Well, good morning, and uh welcome to Church of the Grove. We're so glad that you're here with us this morning, and uh hopefully you've had a uh really great week. Um it's the start of spring. I love seeing the the flowers start to change and bloom. Um but more than that, I love that the Braves season has kicked off and we're 2-0. Uh Grand Slam walk-off last night. I don't know if anybody else watched that, but great, great uh season so far. Um But uh this morning we're continuing a series called The God You Can Know. But before we jump into that this morning, I just want to make you aware of a few upcoming uh things that are happening this week. Um we are about to move into Holy Week. Actually, today is the start of what we know is known as Holy Week, uh Palm Sunday, and this is the kind of last week of Jesus' life before his death and his resurrection. And so we've got a few things on our church calendar that we want you to know about. On Friday, uh we have a Good Friday service. It's not a traditional service, though. We'll have different kinds of stations that will be set up in this room, and it's one of those kind of uh come as you are, just show up and you kind of walk yourself through the different stations that kind of help prepare your heart to experience and remember the sacrifice that Jesus made on our behalf. So anytime between five and eight, you can show up, bring your kids with you, and you can walk through that together. Um, and it might take you 15 minutes, for some, it might take an hour. It really just depends on how quickly you walk through that and just what the Lord's doing in your life as you do that. And then uh Saturday, we're partnering with the City of Social Circle for our community Easter egg hunt. Uh great opportunity to love and to serve our community. If you've got kids, we'd love for you to especially be there. 10 o'clock Friendship Park, and then Sunday, Easter Sunday, Resurrection Sunday. Um, make plans to be here. Um, 9 o'clock and 11 o'clock normal times, but we would love for you to show up early, especially if you are a normal part of Church at the Grove, if you're part of the Church at the Grove family, we would love for you to show up and help jump in and serve and greet and make people feel welcome as they walk into uh the building on next Sunday. So we'd love to have you come and be a part of that. All right, enough of that. Um, all right. Uh I can remember 11 years ago, almost 11 years ago, in a couple of weeks, um, when uh we were pregnant, or my wife was pregnant. Um my wife was pregnant with our son Sam. And Sam was someone that we had prayed for for a really long time. We struggled um to get pregnant for about six years, and finally the Lord answered our prayers, and we had dreamed about the day that we would meet our son. And so 11 years ago, um we were here in Social Circle. We had to drive to what was then Gwinnette Medical, now Northside Gwinnett, and uh we got to the hospital, drove through the drain, pulled into the parking lot, checked in at the hospital. They quickly moved us into a room, and there's just if you've ever had kids, you know how exciting and nerve-wracking and the anxiety that comes with that. There's this nervous anticipation of what's going to come. There's a little bit of kind of fear that's going on in the room, too, of just not knowing what the delivery is going to look like and all that kind of stuff. And let me just say that the delivery looked pretty easy to me. Um, but uh but Caitlin gave birth to Sam, and the doctor let me cut the cord, and then he handed uh him to us, and um, everything changed. Uh, you know, if you've never had kids, you don't know this quite this experience. And for so long, people told me, like, hey, you'll never know what true love is until you have a child. And so um, when we held him for the first time, that's exactly what I felt. I felt like, man, this is my son, um, the one that we had longed for and hoped for for so long, and now we're holding him in our arms. And there was just a love like nothing else. The author Elizabeth Stone says, making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. Now, listen, with our son Sam, there's been a lot of really great times, and there's been a lot of not so great times. There's been a lot of times that I've failed as a parent more times than I would care to admit to you guys today. And there have been times that he has said and done things that have hurt us, but no matter what happens, there is still this unstoppable, unconditional love for my son, and not just him, but for all of our kids. There's a love of a father-son or parent-child relationship that will always be there. And that's what we're talking about this morning is this idea of love. Now, love has a lot of different meanings in our culture today. We don't have a lot of different words that describe love, and so we can say that we love our kids, but then we can also say we love tacos, and hopefully those two things are not on the same level of love. You know, we love Atlanta Braves baseball or we love Jesus. Like those are two very different terms and two descriptions that are drastically different from one another. So, what does it truly mean to love? How do we define love? Our culture will talk about how love is more of a feeling, it's an emotion of some kind, and it's something that you can have for one moment and then you can not have another moment, that you can fall in and out of love. But what we're looking at this morning is an all-loving God. It's something