Advent Episode 20: The Life-Giving Love of God

As we extinguish the Advent candles, we linger in the warm glow of our most cherished theme: love. Aided by the profound words from 1 John 4:7-9, we unwrap the Christmas narrative and its portrayal of God's ultimate act of love. This isn't just another holiday conversation; it's an invitation to witness love as the vigorous verb it's meant to be, challenging the conditional love commonly peddled by the world.

Transcript

The Life-Giving Love of Christmas

Speaker 1 0:04

Hello and Merry Christmas from Real Life Community Church . Welcome to the Real Life Friends podcast . I'm here with my dad and our church's pastor , Pastor Chris .

Speaker 2 0:14

And who are you and what's your name , my name's ? Addy , oh nice to meet you , Addy . Thanks for hijacking our podcast . Yeah , way to go . So we're down to only three episodes .

Speaker 1 0:24

Yes , and we only have one more theme left to do . We have done peace , hope and joy , and now we're on to love . Yes , and we just finished with our Wednesday night fellowship . Instead of having our usual Wednesday night service , slash hybrid Bible study . We do a variety of things in there , but this time we just brought out the food and I tell you what I saw one of my favorite things over there . What was that ? I love chocolate cake , I thought you were going to say meatballs .

Speaker 1 0:52

Well , you just look like a meatball guy , that's right , you just look like oh , I'm glad you said guy , at the end I'm like what I look like a meatball . That's fair . That's fair play actually .

Speaker 2 1:02

Hey , by the way , tonight was a case study because I always make the claim that you know , for a Wednesday night service or prayer meeting we have very few people , which is normally the case . But I said , if we serve food you know we did do about double tonight .

Speaker 1 1:16

as far as the number of adults , I think we had over two dozen , which was wonderful .

Speaker 2 1:19

It was . And speaking of love , you could really sense in all seriousness the love in that place that our people have one for another .

Speaker 1 1:27

Indeed , but my love for chocolate cake is where we were . Quite frankly , now you jumped the gun on me . You've actually kind of skipped ahead , because when I am using that term love or how much I love chocolate cake , even German chocolate cake , which is my favorite texture I absolutely love it .

Speaker 2 1:46

We have really trivialized the word love , haven't we in the English language ?

Speaker 1 1:49

We've at the very least it would be fair to say we've given it a lot of different definitions or we use it a whole lot of different ways .

Speaker 2 1:57

Yeah , so we you know , I say I love my wife , I love my dog . Most of the time I love my children , I I love Chick-fil-A , and obviously there's different , different degrees of love .

Speaker 1 2:08

That's one of the greatest loves that can be yeah . Yeah , that's the apex Almost .

Speaker 2 2:12

That's right . So you know . It's interesting , though when we think of love , we normally think of emotion , right . Right , it's something that we feel and , biblically speaking , you know , certainly we are to feel affections and emotions towards God and one another , but often , most often , in the Bible , love is actually used as a verb . It is very , very action-oriented . For me to love my neighbor , for instance , is not just to feel good feelings about them , but it is just to serve them in any way possible , to go out of my way , to be kind and to actually do tangible things for them .

Speaker 1 2:48

Yes , I think one of the greatest manifestations of love and the way we can describe that , a couple of words I made here my notes from when we talked before we started was were sacrificial and demonstrable .

Speaker 2 2:59

Yeah , that's really good , yeah , that's rich . And you know , as we think about the Christmas story , there is no greater manifestation of love than God sending His Son into this world , jesus coming and taking on flesh , and then the apex of that love is seen through what Jesus accomplished at Calvary .

Speaker 1 3:19

Yeah , the ultimate sacrifice demonstrated .

Speaker 2 3:21

Yeah , so there's a great text in 1 John that actually ties , you know , the theme of love into the Christmas story . So we're going to begin in verse 7 .

Speaker 1 3:30

Okay , and this is from 1 John 4 . Beloved , let us love one another , for love is from God , and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God . One 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 .

Speaker 2 3:53

God's love was beautifully demonstrated for us in the Christmas story . Let's just focus on verse 9 , meditate on it for a moment . In this , the love of God was made manifest among us , that God sent his only Son into the world that we might live through him . So we see here that God's motive for sending his Son into the world was love Unbelievable . God loves us not because of what we've done , but because of who he is . God is love , and so we're reminded at Christmas that God loves us immensely and he loves us unconditionally . And in this text we see three qualities of this love , and we're going to focus on the first one today .

Speaker 1 4:37

Yep , that's absolutely right , and we're going to talk about the life-giving aspect of love .

Speaker 2 4:42

That's right .

Speaker 1 4:43

So if you would read verse 9 again , with the emphasis on that very last part of the verse , 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 .

Speaker 2 4:59

Yes , we've all sinned . We've talked about this throughout the podcast . And Romans 6.23 says for the wages of sin is death , but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus , our Lord . So we are a broken people , apart from Christ , destined to perish . But God , in his great love , he offers us eternal life .

Speaker 2 5:23

And you know other religions . They all have some prophet or some guru who tells you what you have to do to have eternal life , or nirvana or what have you . But the burden is all on you . You know it's like well , follow this set of rules , do X , y , z , abc , 1 , 2 , 3 , and then perhaps , if you're good enough , moral enough , you know , if you do enough good works , then perhaps you'll get what you're looking for . But John 14.6 , jesus says I am the way , the truth and the life . No one comes to the Father except through me . So isn't it great that God did not send Abraham ? He didn't send a Moses , a new and better Abraham , a new and better Abraham , a new and better Moses . But he didn't send us . He didn't send us just a prophet , he sent us himself . He came . Yes , god the Son came and took on flesh to do for us what we could not do for ourselves .

Speaker 2 6:19

So the purest manifestation of love that could ever be through Christ , because Christ came , because he came with a mission to save his people from their sins . Through Christ we can live and I love . We talk much here about the kingdom of God , and when we put our faith in Jesus Christ we move from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light . We move from , you could say , a kingdom of death into a kingdom of life . And all of that because Jesus came and he has brought us near to God and God's love is no longer a concept to us , but through Christ that love was made manifest .

Speaker 1 7:06

And so we're always looking for ways to tie these things into practical things that we're all doing , going through seeing throughout Christmas , and we struggled a little bit for how we wanted to divide these up and do it , and it occurs to me I know a great way to end this one , so do tell .

Moving From Darkness to Light

Speaker 1 7:24

Well , when we were talking about what are some of our favorite Christmas traditions , when we were having our fellowship time early with everyone , bud , one of our congregants said that Christmas isn't complete , particularly for his wife , until she is driven out and going to see the lights . So when you're going out until you get to the lights , really you're in comparative darkness , especially right before you get there . So something you can think about , because we're all going to go driving around looking at Christmas lights of varying kinds this is something that you can keep in mind , that you are moving from a darkness into a light , and so when you see that , think about yourself having moved from darkness into light because of your belief in Jesus Christ and your acceptance of his manifestation of this pure and perfect love .

Speaker 2 8:13

Well done . We're so grateful for the love of God that has come through Christ . It's been made manifest to us and that's something we need to relish every day . Thanks for listening . Join us again tomorrow .