Now returning to John chapter
16. The line of scripture that I want
to focus on this morning is found in verse 27. The Lord says to his disciples, the
Father himself loves you. Now, we probably don't understand
how powerful those words were to the disciples. because it'd be difficult for
us to put ourselves in the same frame of mind that they were
in because of the religious upbringing they had. And then maybe you
will be able to. Remember that these men had been
brought up under the law, the law which laid out That is
the law of the old covenant, the law of Mount Sinai, which
included the Ten Commandments and all the various ceremonial
laws and civil laws and things like that. They've been brought
up under that law. And contrary to what most people
think about that law, that law has never worked righteousness
in anybody. Rather, it is written, by the
law comes the knowledge of sin. Not just that we know what sin
is. We already knew that. The law
is written on everyone's heart, the scripture says. Everybody
knows it's wrong to kill somebody else. Everybody knows it's wrong
to steal, it's wrong to lie. They know all of that. What does
it mean when he said to know sin? To know sin is to have guilt so pressed upon
you that you feel the weight of sin and live under a sense
of dread of the rightful condemnation that will fall on you because
of your sin. I remember illustrating what
it is to know sin in this way. Imagine some woman, she bakes
a bunch of chocolate chip cookies. I'm picking out my favorite kind
of cookie. And I tell you, there is hardly anything in the world
better than a fresh-baked chocolate chip cookie. But she bakes a
bunch of them and then she puts them, you know, well, gives one
to her son, you know, her little boy, and then she puts the rest
of them in a cookie jar. And she says, now, don't you
get into the cookie jar. You've already had one, so don't
get in the cookie jar to get any more. And she walks out of
the room. Well, you know how well that
law works. The very fact she said, don't
get any more out of the cookie jar made him want one out of
the cookie jar even more. And so he looks around, he can't
see mom. And he scoots a kitchen table
over to the cabinet so he can reach up to the cookie jar and
he takes off the lid. And he reaches in there and gets
a cookie and takes a bite. Now, does he know sin? He knows
that what he's doing is a sin because he knows what mama said. But just as he's taking a bite
out, he hears footsteps and he turns around and there's mom. And there he is, eyes locked
with mom. with a chocolate chip cookie
out of the cookie jar stuffed in his mouth. Right then he knows
sin. All of the evil of it, as much
as a little child could perceive, but I mean, you know, all that
it means to be a sinner. He understands that he has not
just sinned against a rule by taking a cookie, he sinned against
his mom. and he has hurt her by what he
has done. And he fears what shall come
upon him because of what he's done. Now that's what it is to
know sin. And when a man tries to approach
God by the law, tries to find favor with God by the works of
the law, all he's gonna do is discover that he is a sinner,
and that his sin does not just consist of breaking some rules
that God gave once upon a time, but that he has sinned against
God, that his sin is an offense to a holy and righteous God,
and that God will rightly bring upon him Judgment, eternal, everlasting,
unimaginable judgment because of his sin. That's what it is
to know sin. And these men had been raised
up under the law. So they had at least some sense
of their guilt before God. And when you have a sense of your
sin, and see it not only as an infraction of a set of regulations,
but you see it as a high-handed act of rebellion against the
God who made you. You would be utterly amazed if
you were told with authority, God himself loves you. Why? It is written, Jacob have I loved,
Esau have I hated. God said that. Now the general
message of the world today is God loves everybody. That's not
true. He said it clearly. Jacob have
I loved, Esau have I hated. And you say that to a lot of
people that go, well, I just can't see how God could hate
someone. I can't see how he could love any of us. That's what I
can't, that's what boggles my mind. I know perfectly well why
God hated Esau. What I can't understand is why
he loved Jacob and why he loved me. You know, that's, to me, that's
a telltale sign whether or not a person understands and believes
grace. If they are bowled over by the
fact that nowhere in the scriptures does it say God loves every individual
in the world, and that he clearly expresses his hatred towards
at least one, and actually he said those that work wickedness,
he said, my soul hateth. That's pretty strong language
on the part of God. But if someone is taken back
By the fact that God hates someone, I'm thinking they don't understand
who God is and they don't understand who they themselves are. They
haven't seen how wicked they are in the light of God. Paul
in declaring the universal sinfulness of man. He says, there is no
difference, meaning there is no difference between the Jew
and the Gentile. That's the last words in Romans 3, 22. For there
is no difference for all sinned and fall short of the glory of
God. Now the all sinned part is not
about anything that you and I have done. It's about what Adam did. And he clarifies that in Romans
chapter five. by one man's sin, or one man's
transgression, sin entered the world, and death by sin, for
that all sinned. And what the Bible teaches us
is that Adam stood as our representative, therefore when he sinned, we
sinned. And that is true, whether you're