that's much more than just a feeling, but it's ultimately seen and demonstrated in his actions and what he does. And so our big idea this morning is this is that the measure of God's love is seen in the price he was willing to pay, that the measure of God's love is seen in the price he is willing to pay. And so, with that, I'd love for us to just pray before we open up the scripture this morning. So, Lord Jesus, we thank you. Lord, that we just have this moment to be together and to open up your word and just to look at the character of who you are, that you are a God of love, not just a God of love, you are love. And so, Lord Jesus, would you just convince us of that this morning? Would you help us, maybe for some of us for the very first time, experience your love and let us be able to walk in that. And so, Lord Jesus, Holy Spirit, would you come now? Would you open up our ears to your truth and let us get a word from you this morning and then give us the courage and the obedience to live that out. And it's in your name we pray. Amen. So if you have a Bible, you can turn to the book of John, John chapter 3. This is probably one of the most familiar scriptures in all of the Bible. Um, if you've ever watched a sporting event, there's probably been somebody that's holding up a cardboard sign that says John 3.16 on it. For many of you, you might even have this verse memorized. And so this is a very familiar part of scripture, but at the same time, just because it's familiar doesn't mean that we've examined it to the fullest weight. And so that's what I want to do this morning. Because in this verse in particular, the gospel message, the good news of Jesus is summarized in one short sentence. And so to set this passage up, there's a guy named Nicodemus. He's a religious leader, and uh he's been around Jesus. Jesus has been teaching, he's been doing miracles, there's all these crazy things that are happening around Jesus. And so the other religious leaders are angry, they're mad, they're they're fighting against Jesus, they're plotting for his death, they're they're they're they're trying to question him and trick him into different traps. Um, but Nicodemus is a little different. Nicodemus is interested in what Jesus is saying, and so in the night, when he can sneak away and no one can notice, Nicodemus walks and he finds Jesus where he is with his disciples, and they begin to have this conversation with one another. And this conversation isn't religious, it's not it's not about a religious system, but ultimately it's a revelation of God's heart. That's what Nicodemus is going to find. That there is a God that you can know, and that his heart can be revealed through Jesus, and it's a heart of love. And so with that, John 3.16 says this. Uh you might have memorized it in a different translation, but this is what the CSB says. For God loved the world in this way. He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish, but will have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, so that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have everlasting life. This is the message of the gospel. This is the good news of Jesus. And I want us to break this down into four different parts this morning and ultimately see that we have a God in heaven that loves us. The first is this is there's the origins of love. The origin of love, it says in the very first part of that verse, for God loved the world, or for God so loved the world. The verse starts with God. The love of God has absolutely nothing to do with you and me. The verse starts with God. God is love. It is his character, it is his nature. It has nothing to do with the object of what he is loving, it has everything to do with who he is being the subject. In 1 John chapter 4, verses 7 and 8, John is writing here talking about God, and he says, Dear friends, let us love one another because love is from God. And everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God because God is love. So we read here that it's not that love is just from God, but we read something much deeper, that God is love. This means that it's not just something that God does, it's not just actions that he takes, but it's who he is. So when we talk about God's love, we're not talking about a mood, we're not talking about his emotions alone, we're not talking about just a feeling that he has, we're talking about his very nature and his very character, his heart, who he is at his core. He is a God is love. John continues in verse 4, or chapter 4, verse 19 of 1 John. He says, We love because he first loved us. And so we see that God is a God of love, that he is love himself, personified. He is love personified, but at the same time, he is a God that loves first. God's love isn't the starting point, and he makes this very, very clear over and over again that we're not the ones that initiate the love. We're not the ones that earn his love. We're not the ones that even deserve his love. The way that God loves us has nothing to do with the reward for our good behavior. God's love has not loves you not because you're a pretty good person or because you did do this or you didn't do this, that God loves you because of who he is. You can never do anything that's going to make God love you more or less than he does right now in this moment. Now that's a pretty big statement, but to think that God loves us, when we've rebelled, when we've turned away from him, when we've gone down paths and have purposely gone against his words and his commands, when we've