Love

 Hey, open your Bibles to First John, chapter four, first John four. Now, this is really for us because we cannot meet for Eve service. This is our Christmas Sunday, and uh, there’s a lot of different ways to celebrate and to remember the birth of Christ. One way is Matthew’s gospel. In the book of Matthew, we see Jesus, uh, we see, excuse me, Matthew, share the gospel story with a family tree.

And this story assures us really of God’s grace. We learn in the descendants, in the line of Jesus. We see people like Rahab, a prostitute. We see Tamar who is violated. We see Ruth. The outsider and at Christmas, what it does for us is it reminds us that God can redeem and use anyone for his glory, or we can go look this morning at Luke’s gospel.

Luke loves the details of Christmas and says a lot about people like Mary, and that, uh, angle really assures us of God’s power. This is what can happen if you trust him. If you have a life that’s fully surrendered at Christmas, we remember nothing is impossible with God, even a virgin birth. Or look at Paul in his letters to the Galatians.

He details the theology of Christmas and says a lot about the identity of Christ. In Galatians chapter four, we’re assured of God’s redemption. We learn that Jesus is fully God, meaning he existed before time and was sent into the world at just the right time. Paul says to be with us. And in that passage we learned that he is also fully man, meaning he entered fully.

Into the human condition, into the form of a baby, knowing, weakness, suffering, and the burdens of life. And we can say by reading Galatians at Christmas, we remember our adoption into the family of God through the sacrifice of Jesus, the God man, God man, excuse me, who came to us. And for us, we can do that.

But for our time today. I want us to examine the Christmas story in the eyes of the Apostle John. We could go to John chapter one, but today I want us to actually go to First John, another letter that he wrote. By this time, the Apostle is an old man. He’s actually the only of the disciples of Jesus who died of old age.

He has decades of ministry behind him, and he believe he’s up to 90. At this point, yeah. He endured a lot of persecution. He buried a lot of his friends. He planted several churches. He helped keep them unified. And all of this experience has given him this earn wisdom of a grandfather of a shepherd who has seen it all, and that in that context, I would now ask you to stand if you’re willing and able to honor the reading of God’s word.

This morning, first John, chapter four. We’re gonna start. I’ll read out loud in verse nine. Holy Spirit, come and be our teacher. God’s love was re revealed among us in this way. God sent his one and only son into the world so that we might live through him. Love consists in this, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.

Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another. No one has ever seen God if we love one another, God remains in us, and His love is made complete in us. This is how we know that we remain in him and he and us. He has given us of His spirit and we have seen and we testify that the Father has sent his son as the world’s savior.

Whoever confesses that Jesus is the son of God. God remains in him and He and God and we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love and the one who remains in love, remains in God, and God remains in Him in this love is made complete with us so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment because as He is, so also, are we in this world?

There is no fear in love. Instead, perfect love drives out fear because fear involves punishment. So the one who fears is not complete in love. We love because he first loved us. Let’s pray together. Father, son, and holy Spirit, the topic we are diving into today, a lot of us have heard, and yet God give us the humility to know, to understand.

That there is still so much more we can learn and receive when it comes to your love. So this Christmas Sunday, God, I pray that we’d honor you by not just hearing the word, but may you give us something that we can then impart do as we seek to receive your love in full surrender. In Jesus’ name, everyone says Amen.

You guys can have a seat. So I’m 10 years old and it’s Christmas night. I, it’s honestly probably the most memorable Christmas of my childhood up to that point at the Van Camp household. Uh, at that Christmas morning, I remember I woke up at 4:00 AM uh, to see if Santa came to our house, and we were that kind of Christian family.

Okay, judge me. Uh, but to my surprise. A go-kart was in the middle of the living room. I could not figure out how he did that. Needless to say, I did not go back to sleep. So for the next couple hours, I was practicing my surprise face as my parents came in to say, come check out the living room, even though I already did that.

