It's good to be back in Marietta.
I love Russ and his family.
I love this church.
I'm so encouraged that I have the opportunity to walk with remarkable young leaders like Russ who are leading with their brokenness, leading with their thirst.
And I'm so thankful that's the way I had the privilege of being mentored and loved for 21 years by a spiritual father named Jack Miller, who, with his wife, his seminary professor, and then spiritual dad, lived out before me the radical implications of the only love that's better than life, the only love that will never let go of us.
The love that frees us to engage the deepest longings in our heart and to turn away from the illusions that what God alone can give us in His great and lavish love, that it could possibly be met anywhere else but in the gospel.
So I'm honored today to walk through this text with you.
I am uh I pride myself in being on time.
I'm not a legalist about many things, but I've been given 25 minutes.
I'm gonna try to shoot for 24.
And just so that we can enjoy communing at the table of grace this morning, I love the fact that a part of this church family's liturgy is the Lord's Supper.
Because it's so consistent with the book you're studying.
I love 1 John for so many reasons.
It was written by one of the disciples, John, who also wrote the Gospel of John and the book of Revelation.
And his was a very unique story, and the gospel really is all about story.
God's story, beginning in Genesis, unfolding all the way through through Revelation, with only one hero, Jesus, but many characters.
And we are those characters, and we engage real people who wrote the Bible who like us struggle, who doubt, who have difficulties in life, who are tempted, like we're tempted to think that Jesus isn't enough.
And so, 1 John was written by the Apostle John to a community that was coming out of performancism.
They were shaped by a world of Greek culture that weren't really sure about who Jesus actually was and what he actually accomplished.
So if you remember in some of Russ's earlier sermons, the way this beautiful letter begins, there's this tangible affirmation that Jesus was someone that John knew and touched, that the resurrection was real, that Jesus came into this world first and foremost, not to be a model for us to follow, but a substitute to trust.
He's done something for us we've never done for ourselves.
Jesus came as John wrote, and he loved us before we first loved him, and that love was centered in this good news of his obeying the law of God for us.
And dying for us upon the cross, exhausting a judgment we deserved, not by an angry God that's similar to some rage-filled personality you've known in your world, but a perfectly holy, loving God who would pay the supreme price to love us like we're reading in these words this morning.
Now, just to help me stay on task, to stay in my lanes as an ADD guy, I've got three phrases I'm going to give you very quickly that are going to just really help us through the few verses we're looking at in 1 John chapter 3.
So the three phrases are simply these: astonishing love, liberating relationship, and transforming hope.
That's really what's going on in the entire of 1 John, but in particular at these few verses we're looking at in chapter 3, astonishing love, every word's important, they're all participles, which mean we're in progressive movement going into these things, liberating relationship and transforming hope.
Well, notice how our text begins.
I love this, and uh very few English translations do justice to what's really going on in these opening words.
I'm reading from my Bible I've been carrying since 1978 in old NIV, and so it may look a little different from these words, but here's the way this starts.
How great is the love, how great is the love the Father's lavished upon us, that we should be called the children of God.
One of the good things about the translation on the screen is the fact that it's closer to the original.
Because actually in the Greek, this first phrase starts with these words.
Look, behold, it's a command.
Consider, allow your heart to linger, marinate, don't rush by this, ponder how great the love is the Father has lavished on us.
Isn't that an awesome word?
I love chocolate.
And uh I love lavish chocolate.
I love mounds of dark chocolate poured upon flowerless chocolate cake.
So I understand lavish.
I don't know what you attach lavish to.
Something, however, that's uh that really engages the emotion.
Uh this time last year, my wife and I, Darlene, we've had just had a little while back our 47th anniversary, and one of our most astonishing sights in the world that helps me connect with looking at the love of God as being lavish is our love for the country Switzerland.
And literally this week, a year ago, we were on the Lake of Briens outside of Interloch and in a little village called Iselwald.
And the first time we went there was in 1984.
I went there to teach a group of Christians for two weeks alongside that incredible Lake of Briennez just to study the book of Galatians and just how glorious the love of God is.
And I always wanted to go to Switzerland.