fought through addictions and marriage issues and struggles throughout life and all the shame and all the guilt that we maybe carry around. And at the same time, God sees all of that and he loves us anyway. Not because we bring something to the table, but because of who he is. David Jeremiah talking about the phrase, for God so loved the world, he says this. He says, the biggest little word in the Bible may be the word so. Included in so are all the agonies of the cross and all the riches of God's grace, all the depths of my sin and all the beams of his mercy. The cross is bound up in that adverb so. God so loved the world that he went to extraordinary lengths to express it. This is hard for us to comprehend because we live in a culture, in a world where love is something that is a conditional practice oftentimes. It's something that you have to do, you have to perform in such a way that's going to earn other people's love. And when you don't meet their standard, when you fall short of the expectations that they've created, the love can suddenly disappear. But that's not the love that we're talking about. We're not talking about a conditional love that falls, go in and out of. It's not something that disappears when we fail. But the measure of God's love is not based on our performance, but it's totally who he is. Romans 5, 8, it says, but God proves his own love for us that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. So that when we had rejected him, with our words and our actions, he didn't reject us, but instead he came and he died for us. And it says that he so loved the world that he loved the world, right? That he is the one that loves the world. Not just a picture of perfect people, but he loves the fallen and the rebellious humanity, that his love is not just directed towards the righteous, but also towards the sinner. That he loves the ones that are broken and sinners and rebels, the ones that are full of shame and secrets, the people that have a past, the people that have a future that they don't even know about yet, people with doubts and all of us, he loves all of us. And I just want us to really like understand this this morning. Because I think that there's an enemy out there that is trying to convince you and me that God does not love us, that for some reason that we've done something, we've said something, we've thought something, and because of those things, because of the past, because of the addictions we struggle with, that somehow God does not love us. And that could not be further from the truth. This is a radical love. It's a love that reaches you right where you are. It's a love that doesn't fluctuate based on your failures. It's a love that is not based on your performance. It's a love that's not just because you're good, it's because he is love. And so let me say that statement again. There is nothing you can do that will make God love you any more or less than he does right now. There's nothing that you can do. There's no sin that you can commit that will somehow remove the love of God from your life. Think about that for a second. But then at the same time, there's nothing that you can do that can make him love you even more. He's absolutely crazy about you, not because of anything you do or say, but because of who he is. He is love. For God so loved the world. That's where we start. That's the origins of love, is that it starts with God. But it continues. It says, For God loved the world in this way. He gave his one and only son. So the demonstration of this love, he's the beginning of love, but then the demonstration of love is that he gave his one and only son. This is what true love looks like. Anybody can say, I love you, but it's a different thing to actually live that out. Anybody can give cheap words and just say, Yeah, I love you, but then not follow through with actually showing and demonstrating that love to another person. Our um, so we've got Sam, who I mentioned at the beginning, but then we've also got Ben, who's eight. He'll be nine in August. And so he's in second grade, and uh he is just he's just hilarious. He's funny, and um, we are now in the drama of second grade uh girlfriend-boyfriend relationships. And so it's a blast, man. Like every day I pick him up from school and I'm like, hey, like, what's the newest gossip in the second grade recess, right? And so he's talking about how his friend Coulter and his friend uh, you know, uh the different friends that are in his class and the girlfriends that they now have, and it's always changing. It's like one day this person has a girlfriend and the next day they don't have a girlfriend, now they have this girlfriend, and now they have this girlfriend. And he wrote a note the other day to a girl in his class and said, Would you be my girlfriend? I think you're cute, yes or no, and she said yes, and so he was excited about that, and that lasted a total of about 48 hours, and then there was somebody else, and so it's funny now. I think it's gonna be really dangerous for us in the future, so y'all can be praying for us and him. Um, but but that's kind of the love that we have, I think, in our culture today. It's a love that is so temporary, and it really doesn't mean anything. I mean, for Ben to have a girlfriend, it doesn't mean anything. They're not really hanging out with one another, they're not doing anything, there's no sacrifice that's happening, it's just a title that they have. And I think that sometimes we think of love that way, but love is not something that you just