So we wound up spending the entire day. Driving around the neighborhood as a 10-year-old, I had a go-kart and, uh, praise God, I survived. There are stories that I did some crazy things on that day, but I was happily exhausted. I, I never slept so well that night in my life. I got everything I wanted and then some, I had been up since four in the morning.

Life is really good. But then that Christmas night around one in the morning, I woke up to an empty house. I had like this immediate sense of fear that I was home alone. Which really is the best Christmas movie, one and two. Okay. I’m even willing to throw three in there, but let’s move on. Okay. I ran to my parents’ room and nobody was there.

I came back to my side of the house and. Uh, and you have to know this in my story, I actually could not see very well, but I was too stubborn to admit that I needed glasses. So it took me a while to notice this. But by the time I went back towards my room and that side of the house, I finally noticed there was blood all over the floor.

And so at first, when I went into my parents’ room and saw that there weren’t there, I thought the rapture happened and that I was the only pagan in the house. You know, Christ came for everyone but me. If you grew up in the nineties, you probably had a similar moment. I was terrified, but then I thought when I saw the blood, my whole family was murdered and they left me.

’cause they know I’m the chosen one. You know, that was in my head. But I’ll never forget, like the gut level despair and fear that ran through my body. It’s not like I had an iPhone. It’s not like I can call somebody and figure out what’s going on. A few hours later my aunt came to the house. Uh, she had a key, so she came right in and she came to babysit me and explained.

What just happened? And so kind of the story goes. My sister, my older sister, she had her tonsils removed, uh, the week before Christmas, and it turns out a stitch came loose. And so it led to just that horrible night. Um, my parents, I slept through all of this, by the way, which this isn’t the first story I’ve shared with you that something dramatic happened to my house and I slept through it.

But I promise you don’t rob my house. I, I wake up to everything now. You know? That was just kid Trey. Okay? All right. Some of you know where I live. All right. So anyways, we have alarms anyways. Okay, so my parents wound up calling 9 1 1. They grabbed the youngest, my youngest sister, they left the middle child, forgotten about, shocker.

And then they just followed the ambulance to the hospital. And again, I slept through all of this, but then I woke up to an empty house, a crime scene. And it was traumatic for my life. And to be clear, I was texting my sister about the story yesterday just to, you know, make sure my facts were straight. I do think it was more traumatic for her, but still for me it was terrifying.

But it is really strange how those kind of memories, they have a way of never truly leaving your nervous system. Um, ever since then I’ve kind of noticed around Christmas I do get excited, but also there’s a bit of paranoia within me. There’s a bit of fear of what, what’s the next bad thing that’s gonna happen on this wonderful day later, uh, in my childhood, we were stuck in an airport from December 23rd to December 26th.

I hate Atlanta ’cause we lived in that airport. That was the year I think that Tom Hanks came out with that terminal movie. Anybody remember that movie? Movie I was living it? I was like, we need to watch the movie again. Where does he find his soap? You know, or whatever. We were living there and snowed in, um, another in more adulthood.

My wife, she had a brutal miscarriage on Christmas afternoon, and it was just after finding out that our baby was a boy, and so that was really hard. The next year. Um, I knew this was the last time I could just sense that it was the last time I would see my grandfather. He was not feeling well. He wound up having COVID and, um, by his appearance, I just knew it was time to say goodbye.

And he passed. Uh, not too long after. I don’t say all those things to get sympathy or for you to be my counselor. I imagine, honestly, if we were to swap stories, mine might be the least, you know, traumatic in the room. I only say all that to say. I’ve done the work of like, working through those stories.

’cause I do, I feel this like weird, anxious feeling in my body. So I’ve, I’ve kind of seen, I’ve, I’ve worked with God, like, okay, I still see the goodness of God in all the circumstances that have happened to me in my life, including times and Christmas. But my body has this way of remembering every single Christmas and, and the word I wanna use is fear.

I feel fear on Christmas. Next slide, please. For one, our family doesn’t have. Any type of surgeries right before Christmas. ’cause I’ve learned, okay, you just might be throwing something up that Christmas night. So like I literally, I’m supposed to meet with a dentist and I postponed it to January. Is that logical?