a Jew or a Gentile, bond or free, whether you're a man or a woman,
whatever, all of us are descendants of Adam, and therefore we come
under The guilt of Adam's sin. Therefore, Paul says, there's
no difference because all sin. Back there in the garden, all
of us sinned. So nobody can claim innocence before God because
before one of us drew breath, we were already sinners because
of what Adam did. But Paul doesn't leave it there,
he goes on to say, and instead of putting it, actually it's
a Greek aorist tense, but, and that means something, generally
speaking, means something in the past that happened at a specific
point in time. But we all sinned at that specific
point in time. But then he changes to the present
and he says, and fall short of the glory of God. Now that's
what we do. Now notice there, he does not say we all fall short
of the glory of the law. The law was glorious when it
was given. I mean, God revealed something of his glory there
on Mount Sinai, so much that Moses said, I exceedingly quake,
I'm terrified. And it came with displays of
the glory of God, you know, with the sound of a trumpet and with
dark clouds and thunder and lightning and all that, all that God can
do in natural ways to demonstrate something of his glory. But it didn't say that we have
fallen short of the glory of the law. He didn't say for all
sin and fall short of the best they can do. He said, all sin and fall short
of God's glory. In other words, Paul is saying
to us, the standard with God is not that you do the best you
can, it's that you do the best God can. And that's why Paul says, again,
he's proving there's no difference between the Jew and the Gentile.
Because the Jew would look at what they thought was their superior
morality, which for the most part, for most of them, was just
a morality on the outside. The Lord said of the Jewish leaders
of that day, he said, you're like whited sepulchers. He says,
you're pretty on the outside, but you're full of dead men's
bones. And that's moral man's nature. On the outside, he looks
good. And believe me, I'm not saying
here, everybody may as well just give in to what's on the inside,
because it won't do you any good. No, it'll do some good here.
I'm glad that people look better than they really are. I'm glad
people act better than their nature really is. But God doesn't
look on the outward appearance. He looks on the heart. But the
standard of our conduct is not just ten commandments written
in stone. The standard of our conduct is
God himself. He said, Be holy, for I am holy. Now, I don't care how morally
you've lived your life. You can't match that. You can't
be that. You can't even get close. My
dad used to say, you haven't begun to start to commence. to meet that standard of righteousness. So, while we look at people,
while our eyes are looking only on man and whatever glory man
may achieve on his own, we see distinctions among people and
we say, This man is better than that man. This woman is a better
woman than that woman. We say that, but as soon as we
see God in all His glory, come to understand something of what
the scriptures mean when it says God is righteous and holy. If we see that all at once, these
differences we see among us are so minuscule as to be utterly
insignificant. Therefore, if by the Spirit of
God we have been taught something of the glory of God and the foulness
of our nature, it will shock us to discover that God loves
us. These men had been traveling
with the Lord Jesus and they loved him. They hung on his words. He was, as much as could be said,
he was everything to them. Some of them had left profitable
businesses. Some had left family. All of
them had left something and at this point would have been willing
to leave anything and everything to be with him. They loved him
and they had some sense that he loved them. But when they would think about
God, absolutely considered, that's
the way Brother Mahan used to put it, God as he was before
he created the heavens and the earth and as he still is, God
outside of time and space, however you want to describe God, they
could not imagine that God, could ever love someone like them. Our Lord will, within a few hours,
lay down his life for the sheep. He will certainly demonstrate
his love for them. It says in chapter 13, having
loved his own which were in the world, he showed them the full
extent of his love. And he did demonstrate his love
as he hung on a cross as their substitute, bearing in himself
the guilt and the punishment of all their sin. And they had seen how he had
been patient with them. how tenderly he had dealt with
them, they had some sense that he loved them. But as he's about
to depart this world, he said here, I came from the father
and entered the world. Now I'm leaving the world and
going back to the father. And that would distress them.
He told them other times that he was leaving. He told them
he was going to be killed. Peter said, no, that's not going
to happen to you. Why? Well, what would you think
if the dearest on earth to you said, I'm leaving. I'm leaving
and you won't see me again in this life. And that's what he's been telling
them in these chapters. Would that leave them cut off
from love? A fellow that was a famous youth
worker, I suppose he's somewhere around
80 years old now, I read a book by him about raising
kids, but he used to have these Back when you could get away
with this, he would go to high schools and have these assemblies
and talk to the youth. And he said he'd always start
his presentation with the following words, and
it would always bring complete silence to the auditorium. He
says, every one of you is terrified that you will not be able to
love or be loved. And that would unhorse them.