And uh I loved Heidi movies, and uh and then it was only Hershey bars, which isn't real chocolate, that's just brown wax.
And uh, but you know, when I finally made it to the real Switzerland, I remember getting off the train.
We trained, flew into Zurich and trained down to Interlock, and it was a day in September what the Germans referred to as a thirn, which means the atmosphere is so clear, you can see for five miles, you can hear sound just echoing.
And there was uh fall flowers around the Lake of Brienne, there was a light snow on top, and literally I was absolutely undone.
I did not want to move, I did want to dance, but I just wanted to drink it all in.
And you've got places like that, you've got moments, you've got people, you've got people and situations in your memory bank that are astonishing.
I hope you hear with me today.
Just central to this five-book chapter, chapter three, this kind of pause button that would say, do not miss this.
Slow down.
Consider how great the love is the Father has lavished upon us.
You need to know that this good news is not a second chance for you to make up for regrets from your past.
You need to know that this love is so lavish that none of us in this room are beyond the reach of God's grace or the need of God's grace.
Now you hear that from Russ all the time.
I pray you hear it through this Tar Hill redneck voice, perhaps in a different way today, emphasizing the gospel this church treasures.
Again, pondering.
We live life too fast, entirely too fast.
One time I took my wife and our two kids, who were much younger then, to visit our missionaries in Europe we were supporting, and we spent 30 days in four or five different countries in Europe, and um we had some missionaries we were supporting in France.
Girard and Sylvain Beauce, French, loved it, lived in Paris.
They took us to the Louvre, took us to the Musée d'Orsay.
Well, we went to the Louvre, and we only had one morning to take in that incredible museum and then run over to see a little Monet.
But this was a fascinating illustration.
If you go to the Louvre, one of the paintings everybody wants to see is the Mona Lisa, right?
You just assume you gotta make it to the Mona Lisa.
The average time people spend when they finally make it to the Mona Lisa is 17 seconds.
You're in such a hurry to get there, then it's like, okay, there she is.
Then they're done that.
Okay, let's run over, you know, down the road.
You see, we we tragically we have a life of accomplishment being there doing that.
And and this passage is absolutely contradicting that notion that in 17 seconds you can drink in the love of God.
I pray that as we go through some more of these words this morning.
In fact, would you go ahead and just put up on the screen the painting that I really want, speaking of paintings and Monet and Rembrandt and all this good stuff, I just want this painting, some of you familiar with it, to be on the screen as I walk through this text.
Because I I want the visual of what John wants us to understand in this passage to come to life.
Notice what he does here.
He says, be astonished.
You're doing something with your astonishment.
We we're all made for wonder, but we're prone to wonder.
And in this season, in September of 2019, what are you wandering towards that's wasting the wonder for which you've been made?
This is an incredible gift that we have in the gospel to consider how great the love is the Father has lavished upon us.
And that takes us to the second affirmation.
How what are the categories that we are to have to think of God's absolutely astonishing love?
Well, it is a liberating relationship.
John immediately says, unpacks this category.
It is the Father, capital F.
Not your experience of human father, although that's such an important part of your story, where it was really, really good or where it was really, really hard.
Consider how great the love is the father's lavished upon us.
That we, says John, that we should be called the children of God.
In the Bible, calling is never just invitation.
It's more like a subpoena.
We've been subpoenaed.
We've been, the door has been knocked upon with authority that we would be called into a relationship with God as Father.
One of the men that's impacted my understanding of God's grace through the years.
His name is J.I.
Packer, and a wonderful theologian.
He's legally blind now.
He taught at Regent College in British Columbia for years.
And he said this about this very topic.
He said, You can come to understand how well anybody understands the Bible or how much they understand about Jesus or what the word gospel means to them.
You can discern how much they have the proper understanding by the degree to which they make much of having God as their father.
This is the distinctive Christian name for God.
Father.
And what's liberating about the relationship is that this is the father we always wanted.
Just like Jesus is the ultimate spouse that we really, really wanted.
And just as we're foolish to think there's some human spouse that can really fill us up, we're also foolish to think that apart from knowing God the way he delights to be known, that there was the Father that would have made all the big difference in your world, or the fact that perhaps like me, you were disconnected from your earthly father, that that defines you forever.