say, but it's something that you show. And that's exactly what God does. God shows us his love by the way that he gave. This is a demonstration of God's love. God didn't send a text message, he didn't just kind of send an encouragement from a distance to give us warm and fuzzy feelings, but instead, God moved towards us. He gave himself. He gave himself. It points us directly to the cross that God gave what was most precious to him. He gave himself, he gave his one and only son. It speaks of the uniqueness of who he was, that this is not, this is no one like Jesus, that he is not one of many sons. He is the Son of God, and he gave himself for us. The greatest expression of love is always sacrifice, and God didn't give something, he didn't give someone else, but God gave himself in the person of the Son. Now think about that. There are there are many things that I would do for others, but to think about giving up and sacrificing one of my children for the good of someone else. That's what he did for you and for me. If you've ever wondered and wrestled with this idea of God really loves you, you don't have to guess. You don't have to look at your circumstances and let your circumstances tell you whether or not God loves you or not. If you're walking through hard and difficult times and you maybe feel like God doesn't love you in that moment, you don't have to look in that way to understand God's love for you. You don't have to measure it by how well you did last week, how well you performed, if you read your Bible every single day, or if you weren't short with your wife, or if you didn't yell at your kids. That's not how you determine whether or not God loves you or not. The simple way to know that God loves us is we look to the cross. He gave himself. The cross is God's receipt. The cross is God's proof. This is how far I'll go for you. This is what love looks like. The cross proves that God loves you beyond all doubt. When we question God's love, we only have to look to the cross. Caitlin mentioned about today being Palm Sunday. And Palm Sunday is the day that Jesus is moving into the final week of his life, and he's riding into town on a donkey, and they're putting their coats on the ground before him and laying down palm branches, and they're shouting, Hosanna, Hosanna, Hosanna. They're recognizing him as the king that is coming into the city, and they're worshiping him, and they're bringing him praise, and they think that he's going to be this great ruler and king, and he's going to help set the Jewish people free from the Roman oppression that they're under. But these same people that are praising God in this moment are going to be the same people in just a few short days that are yelling, crucify, crucify, crucify. And that's a lot what love looks like for us, right? It's a love that is fickle. When it goes our way, we love, but when it doesn't go our way, we despise. The measure of God's love is seen, though, in the price he is willing to pay. He still rides into town. I just imagine him with tears flowing down his eyes as he knows what awaits him in just a few short days. But it's a love that acts. It's a love that is real. He shows love. Again, Romans 5.8, God proves his own love for us that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. The cross proves beyond anything else, beyond any doubt, that God loves us. But then it continues, right? For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him. So there's now the origins of love, there's the demonstration of love, but now there's the invitation of love. That everyone that who believes in him, this is that God loves everyone. This is not just, this is some of the most hope-filled parts of Scripture, that he doesn't just love the religious, he doesn't just love the moral, he doesn't just love the successful, that God loves the broken. If you're broken, you can come. If you're weary, you can come. If you're ashamed, you can come. If you're skeptical and have doubts, you can come. If you've tried before and failed miserably and then got back up and tried again and failed miserably again and again and again and again, you can come. God's love is for all people. No matter what sin they're committed, no matter what their background or their past, no matter anything that they have ever done, God loves the world. However, there's a condition here. That it's the ones that believe in him. Now, it's not that God only loves the ones that believe in him, but in order for us to truly experience the love that God has for us, then it requires us to believe in him. Believe is one of the most misunderstood words, I think, in the Bible, especially in the kind of Bible Belt South in which we live, because much like love, there's a lot of connotations of what belief can mean. For some, when they talk about believing in Jesus, it's more just an intellectual pursuit. So it's all about us having the right information and being able to do the right things and just uh have the right doctrine in our lives. That's what belief means. But what Jesus is talking about here is a belief that is much deeper than that. It's a belief that connotates trust, that it's about putting our lives in his hands. It's about putting all of our weight and all of our energy and all of our time and all of our resources in the Jesus basket. It's kind of like if we had a chair up here or a stool. I could say that I believe that the chair or the stool was going to hold me up. I could look at all the schematics of it. I could see how the pressure points are. I