Why? Love is what everyone wants.
And while the Beatles didn't understand what they were talking
about, they were right when they said love is all you need. Really. Love, it is the highest of virtues. Love is the chiefest of blessings. And why can we say this? Because
it is the character of God, so much so that John said in his
epistle, God is love. And without love, it doesn't
matter what else you have. It's worthless. In another place,
Paul said, this is 1 Corinthians 13, he said, Now, these three
things remain, faith, hope, and love. Now, who is going to deny
the tremendous value of faith? Well, nobody that has faith is
going to deny the tremendous value of it. Who's going to deny
the tremendous value of hope? We have a hope the world knows
nothing about and can't know apart from a work of grace. Our hope is not in this world.
Our hope is what comes from out of this world. What we hope for
and the one we hope in are all things not pertaining to this
life. We have a hope of righteousness. We don't have it yet. We have
a righteousness charged to our account, but we haven't been
made righteous yet. But boy, we have a hope. You know, most people, their
hope is heaven. They've got a hope of heaven. If heaven's all you're
hoping for, and your idea of heaven is just an everlasting
vacation, you've missed what heaven's about. Heaven's not
about a particular place. Heaven's not about a destination,
it's about a destiny. It's not about where we shall
be, but what we shall be. In the adult Bible class, we
looked at 1 John chapter 3, and it said that when Christ is made
manifest, when he comes back in the full blaze of his essential
glory, we shall be like him. for we shall see Him as He is." That's our destiny, to be like
the Lord Jesus Christ. And that's what heaven is. You
know what hell is? Hell is to just keep on being
us, as we are, dead in trespasses and sins. It's to continue being us, and
yet it's worse because whatever what we might call common grace
that God gives to man to enable them to live a life, will be
taken away. And all that will remain is their
utter depravity. And it will gnaw at their conscience
like the worm that never dies. It will burn with a sense of
condemnation. like the fire at the garbage
dump in those days never went out. There's always new garbage
to burn. I can't think of anything worse,
really, than if I had to go on being this forever. My hope is
someday I'm going to be something else. comes to us by the love of God. And so, as the Lord Jesus is
about to go to the Father, and they would no longer see Him,
He says to them, in that day, you will ask in My name. What
does He mean by this? You will pray for yourselves.
He'd been praying for them before. You don't find anywhere in the
scriptures that I can think of any of the gospel accounts like
that the Lord fed 5,000 before they ate. He said, Peter, would
you lead us in a word of thanks? He didn't close one of his teaching
sessions and say, Andrew, if you'd dismiss us with a word
of prayer. We don't find that anywhere. All the prayer, praying
we see or read about, he's doing it. He said, I'm not saying that
I will ask the Father on your behalf. What's he saying there? Now, he's not saying he won't
intercede for us anymore. What he's saying is we, his people,
will have access to the Father and we'll be received by him.
We can pray on our own behalf. Why? The Father himself loves
you. See, Jesus Christ did not come
into the world to make the Father love us. He came into the world
because the Father loved his people with an everlasting love. And he came that that love might
be demonstrated to them in his willingness to sacrifice his
own son that he might be just and justify the one who believes
in Jesus. God commended his love toward
us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. And so the Lord says to these
disciples, The father himself loves you. I'm sure they were
convinced the father loved Jesus. In fact, they heard the father
say that on two occasions at his baptism and then on the Mount
of Transfiguration. And to my knowledge, this is
the only time that the father ever spoke audibly. This is my
son whom I love. hear him, listen to him. And
so they knew that the father loved Jesus. What they didn't
know, or at least were ambivalent about, was whether the father
loved them. And so he says, the father himself
loves you. Now, as I was preparing for this,
I was kind of, actually that little phrase, the father himself
loves you, came to my mind and I was already working up a sermon
for it and then I look in here, the father himself loves you
because you have loved me and have believed that I came from
God. And I thought, oh man, how am I going to get that all straightened
out? When I say all straightened out, I mean how am I going to
fit that into our theology which says there is no cause for God's
love toward us. In fact, if you look over at
1 John 4. Verse 19. 1 John 4, verse 19. We love because He first loved
us. Now, some of the old manuscripts
say, we love Him because He first loved us. Some of them don't
have the word Him in there. But it doesn't make any difference
to the point I'm making. Because whether, as our translation
here, the New International that I'm preaching from here, When
it talks about we love because He first loved us, that certainly
must include whatever love we have for God. The truth is, the only reason
we genuinely love anyone, as brothers and sisters in Christ,
is because He first loved us. But certainly, John makes it
crystal clear, the only reason we love God is because He first
loved us. Now, those that would say God
loves everyone would not be able to say that
we love God because He first loved us. Because if He loved everybody
and the love of God was sufficient cause to get a return of love,
then everybody would love him. Now, we love people and sometimes
get no love in return. And I feel sorry for parents,
and I've known a few who deeply loved their children, but it seems as maybe one of
their children just never returned that love. That's tough to take. Our love can fail to get a return
of love. And who of us in the years, in
our teenage years, in our young adult years, did not at least
think we were in love with someone? And that love didn't get returned.
