instincts. Man can choose! What a great demonstration of God’s love!
Second, we see how much God loves us when we look at the complexity of the human body. God could have made a stick man, a gingerbread man, a Pillsbury man, or a Michelin man, but He DID NOT DO THAT! Instead, as David writes in Psalm 139:14, “I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Man has learned so much more about this than David knew about in his day.
Did you know that we were blessed with an amazing cooling system composed of 2-5 million sweat glands? http://www.austin360.com/news/lifestyles/recreation/cool-facts-about-sweat-2/nRbkH/ We have six hundred muscles and six billion muscle fibers. We have twenty-eight facial muscles that enable man to make the largest variety of facial expressions. Consider only a few more details from Frank J. Sherwin’s article titled, “The Human Body: Evidence for Intelligent Design.”
The lungs that look like a pair of pink sponges in our chest, for example, contain about 600 million tiny air sacs called alveoli and have 750 woven miles of blood vessels. If the lungs were flattened out, they would cover a surface area of about 1,000 square feet.
Our bone is stronger than granite. A block of bone half the size of a computer mouse can support ten tons—four times the capacity of concrete. [A cubic inch of bone can in principle bear a load of 19,000 lbs. or more — roughly the weight of five standard pickup trucks — making it about four times as strong as concrete. www.livescience.com/6040-brute-force-humans-punch.html ] In the “average” adult, the marrow of the flat bones (skull bones and ribs) also makes two-and-a-half million delicate red blood cells per second, as well as providing anchor attachments for our muscles.
Our heart, composed of unique cardiac muscle, beats at least 2.8 billion times during the average life span—resting between beats. This means it pumps 600,000 tons of blood in the average lifetime through 60,000 miles of blood vessels. If skeletal muscle from the arm or leg tried to do what the heart does day out and day in, it would be useless within minutes. The heart is a wonder of engineering.
We have two kidneys that contain 1.3 million amazing units of filtration called nephrons. With every beat of the heart, one-third of the blood goes to the renal arteries, and thus through this pair of reddish-brown, bean-shaped organs. This means they filter about eight quarts of blood every hour. The kidneys are designed, at the level of the nephron, to return glucose, ions, water, and other important substances to the blood while expelling two liters (three pints) of urine a day…
Frank J. Sherwin, “The Human Body: Evidence for Intelligent Design,” The Big Argument: Does God Exist? John Ashton and Michael Westacott, eds. United States: Master Books, 2006), 73.
All of this and we’ve only begun to scratch the surface. Consider the resilience of the human body. The many and varied abilities of the human body: balance, speed, agility, dexterity. We take for granted the ability to write. “Researchers from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden tested the depth of human tactile perception to get a feeling for how advanced human touch really is. They found that human fingers can identify textures whose ridges are mere nanometers in size….” Mark Rutland, Professor of Surface Chemistry explains, “This means that, if your finger was the size of the Earth, you could feel the difference between houses from cars," http://www.isciencetimes.com/articles/6073/20130917/sensitive-human-touch-new-research-suggests-fingers.htm By the way, how many muscles are in your fingers? None! “…Fingers move by the pull of forearm muscles on the tendons.” http://www.medicinenet.com/image-collection/finger_anatomy_picture/picture.htm And yet, surgeons have sufficient precision in movement to perform heart and brain surgery. Oh, how much God loves you and me!
We read in James 1:17, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above…” Talk about gifts: even with all the deficiencies resulting from the fall, God has blessed us with a breath-taking environment to inhabit; what a playground we have on planet earth! We see now the wisdom and blessing that was part and parcel of God’s command in Genesis 1:28, “Then God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it…’” How obvious now was the blunder of man to attempt to cram everyone into Babel. Consider even in our little country: the mountains and valleys, deserts and beaches, prairies and canyons, lakes and rivers, springs and waterfalls. Oh, how much God loves you and me!
What about the blessing of human fellowship? Despite the beauties of his environment and the company of the animals, Adam was empty until Eve was created. The greatest gift of all is the ability to give and receive love at such a high level. God gave us the marriage relationship: Genesis 2:24, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” Many of us are blessed with children. We experience the gift of friendship and within the church we can have true brotherhood.
Closely related and yet infinitely higher is the blessing of Divine fellowship. How is it that flawless Creator and flawed creation can have the intimacy of fellowship – even if this fellowship is conditional – 1 John 1:6-7? This reality is described eloquently in Deuteronomy 32:9-12, “For the LORD's portion is His people; Jacob is the place of His inheritance. ‘He found him in a desert land And in the wasteland, a howling wilderness; He encircled him, He instructed him, He kept him as the apple of His eye. As an eagle stirs up its nest, Hovers over its young, Spreading out its wings, taking them up, Carrying them on its wings, So the LORD alone led him, And there was no foreign god with him.’”
The exchange of communication we have with God is something even the highest of animals cannot experience. Through the Scriptures, God has relayed nearly 800,000 words to us in sixty-six books and invites the Christian to pray to Him “without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17). Oh, how God loves you and me!
Of course, central to our ability to have fellowship with God is the fact that God doesn’t destroy me when I commit that first sin. The law of sin and death is, “You sin, you die!” We read in Romans 6:23a, “For the wages of sin is death…” We’ve all been there; we ear death, and yet, God’s great forbearance allows us to live and correct our lives again and again. Isaiah 55:7, “Let the wicked forsake his way, And the unrighteous man his thoughts; Let him return to the LORD, And He will have mercy on him; And to our God, For He will abundantly pardon.” What immeasurable love!
But how can a holy and righteous God have fellowship with sinful man? Jesus explains in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” When Jesus says God gave His Son, He means sacrifice. He gave the best of heaven, He gave His only begotten Son! How different than the pagan religions in Bible times. Pagans sacrifice their OWN children to their false gods while the Almighty God offers His only Son.
God so desires to restore fellowship with sinful me and sinful you -- Romans 6:23, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” – that God allows the Word from eternity to be stripped of His impenetrable attributes to take on the deficiencies of human flesh that resulted from Adam’s sin. Philippians 2:6-8, “…Jesus … being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.” Truly, as the apostle writes in 1 John 4:19, “We love Him because He first loved us.”