“God’s Love Manifested”
I John 4:7-16
12/24/07 - Christmas Eve
Love... It’s what the world needs
now. It’s what tonight’s Scripture reading is all
about, as the word “love” appears no less than 16 times in
the text. It’s what the Christmas season is all about -
God’s love for us manifested. And that’s the thing
about love: It must be manifested. You can’t simply
say, “I love you” to someone and not show it.
Christmas provides us the perfect opportunity for showing our love
towards others at least once a year. There are many ways in which
we can manifest our love. We may give our loved ones gifts.
We may give to charities that help the homeless or the helpless.
We may perform a service for someone who is unable to do it
themselves. Or we may simply offer someone words of
encouragement, hope, comfort, or acceptance.
But since it is Christmas Eve the focus for this
evening is on God’s love for us. And here, too, God does
not simply say, “I love you.” He shows His love for
you. And just as there are many ways in which you can show your
love for one another, so there are many ways in which God shows His
love for you. He shows His love for you by sustaining your lives,
providing you with the food, clothing, and shelter you need, giving you
jobs, family, and friends, sending you rain, causing crops to grow, and
working through the vocations of others to supply all that you need for
your bodies and lives. In fact, all that we have we have as a
gift to us from God, who gives us these gifts not just once a year but
on a daily basis, all out of His undeserved loved for us, His fallen
creatures. And that’s the amazing thing about God’s
love - that He loves sinners, people who have rebelled against Him and
spurned His love, people who refuse to acknowledge that all that they
have has been given to them by God and who refuse to give Him their
thanks and love in return.
But the most amazing expression of God’s love
for us sinners comes in His sending His only-begotten Son, Jesus
Christ, into the world to give Himself as the sacrifice for our sins on
the cross, that we might have eternal life. You see, God shows
His loves for us, His creatures, by providing for our needs. He
does this, as just mentioned, by giving us things like food, clothing,
and shelter. But our greatest need as sinners is the need for
life. We may be physically alive right now, but God’s Word
says that the wages of sin is death. Because we all sin, we all
die. And sin brings not only physical death but eternal death as
well, eternal separation from God under His judgment and wrath.
But God loves us too much to want to send us there. And yet, our
sins must be dealt with and answered for. And so, He sent His Son
to save us, to live the perfect life of love that we sinners should
have lived and to die the death that we sinners deserve, so that
through faith in Him and His work for us, we might not die, but
live. As the most well-known verse of the Bible, John 3:16, says,
“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.” This verse tells us not only how much God loves us,
but how He loved us, how He manifested His love for us in sending His
only-begotten Son to ransom us from our sins with His blood shed at
Calvary. If you could determine how much a husband loved his wife
by how much he spent on her, you might conclude that he loved her more
if he gave her a diamond than if he gave her a gift card to
Safeway. In the same way, you can determine how much God loves
you by how He loved you in giving His Son into death for you. If
you ever want to know how much you are worth to God, ask yourself how
much Jesus is worth to Him. It was with His holy precious blood
and His innocent suffering and death that God purchased you for
Himself, that you might be His own, live under Him in His kingdom, and
serve Him in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and
blessedness. If you can put a price on Jesus’ blood, then
that’s how much you are worth to God. The fact is, because
God’s love towards His Son is infinite, so great is His love
towards you. Just one drop of the blood of His Son is priceless;
and that is how much you are worth to Him.
Of course, this love of God can be spurned.
It’s a gift, and gifts can be rejected. Like presents at
Christmas time, this gift, too, has your name on it; Jesus is for you,
He’s your Savior. But He is a gift for sinners, and if you
don’t see yourself as a sinner, then Jesus is not for you.
But the bigger a sinner you confess yourself to be, the bigger a Savior
you have. If you reject this gift because you believe you
don’t need it, you will not benefit from its blessings. You
will continue to cut yourself off from God’s love, and that is
hell; hell is where God’s love is absent. But how is His
love received? How does a child receive a Christmas
present? He’s simply given to. He doesn’t do
anything for the gift. If he did, then it would no longer be a
gift, but a wage. And once the child receives the gift he
doesn’t talk about what he did to get the gift; he doesn’t
say something like, “Look at me! I took the gift into my
hands, I accepted it, I opened it, I made it mine!” What
would the giver of the gift think of such a response? No, the
child doesn’t talk about anything he’s done to get the
gift. He talks about the gift itself and the giver of the
gift. The response is usually, “Wow! Thanks, mom and
dad!” and he shows all of his friends what he got.