But God never loves without getting a return of love. We love because he loved us. And therefore everyone God loves
will love him back. So what does it mean here? That
seemed to conflict with what the Lord Jesus is saying back
here in John chapter 16, verse 27. Now I'm sure there's no conflict. because it all came from God,
and there is no conflict in God's word. But I can also say I'm
pretty sure there's no conflict here, because this scripture
in John 16, 27 was written by the same guy that wrote 1 John
4, verse 19. The Father himself loves you
because you have loved me and have believed that I came from
God. Does this mean that God's love for us was caused because
we loved him? or you loved Christ and believed
him? No, the meaning is this. Let's go back to that little
boy got a cookie out of cookie jar. Mom walks
in. You disobeyed me because you
got a cookie in your mouth. Now he disobeyed her before that
cookie ever went in his mouth. Cookie in his mouth was proof
of the disobedience. Make it a little bit more neutral. You're going somewhere, because
I can see your suitcases packed. Well, me seeing his suitcases
packed did not cause him to go somewhere. What I'm saying is,
if I wanted to be real strict in my grammar, I can see that
you're going somewhere because your bags are packed." Now, let's
see that that's even what John means as he's quoting the Lord
there. Because here, back in 1 John
4, verse 7, Dear friends, let us
love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves
has been born of God and knows God. So John might have put it this
way, you've been born of God because you love the brethren.
Now he wouldn't have meant by that that we were born again
by God as a result of us loving the brethren. He's simply saying
you're born of God and here's how I know, you love the brethren. Because nobody except someone
born of God actually loves the brethren. In verse eight, whoever
does not love does not know God because God is love. This is
how God showed his love among us. He sent his one and only
son into the world that we might live through him. This is love,
not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent his son
as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God
so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God, but
if we love one another, God lives in us and His love is made perfect
in us. He's using the same kind of argument. God lives in you because you
love one another. That doesn't mean our loving
one another resulted in God loving us. God's love, it means our
loving one another was caused by God's love. So that's what
the Lord means here when he says, the Father himself loves you
because you have loved me and have believed that I came from
God. Now modern day evangelism has been going on at least as
far back as when I was a child. Modern day evangelism begins
with God loves you. Do you know you cannot find anywhere
in the scriptures that one of the apostles ever preached to
shall we say, a non-church audience, just a gathering of people and
told them God loved them. They never did. They would speak
to those who had professed faith and say God loves them. Why is that? We don't know who
God loves. Here's how we know who God loves. They love Him. They love the
Lord Jesus Christ. they believe him. Now I realize
there are some who God loves and they have not yet returned
that love, they have not yet come to love the Lord Jesus Christ,
they have not yet come to believe on him but they will. Saul of
Tarsus was loved by God though it For the first 30-some years
of his life, he absolutely despised God, hated the mention of the
name of Christ, and hated everybody that loved Christ. But God's
love was on him. How do we know? Because God stopped
him on the way to the road to Damascus, pulled him up short,
and said, that's as far as you're going in this direction, Saul. I've chosen you. You're mine. And when Paul was made to realize
what God had done for him through the Lord Jesus Christ, he started
to love God. He thought he loved God before,
but it was a God of his imagination. He began to love God, and he
loved the Lord Jesus Christ. So much so, he said, for his
sake, I've gladly suffered the loss of all things. I'd give
up everything that I may know him. Jesus Christ was his life. But God loved him even before
that was true of Paul, but because God loved him, it was certain
that that would become true of Paul. So I don't say to a group
of people, God loves all of you. I don't know. Those of you that say you love
God, that say you believe the Lord Jesus Christ, I'll take
your word for it and assume God loves you because you wouldn't
love God, you wouldn't love Christ, you wouldn't believe Him if God
didn't love you. But if someone's, if I'm going
out doing some kind of, as they call it, evangelistic work. And
I'm preaching to people I don't know. I don't ever say to them,
God loves you. The apostles never did. The gospel
was not a declaration of the universal love of God, it was
a declaration of the universal lordship of the Lord Jesus Christ.