could see how it was made and designed, and I could see other people sit on the chair. But until I actually sit on the chair myself, I don't actually believe that it's going to hold me. Belief requires action. And so this is what Jesus is calling us to. It's putting our full weight in Jesus. It's about not earning salvation, but rather receiving it by faith. God's love is offered to everyone, but it's experienced fully by those who believe. By those that believe, that put their trust in him. There's the ones that get to walk in the abundant life that he offers, the love of God in our life. God's love is for all. There is no one that is beyond God's love. But it's fully experienced only by those who believe and trust in him. So the final part of the stage is the fruit of God's love. We've got the origins, the demonstration, we've got the invitation, and now we've got the fruit of God's love. It says that no one will not perish, but will have everlasting life. So we see two things here. There's the two outcomes of responding to God's love. The first is that we should not perish. So there's a rescue element to this: that because of our belief, our trust in Jesus, we are now rescued from our sin and the separation that we would once be put under, the punishment of sin and being separated from God, the consequences of sin and our disobedience. It's the sins of commission and omission, the things that we've actually done that were wrong, and the things that we were supposed to do that we didn't do. All of those sins separate us from God, but the fruit of God's love is that no one would perish, that no one would die the death, that no one would spend eternity separated from Him. That's the goal of God's love, that no one should perish, but that everyone would have everlasting life. So there's rescue and there's restoration. This means more than just living with God in eternity in heaven when we die. That's a piece of it for sure, that that's what awaits those that have put their faith and trust in Jesus, but it's more than that. It's an everlasting life that's here and now. It begins at the moment that you believe and it continues all throughout eternity. Eternal life is not just about heaven someday, it's about knowing God today. God's love rescues you from perishing, it rescues you from the separation from his presence, and it also restores your life. 2 Corinthians 5.17. Paul is talking about this new life we have in Jesus, and he says, Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away, and see, the new life has come. That there's a new life that takes place, that we are restored to him, we're able to walk in the peace and the life that ultimately and only he can bring to us. John 3, 16 shows us the undeniable truths about God and his love. First is that it's initiated by God, that it's demonstrated through Jesus and his death on the cross, that it's offered for all people. It's only received, though, by and through faith, and the results of it are eternal life. This is the good news of the gospel. This is the good news of Jesus. This is the reason that we gather in rooms like this. This is the reason that we sing praises to him. This is the reason that we do the things that we do. This is the reason we have the scriptures. This is the reason that we have churches. This is the reason that we give and are generous with the resources he's placed in our hands. It's because God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son so that whoever should believe in him will not perish but have everlasting life. It's the good news of the gospel, and it motivates us in every area of our lives. This is what drives and propels us to move forward. Now, for some of us in the room, maybe we know of God's love. Maybe we even believe it intellectually. We believe that Jesus was a real person, that he died on a cross and that he rose again on the third day. Maybe we believe that intellectually, but we've never actually put our full weight into that. We've never trusted him fully and completely and believed everything in our being about that truth and that reality of who he is, where we just say, God, I'm all in. For some of us, the step that we need to take this morning is to understand and recognize God's love for us and then give our entire lives to him because of his great love for us. For others of us, maybe we're a lot like the crowd on Palm Sunday, where we love Jesus when it's convenient for us to love Jesus when things are going our way, but when things start to turn a corner and things don't look so hot in the future, and we start to have to have pain and persecutions and hardships in our life, we go, man, God doesn't love us. And it's the enemy's way of kind of getting into our mind and getting us to believe a lie that for whatever reason God doesn't love you. This is what he's been doing since the very beginning. He's trying to get the people of God to believe a lie, that God does not love them, that God is not for them, that God is not working all things out for the good of those that love him and are called according to his purposes. And we just need to come back to a place this morning where we look to the cross and we recognize the sacrifice that he has made. And because of the sacrifice he has made, there is no doubt, there is no question that God is love and that his love is for you. Maybe you've bought into the lie that there's something that you've done that has kind of pushed away God's love from your life, that it's disqualified you from being able to be loved by God. I