See, that would be even something we'll consider this afternoon as we just want to talk about parenting by grace and how it's for many of us and being fathered by the true Father, the Father from whom all fatherhood derives its name, that we really parent more by faith and less by stress and fear.
And this is why this conversation is important for us, for we who are parents or not.
This is an astonishing love.
It is a liberating relationship.
Liberating because we we are the sons and daughters of the living God.
I love what John says in verse 2.
Now we are the children of God.
Right now, right now in this room, if you simply by childlike faith or trust in Jesus for your forgiveness and your righteousness, now you are loved by God the Father as much as he loves his son Jesus.
And there's nothing you can do to add to that or take away from that.
Talk about astonishing, talk about lingering worthy.
Can you just imagine what would be going on in this season of your life?
Whether it's a very difficult one, whether there are new, fresh diagnoses that are calling worries, or whether you have children that are struggling in life.
Whatever your story, can you imagine if you knew God truly delights in you, that he rejoices over you with singing, that he is so glad you are his daughter and son.
See, the whole testimony of Scripture is this is what we want.
This is what we were made for.
It's what we've been singing all morning.
Everybody in this room has the echoes of Eden in your heart, whether you're someone just beginning to explore Christianity or this gospel or this thing called faith, or whether you've been walking with the Lord a long time, written into your DNA is the belief, is the knowledge that you were made for Eden.
And I love when I think about in Genesis 1 and 2, what's most beautiful to me about Eden or the life before anything got broken was this magnificent verse in Genesis 2.25 when describing our first mom and dad, Adam and Eve.
Here's how that life was summarized in Eden.
The man and his wife were both naked and felt no shame.
And that's talking about shame before God.
They were completely free before the gaze of God and had no doubt about what God thought about them.
Let me ask you this morning, if you were just to take the time to sincerely respond to two questions.
What do you believe God thinks about you this morning?
And number two, what can you do about it?
See, these are questions not to stir guilt, but to stir grace.
Because what John is saying here, life will not be found in performances.
God is not in this sky with his arms crossed, waiting for us to put a big smile on his face by getting our act together, promising to do more, try harder.
No, he loves us now in Jesus as much as he will ever love us.
And it's a liberating love.
What do we mean even by that?
Well, it does set us free from the illusions that mere human relationships, any of them, will ever be enough to fulfill this ache or to resolve the guilt and the shame, but also this liberating love takes on our whole story.
As a pastor, when I was 50 years old, had planted a church in Franklin, Tennessee with a lot of good friends back in 1986.
And I preached God's grace, and God was pleased to help a lot of people come alive to his grace, before in my heart and parts of my story, I felt that freedom to come alive more to the lavish love of the Father.
But God gave me the gift of a burnout at age 50.
When our church was actually doing really good, you know, in life, sometimes burnout happens in seasons of when you're, you know, losing sight of your gold and redoubling your effort, or you're working real hard to make up for loss.
Our church, we were, we were having four services every Sunday, and all kinds of people from the culture were coming in, Vanderbilt professors sitting right next to street people because we were preaching, discovering the love of God in Jesus.
And yet, I did not know that this liberating love was not just going to prepare me for heaven, but also for life.
And so the Lord loved me enough to allow me emotionally, mentally, spiritually, physically, to hit the wall.
And that was the beginning of a journey as a pastor, as a husband, as a dad, of realizing I had some deep, deep heart wounds that God cared about.
And um, and and and maybe you do too.
And so I want you to hear this good news this morning that this father, this this amazing, compelling, liberating love will indeed absolutely take on whatever that still causes you to doubt, does God love me?
Does he care?
Or if he did love me, where was he when?
Parts of my story where the Lord's been so kind in these last pushing 20 years, next February 1st, I break into that decade called 70th birthday, and that's kind of daunting to me.
It's just like, you know, I went from 18 to 70 all of a sudden.
Where didn't all those years go?
But I'm so thankful that uh as a 50-year-old man, I was called into this lavish love of God that began to heal the deep loss in my heart of my mom who was killed in the car when I was 11.