Probably not. But that’s how fear works. What fear does, it doesn’t just live in our thoughts, which is torment enough, but what it winds up doing is it ingratiates itself into our bodies. Into our habits and to our instincts. I know for me, fear has had this way of like robbing me, of enjoying my present moment.

When I think even about like when my kids were really small. I kind of don’t remember those memories and I think it’s because I had some other things happening in my life, some anxiety and fear that was really. Taking control. It also, fear has this way of re re rewiring and re rewriting. Why is that word so hard to say?

Rewriting our memories from the past to like doom and gloom. Like honestly, when I set out to write this story about what happened when I was 10, I forgot about the go-kart. I just only think about all of that. That crime scene, but there’s a way where our memory, we just only remember the bad things. It also, as you grow into adulthood, what fear does is it retrains our expectations.

This is why I think I love being around kid kids because they expect coming good. You live life long enough, you start to just expect coming grief. I am always thinking, is this the last Christmas with my grandma? Is this the last Christmas with this, that, or the other? And so. After decades of life in ministry, the Apostle John here empowered by the Holy Spirit.

He doesn’t shame us for having fear. What he does is he names it. What John is doing here is he’s diagnosing something that’s so deeply embedded in the human heart that many of us can’t even imagine life without it. Dallas Willard, I know you’ve never heard of him before. He’s a philosopher, a brilliant author, great Christian thinker, wrote one of my favorite books, the Renovation of the Heart.

It’s a reread I do every single December. He puts it this way. I think it’s so true. Most people cannot envision who they would be without the fears. Angers, lusts, power, poise, and woundedness with which they have lived so long. But in Christ, you and I absolutely can live free from this. Every Christmas I find myself coming back to one John four ’cause I love the picture he’s painting that because of Christmas and Easter, he envisions that you and I can live a life without fear.

In the here and out. What’s so striking is that John as again, empowered by the Holy Spirit as he writes this letter, he doesn’t begin with good advice. He doesn’t begin by saying, be brave, get braver. Quit fearing. No. He begins with good news. God is love. Before he tells us what fear does, he tells us who God is.

Before he addresses our anxiety, he reminds us of God’s. Goodness. So I want us to look just at a few key verses again for us to truly understand this Christmas message in one John four. Let’s look at verse nine again. Verse nine says, God’s love was revealed among us. In this way, God sent his one and only son into the world.

You may notice this language is similar to John three 16, right? For God so loved the world, he sent his one and only son. So John is reusing this language ’cause it’s so important. God sent his one and only son into the world that’s Christmas so that we might live through him. Love consists in this, not that we loved God, so we’re not the initiator here, but that he loved us and sent his son.

Why? What purpose to be the atoning sacrifice. For our sins. This word love here. If you grew up in church, you’ve likely heard this before, but I think it’s worth repeating. There’s four different, at least four different Greek words for love. Any of you heard this before, like English. This is what’s fascinating.

In English. We have one word, love. So here’s what’s fascinating about the English language. I can describe many things as things that I love. First of all, I absolutely love my wife. Aw, 13 years ago today I proposed. She did say Yes, you know, the first time, and I love her so much and it’s her birthday tomorrow, happy birthday.

And it always gets ignored because it’s right before Christmas. Okay. I also really love running. Did you guys know that? I run. I’m kidding. I’m like turning into like those CrossFitters, you know? Amen. Right. I love running. I love to talk about it, but I also recently, like this new fad for me is I love getting the bean and cheese burrito with sour cream inside at Backyard Taco, like the drive-through.

Glorious. Love it. Now I just use love. But I promise you, babe, there’s different variations in meetings. But I don’t love my wife the same that I love that burrito. Right? It’s important to know we ha well sometimes. I’m kidding. I’m kidding. It’s imp when you faster for 48 hours, that burrito looks good, right?