don't know what it is, but this morning is an invitation for us to experience the love of our Heavenly Father. The love that goes beyond any bounds, the love that is so great that we cannot even begin to comprehend the weight and the magnitude of it. It's a love that is unlike any other love that we know. And so this morning there's an invitation for us to step forward and to trust Jesus as our Lord and Savior and to walk in that abundant life. But there's also an invitation for us. If what we talked about this morning is true, if the cross actually happened, if Jesus was raised on the third day and he got up from the grave and defeated death, sin in the grave, then that love should compel us. It should compel us to be the ambassadors that he's called us to be. In 2 Corinthians 5, 20, it says, Therefore, we, people that have followed Jesus, are ambassadors for Christ. Since God is making his appeal through us, we plead on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God. He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God. Because God loves us, because we've experienced God's love, then our heart's desire is to see other people experience that same love as well. It's not super loving for us to experience the great love of an all-loving God and just hold on to it ourselves and not share it with others. And listen, there's a great opportunity coming up this week. Easter is the biggest day of the church, and it is an easy invite. Even people that aren't church people, even people that aren't religious people, even people that don't really have a background in the Bible, I mean, most of them will accept your invitation to come and experience the love of God. But the question is, will you make the ask? Will you invite? Will you bring somebody with you next week to celebrate the greatest news that the world has ever known? The love of God is seen in the cross. That changes everything that we do, but it also compels us forward to live on mission for Him. And so, Lord Jesus, we thank you that you're a God that loves us. Maybe even in that verse where it says, For God so loved the world, maybe instead of the world, maybe just replace your name with the world. For God so loved Nathan, and for God so loved fill in the blank, that he gave his one and only Son so that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life. Lord, in this moment, would you let that verse and that truth sink deep down into our hearts and souls? For some of us in the room, we've heard that verse for years and years and years. And it's just something that we can quote on the tip, it's on the tip of our tongues. We just know that. But Lord, maybe it hasn't sunk deep enough down for us to resonate with. And so, Lord, even in this moment, Lord, let us just experience and know your love. Let's just sit in that truth this morning. That you are loved by God, the creator of the universe, the all-powerful one, the one that was in the beginning and will be in the end, the Alpha and the Omega, that He loves you. Not because of anything you've done or not done. In spite of all of that, He loves you. I just sense that there's people here this morning that just for whatever reason don't believe that God's love is for them. It's for everybody else, but not for them. Right now, the Lord is saying, hey, look to the cross. Look to the cross. This is how much I love you. And so maybe this morning the step that you need to take is to surrender your life to Jesus, to believe in him, to not just know about his love, but to actually experience his love. And so we would love to talk with you after the service about what that looks like. But it's really just a simple action that we take on our place where we just say, God, I'm a sinner, I'm broken, and yet you love me anyway. And I believe that you are the that you sent your son. He died on the cross, rose again on the third day. And if I put my faith and my trust in him, that I can spend eternity with you. It's just an overflow of your heart of just recognizing your sinful state and your desperate need of a Savior. And so maybe that's the step you need to take. And we'd love to talk to you about what the next steps look like after after the service today. But maybe for others of us, maybe we've experienced the love of God, but it hasn't compelled us to share that love with others. And maybe there's somebody in your life, maybe it's a family member or a friend or a neighbor or a coworker that doesn't know the Lord, that hasn't experienced the love of God. And this week, this is an opportunity for us to be the people of God, to demonstrate the love of others, for love of God to others. And so maybe you just need to spend a few moments just crying out to the Lord and just asking for the Lord to open up your neighbor, your friend, whoever it might be, their heart to experience the love of God this Easter. And so, Lord Jesus, we thank you so much for who you are. We thank you that you love us. We thank you that you chase after us. We thank you that there's no mountain you won't climb, Lord, without coming to get us. That you're our rescuer, you're our restorer, you're our redeemer. And so, Lord, let us be overwhelmed by your love this morning, and let that love compel us to share others, to other people about your love as well. We pray all this in your son's name. Amen. In a second, our band's gonna lead us. Feel free to move around, feel free to pray at your seat, come forward if you need to, um, and just experience and meditate and remember the love of God this morning.