And then to go on and to be aware of a deep heart wound that happened even three years before that, being harmed deeply by a neighbor I should have been able to trust.
And and you know, there are just things that are in our story that we don't have categories for.
And and and we we we we live like orphans, even as Christians, when we have a father that says, My love is lavish, my love is comprehensive.
I love how that played out in the Apostle Paul's story, you know, in 2 Corinthians.
It's one of the most vulnerable letters in the Bible.
And the Apostle Paul begins that great letter and he catalogues a lot of his pain and difficulties in life.
But I love what Paul came to know about God, this Father, when he said to the Corinthians, he says, you know, I bid you know and love the Father of mercy and the God of all comfort, uh, God of all comfort, who comforts us with the mercy that we need that we might share that mercy with others, for those who similarly suffer like us.
See, Paul came to know God as a father of compassion, the God of all comfort.
And he entered into that experience of being loved and healed and liberated and known and rescued from unbelief.
And and but you hear his words.
He says that we might love others as we come alive to that love.
True sign of gospel renewal and growth and Redeemer Church moving forward will be all of us coming more fully alive to the love of God.
That we might love our neighbors, that we might be a community where people hear that there is a church in Marietta where you don't have to pose or pretend.
You can come and you're not gonna be invited every week to man up or woman up.
You're gonna be called to grace up because we need Jesus, just as just as Russ said, we are our need is far greater than we know, but God's provision is far grander than we ever dreamed.
Both are true because the gospel is true.
Well, that takes us to the third affirmation.
I'm gonna mention this, and then we're gonna simply close by talking about this painting a little bit because it tells the story through the life of the man Rembrandt, who grew up in a very religious community, but but went to church long before he went to Christ, knew about God as a father before he, through his own story, came to rest in this love.
Well, this astonishing love takes on the fact that we are adopted, we are legally adopted, we our guilt is gone, our shame is being broken.
But this last phrase, transforming hope, is what John finishes with in this text.
And I love it.
Notice what he says.
Dear friends, now we are the children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known, but we know that when he, meaning Jesus, when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
Everyone who has this hope in him, meaning in Jesus, purifies himself even as Jesus is pure.
Now, what does that mean?
Hope in the Bible is not a whimsical orientation.
Hope in the Bible is not crossing your fingers and squinting real hard.
Hope is not even a redemptive hunch.
Hope in the Bible is absolute guaranteed certainty based upon the faithfulness of another.
And what John is saying in this text is the hope that we have is that this Father that now has made us his sons and daughters of delight, he began a work in us that he will complete.
Paul wrote that in Philippians 1.6, he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion.
And what John wants us to know in these verses is that even as Jesus, who is the perfect Son, did for us everything necessary that we would become the children of Abba Father's delight, so one day we will be as lovely as and as loving as Jesus.
Our future involves the promise that as surely as Jesus came the first time, he's coming back a second time and he will finish making all things new.
And there will be no more death or dying or mourning in pain.
In fact, one of my favorite images in the book of Revelation is that when Jesus comes back, God will wipe away every tear.
Now that image is more than just your grandmother wiping tears off your cheek.
It's actually a Greek idiom of God putting his finger in your eye and wiping the tear out of your eye.
Doesn't sound very attractive, right?
Someone poking you in your eye.
That's not what's being referred to.
The statement is the father will not just put an end to tears of sorrow.
He will redeem the tears, he will redeem the pain behind the tears.
And you see, the hope that we have is, you know, Russ is not going to stand up every week making promises he can't keep.
And God does not tell us that answers are enough, but God gives us himself.
And one day, as Tolkien said, everything sad will become untrue.
You see, as Lewis said, everything will be put right.
This is what John's saying.
We have this hope.
We will see Jesus and his beauty.
We will be finally free from our unbelief, and we will know him in his fullness, and the Spirit will completely resurrect and transform us in the world of which we are a part.
And that's why John says, lastly, everyone that has this hope purifies himself.
Now, what does that mean?
It doesn't mean you start changing yourself, it doesn't mean you sign up for a rigorous course of fixing yourself because you can't.