It was a declaration of the absolute success of His death, that He
actually bore the sins of His people, actually put them away,
they're gone, they'll never be brought up again. That was the
gospel they declared. Peter wrapped up, summarized
the gospel he preached on the day of Pentecost, said, let it
be known to all the house of Israel, this same Jesus whom
you crucified, God has made to be Lord and Christ. That was his gospel. That was
the good news. Didn't sound like good news to
those that heard it. It sounded like sure and certain
condemnation, because they said, oh man, what are we gonna do?
What must we do? And then he told them the good
news. Repent and be baptized every
one of you for the remission of sins. You mean? There's a way out of
this mess that we've made. Yes, there is. And those who
believe that message, God's Spirit testified with their
spirit that they were the sons of God. And by that spirit, they
cried out, Abba, Father. And they learned that God loves
them. The Father loves you. And this love is an almighty, everlasting,
and invincible love. Now this idea that God loves
a person and would let that person go to hell, let me ask you something. Are you better than God? If you
loved your child and that child wandered out in the street and
there was a semi-truck bearing down on him, It's too close for
the truck to stop. That child's gonna get killed.
Would you stand on the side of the road and say, well, now,
I love you, sweetie, and I sure wish that you'd come over here
to the side of the road and out of the way of danger, but you
know, I'm not going to force your hand on this. Now, why don't
you come over here to Daddy? If you love that child, you'd
throw yourself in front of the truck. You would run out there, and
if necessary, grab that child and throw him to the side, knowing
full well the result would be you'd get smashed flat. And that's exactly what God did. In the person of his son, the
Lord Jesus Christ, God ran out in the middle of the highway,
and we were standing there with God's eternal wrath bearing down
on us, and he grabbed us and threw us to safety and got flattened. God's love always, always gets
its object. It never fails. Herein is love, not that we love
God, but that God loved us and gave his Son for us. Oh, what
a measure of the love of God. I love you all. I can say that.
I love you all. But I'll be honest with you,
I wouldn't give one of my children for you. Not for any one of you
or the whole lot of you. And I wouldn't expect you to
do the same for me. I wouldn't even ask you to. But
that's exactly what God the Father did. He gave his only begotten
son The old hymn writer wrote, if
we with ink the ocean filled, and were the sky 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. His love is not upon everybody,
but it is so great to everybody upon whom that love is bestowed
that it cannot be told out. That God loves us at all is simply
amazing, that God loves us on that level. The Father himself
loves you. I like it that, you know, He
didn't just say, the Father loves you. He used that way in which
we emphasize Him. The Father Himself. You know
I love you. I've declared my love for you.
And you've seen me love you. But I want you to notice, the
Father Himself that I've been telling you about, He loves you.
And He declares His love in this fashion. I have loved you with
an everlasting love. Therefore, have I drawn you with
cords of loving kindness. The scriptures say that no man
will come to the Son unless the Father draws him. And most people
think that that word, draw, there means to draw like just, y'all
come on, y'all please. I've even heard that. Almost
like, won't you do God a favor? come to his son, you know, I
think, come on, folks, you know, we can't do God any favors. We
need him to do us a favor, don't we? That word translated draw
in nearly all English language means to drag. It means to draw
like a tractor draws a plow. It means to draw, in fact, it's
used this word when people are dragged into court. God's love
will not let one of its objects perish, period. One of my children may get sick
and die, and my love won't be able to stop it. But there's
nothing that can stop God in his love. And he said, to this motley crew
of 11 remaining disciples, full of doubts, confused, distressed
because of the things he's telling them. He says, the Father himself
loves you. And here's the proof. You love
me. And you have believed that I
came from God. because you wouldn't love me
and you wouldn't believe I came from God unless God loved you
and taught you that truth in your heart. He asked the disciples,
who do men say that I am? And they gave some answers that
they'd heard other people giving about who Jesus was. And he says,
well, who do you say that I am? And Peter says, you are the Christ,
the Son of living God. And the Lord looked at Peter
and said, blessed are you, Simon, son of John, because flesh and
blood didn't reveal this to you. My Father, who is in heaven,
revealed this to you. Do you love God? And you know
whether or not you do. Even Peter, you remember how
the Lord asked him three times, Peter, do you love me? And even though he had betrayed
the Lord, not betrayed, well, denied him, he could not resist saying yes. And the third time he said, Peter,
do you love me? And it says Peter was grieved
because he asked him three times and probably because he realized,
yeah, he asked me three times because I denied him three times.
And he said, Lord, you know all things and you know I love you. Now, we don't always act like
we love him. But you know right now whether
or not you love the Lord Jesus Christ. And if you do, let me give you
some wonderful news. The father himself loves you.