Sometimes. Where was I going? Love here in this language. It’s so helpful to know it’s agape love. In the Greek, the four different ones. One is phileo, where we get Philadelphia. If phileo is brotherly love. This is like friendship, love, and that’s one of the greatest gifts in life. Honestly, I love my friends and honestly don’t know what I would do without.

Some of them. Amen. Can we be honest this morning? All right. Uh, the other thing is aeros love, which is romantic love, right? Which is beautiful. That’s not the word John is using storage. A love means family love. It’s that kinda love where it’s like, man, you’re we’re blood, so I kind of have to love you.

It’s good love, you know, but it’s like, it’s kind of forced. You were born into it. Beautiful thing. That’s not the love he’s using here. The word here is agape, which simply means like sacrificial love. A lot of authors put it this way, agape love is essentially putting the good of another ahead of your own, even at major costs to yourself.

So to love someone is to put their good above your own, usually, meaning you are, you are at a deficit. You have to lose out on something. You have to sacrifice something in order for their good. This is Christmas. This is God. God is love. It’s not superficial. It’s not sentimental. It’s sacrificial. It’s unconditional.

So John is saying, God is agape love. And then he says, this is how he proved it. He took the initiative, he sent his one and only son into the world. So a lot of us, even in our understanding of the gospel, we just assume God’s on this mountain and we’re trying to do as many goodies as possible to get up and to meet him.

That is not the Christmas message. The Christmas message is you can’t get up there. So God came down. In the flesh, in the form of a baby, in a, as a servant, Philippians two says. He was born in a manger. He came down to us ’cause we can never come up to him. But also, how also did he prove this love? He sent his one and only son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.

This is atonement. This is very important in theology. I’ve. Remember, in seminary, my professor says The easiest way to remember atonement is at one meant. It means we are made right with God. Our sins separated us from God, but through his atoning sacrifice, we are now at one with God again. How we were always designed to live and dwell with him and to remain in him, but that’s only possible through the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.

So this love, it’s not hollow. It’s not theoretical, it’s sacrificial, it’s rooted in history, it’s unconditional, and this love is strong enough to handle our fear. So once love is defined this way, once it is anchored in God’s initiative and in his sacrifice, John then names how this kind of love does something to fear.

Let’s see what it says. Verse 18. There is no fear in love. Even that’s fascinating to me. We typically contrast fear and faith and love and hate. But John is making a statement here saying, actually the opposite of love here is fear. These are, these two things are opposed to each other instead, perfect love drives out.

Or other translations say casts out fear because fear involves punishment. Let’s look at that line again. Perfect Love drives out fear. A few things I wanna point out. First of all, perfect. Perfect. Here, uh, can mean one of two things. I think typically with our like platonic, uh, insights and, and influence from Greek culture, perfect.

We usually think as flawless as like aced the test did it perfectly, but the Hebrews understood perfect to be something different. Sure, it’s flawless, but a better kind of word to use is fullness. So read this as the fullness of love. Drives out fear. So if you are full of love, all of the love that God has attended for you, that is now perfect.

It’s made complete. Okay? So this full love is what drives out fear. Dallas Willard, you may have never heard of him before. He is a philosopher and a great author. Anybody. Okay. He actually exudes one John four here, and he argues looking at one John four, there’s four movements toward perfect love. So let me march through those quickly.

First of all, he first loves us, so if we have fear in our life, we have a love problem. We need to receive love more. Step number one is to first recognize this is so crucial. It’s not like we made ourselves lovable or we decided to love God first. No, God first loved us. He’s the initiator. It. Now, some of us, we get caught up in life because we’re waiting for everyone to first love us.

Some of us we need to take that initiative. But isn’t it a blessing when someone takes the initiative first, when they’re the one who shows love first? What a what? A what a grace. God loved us well before we loved him. Paul says this in Romans five, eight, but God proves his own love for us, and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

So that’s number one. Some of us, we need to sit there. And, and, and receive that. Number two. Now, we love God. Because he first loved us. So the next kind of movement towards this fullness of love is that our souls awaken to the beauty of Christ himself. You’ll see this a lot, and we don’t knock it. When people first come to Christ, when they first get saved, often in their language, you learn why they wanna pray.