None of us are the fourth member of the Trinity.
It means that you set yourself apart.
See, purification in Scripture is always responding to something God gives us, who God is.
It means that you don't spend 17 seconds in front of the Mona Lisa of the gospel.
It means that you start saying, My heart is to be nourished and guarded because out of the heart flow the issues of life.
I know a lot of you ladies this weekend had a marvelous retreat, really learning about contemplation and slowing down enough to think, to meditate, to marinate.
It's moving from spiritual disciplines to see them more as a means of grace, that our hearts might know this lavish love, that we might know our inheritance in Christ, that we might right now see the healing hand of God in us and in our community, that we might live with hope, not by hype.
Well, just the last couple of words.
Why this painting?
Some of you know the story of the great Dutch painter Rembrandt.
He painted so much awesome art, just incredible.
And yet he lived a very painful life.
Grew up, like I said, in Christian subculture, went to the great schools, went to the great art schools, and uh, and yet suffered a lot in life.
Had a magnificent romance with a woman that was his wife, and had children, and yet she died early, and he had children that died, and and it was a horrible loss, and there was not a real culture that really felt free to grieve in.
Again, sometimes Christianity can feel so performance-oriented and just get over stuff.
But by God's grace, Rembrandt came to know the God he honored by creed as a father.
And one of the very last paintings he painted was his paintings.
It's his interpretation of Luke chapter 15 and the father and that gospel that Jesus told the story of this is what God the Father is really like.
He runs after all kinds of his children.
And there were two primary children in Luke 15.
One represented in this painting, this tall figure towering above a father, and this broken man pushed into the breast of this father.
This tall man looking down in Luke 15, Jesus referred to as the elder brother, a self-righteous, hardened, rigorous legalist who was a stranger to the love of his father, even though he lived in the estate.
But there was a younger son who just through pain, longing, through just unbelief, demanded a part of his father's inheritance and ran away and wasted his life and came fully alive to shame and guilt.
But there was a part of his heart that reckoned that at least at home it was better than anything he found under the illusion of his idolatry.
And Rembrandt captured Jesus' telling of that story of this now very broken son that had lived in a faraway country coming home.
And what you need to know, and I'll conclude with this as Russ is going to come and bring us to this table of grace and mercy.
When Rembrandt painted this painting, many of his friends, reflecting upon the painting, said Rembrandt put himself in the position of the younger son, that that's his profile.
And you'll notice the effect of his life of lived in misery and loss and unbelief.
But notice most importantly, here's the father figure.
And there's two hands on the back of this younger son's back.
And if you'll look closely, you can do a search this afternoon.
Rembrandt painted two different hands on the back of his own back, representing the father.
In our perception, is a strong masculine hand.
And the right hand is a far more feminine, delicate hand.
And Rembrandt wanted to say, this is the God I've come to know.
My creed has become my passion and my delight because my God has welcomed me.
And with the tenderness of a mother that will never forsake her nursing child, and with a strength of mercy that will take on everything that represents my story, heart and life.
This is the God I know.
I ask you, my brothers and sisters, do you know the lavish love of God for you?
Do you know yourself to be here as someone that the Father wants to come more alive through his love and grace?
What's hard about your life and story?
What would it look like in your marriage, your singleness, in your parenting, and the whole of your life and the culture of this church for us to rest in this love and share it with the surrounding culture?
Let me pray for us, even as we conclude this morning.
Father, thank you that none of us are as free or as joyful or as alive to your love as we long to be and as you intend.
Thank you that it is a lavish love that's defined in terms of you wanting us to know you as Abba Father, the one who welcomes us, one that we will never inform of anything, the one who wants us more than we can imagine and delights in us beyond all expectation.
Lord, heal us.
Help us this day at this table.
Help us further into this day.
Those of us that even talk about being reparented by you as we love our children, Lord, as daunting as that seems sometimes.
I thank you, I praise you, I bless you for my privilege of walking with Russ and Christy and their beautiful children at this church.
We long for the fullness of your kingdom.
Thank you that it is a living hope, not religious hype.
In Jesus' name we pray.
Amen.