The same goes for us as we receive God’s gift
of love to us. We are nothing but on the receiving end of this
gift to us. But so many people want to talk about what they did
to get this gift, either that they did something to deserve it, or that
they did something in the receiving of it. To talk about your
faith or your believing or your asking Jesus into your heart or
something like that, however, is not yet talking about the gift
itself. It’s when you talk about the gift - Jesus Christ,
crucified and risen for you, and the forgiveness of sins, life, and
salvation that you have in Him - that then faith is talking.
Faith doesn’t talk about itself but about the Gift, Jesus,
God’s love manifested to us. And then, the more we talk
about the Gift, the more we’ll give thanks to God, the giver of
this Gift, and the more we’ll want to show it off to others.
That’s what happens when God’s gift of
love in Christ has its way in our lives. It works love for God
and love for one another in our hearts. In fact, the only way you
can love God and others is after you have first been on the receiving
end of God’s love for you in Jesus. As His love for you is
poured into your hearts, it will spill out from you onto those around
you. This is what the Apostle John is talking about when he talks
about abiding in God’s love: being on the receiving end of
His love for you, as He delivers that love to you through His Word,
through Baptism, through the Lord’s Supper, and then giving that
love out to one another. The more God’s love is given to
you, the more you will show that love towards others, not simply in
words of love, but also in works of love.
And that is how we manifest God’s love, by
giving His love to others by confessing with our words that Jesus is
the Son of God sent to us by our loving heavenly Father to be our
Savior, and by loving others with our works the way God loves us in
Christ. Today, people have all different kinds of ideas about
what love is. It’s a feeling. It’s sexual
attraction. It’s lust. It’s being loving
towards those who are lovely and love us back. But the kind of
love that God manifests towards us in Jesus is a selfless,
self-sacrificing, serving love, a love which loved us in spite of the
fact that we didn’t love God back, in spite of the fact that we
were enemies of God at heart, dead in our trespasses and sins.
The Word of God says, “But God, being rich in mercy, because of
the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our
trespasses, made us alive together with Christ...”
It’s one thing to love those who love you; it’s quite
another to love those who are your enemies, and yet that’s what
God did for you in Christ. And that’s what He wants you to
do for one another. He wants you to love one another with the
same kind of selfless, self-sacrificing, serving love that Jesus showed
you, loving others in spite of the way they are, in spite of the fact
that they might not love you back. But again, the only way you
are going to be able to show this kind of love to others is if you are
first on the receiving end of that love for yourself in Jesus Christ.
That love was manifested to the world in the life,
death, and resurrection of Jesus. It was manifested at His birth,
when the angel announced to certain shepherds who were out in the field
keeping watch over their flocks by night, “Fear not, for behold,
I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is
Christ the Lord.” God’s love was then manifested as
Jesus perfectly obeyed and kept all of God’s commandments for us
in our place, because we sinners have broken God’s Law in our
thoughts, words, and deeds and cannot keep His commandments
ourselves. Jesus also manifested His love by performing many
signs and wonders, including healing people of their diseases,
forgiving them their sins, teaching them His Word, eating with them,
and raising them from the dead. And then He showed the full
extent of His love by giving His life for us on the cross, that we
might have life through faith in Him. Now, risen from the dead,
He manifests His love for us by sitting at the right hand of God the
Father almighty, where with His blood He speaks us righteous who trust
in Him. And He manifests His love here among us today through
Holy Baptism, through the words of Holy Absolution - the forgiveness of
your sins, through the proclamation of His Word, and through His Holy
Supper, where He feeds us on His body and blood, given and shed for us
for the forgiveness of our sins. And He will manifest His love
for us when He comes again on the Last Day to raise us who belong to
Him from the dead and to take us to live with Him forever in His
heavenly kingdom.
It’s Christmas time! Time to receive
gifts, the gifts of God through our Savior, Jesus Christ, God’s
Christmas gift to the world. This Gift is for you; it has your
name on it. And as you receive Him and the gifts He gives you,
you will be able to pass those gifts on to others. As you abide
in God’s love for you in Jesus, so God will abide in you, causing
His love to have its way in your life. May the love, then, that
flowed through the blood of Jesus which He shed on the cross for you
and with which you were sprinkled at your Baptism, flow from you out
towards one another, that His love might continue to be manifested to
the world. Merry Christmas! Amen.