Why they love God is the feeling they get. It’s like, oh, I’m no longer guilty anymore. I feel like there’s peace, and those are all beautiful things and we celebrate that. But at some point in your spiritual maturity. You will get to a point that you’re praying ’cause you want him. It’s his presence, it’s who he is, your love.

You no longer just love the gifts, you love the giver. That’s a step towards perfect love and we wanna help you with that. Honestly, the third step is that we begin to love one another. I said this last service, I think it’s worth repeating. By the way. This isn’t like step 1, 2, 3, 4. So then this is an excuse like, I can’t love you yet.

’cause I’m not like, sure God loves me, so I can’t, I can be a jerk to you. That’s not what I’m saying here, but there is something about this progression. At the same time, when we begin to receive his love and we love him back, what happens is you genuinely love those around you. We’re called as Christians in our community to love the local church, but also those outside of the faith.

And that leads to the fourth movement. We are loved by others and this one’s huge. So important. Not just that we love, but we allow people in our church, in our families to love us. My youth pastor would tell me this all the time. I, again, you’re not my counselor, but I have processed like it’s really hard for me.

To allow others to love me. I’d rather be on the serving side. But that’s actually a problem that’s problematic. It means I don’t understand love. And so my youth pastor, I’d always say no, um, to certain things. And my youth pastor would always tell me, Trey, don’t rob them of your, of their blessing. So for him, like sometimes he wanna pay, uh, for dinner.

And I’m like, no, no, no. He said, Trey, don’t rob me of my blessing. Some of us, we are robbing others of their blessing. Because we refuse to allow them to love us, to sacrifice for us. And if you are in that, I’m in that boat, you have not fully stepped into perfect love, which obviously means you’re battling fear according to the Apostle John here.

All four components are what contribute to perfect love, and we are designed to live in that perfect love. And if we don’t live in that perfect love, we have nothing but fear and chaos and disorder. This is hard. Because giving love, receiving love, it’s difficult. Why? Because we’ve experienced people who claim they love and yet they don’t.

You can think through our upbringing. You can think about your experience with love. Who among us doesn’t have someone that we looked up to that promised love and yet always underdelivered. And so as a result, what happens is that fear gets a foothold in your life. And this is what I think the Apostle John is warning.

There are four ways fear gets a foothold in your life. Number one. Is when we don’t truly receive God’s love for us. This is the biggest way to make sure fear has a foothold, a stranglehold over your life, and it doesn’t even matter if you grew up in church and heard the right teaching. For me, I grew up in a gospel centered church, and yet still I have this instinct to think that God loves me when I perform well.

But if I’m not doing well, if I don’t perform. God is mad. I have displeased him and he doesn’t want anything to do with me. That’s hard. Uh, one key line that honestly changed my life, this was a few years ago in this book, um, he says, okay, a lot of you as Christians, we do believe that God loves us, but do you believe that God likes you?

That’s hard, but God likes you. And I just wanna say this as an invitation, if you feel repulsed by that, if you feel like there’s no way, what a beautiful invitation for you to step into his love this next year. ’cause it really is a lifelong learning of how to step into his love. Ephesians three would argue that as well, Paul makes that argument.

Number two, not only, uh, another way that fear can get a foothold is number two, we still clinging to the loves of this world instead of delighting in God. This is part of immaturity. This is part of us growing, but many of us are like, what the proverbs say in chapter 26, verse 11. We are like the dogs who keep returning to our own vomit.

Some of us aren’t experiencing perfect love because we just, we believe the lie of sin. What sin does, Adrian Rogers would always say, A pastor that passed away about a decade ago send thrills and then it kills. It fascinates and then it assassinates. But some of us are still stuck in that lie. We still think it thrills and it’s killing us, but we can’t let it go.

This is how fear gets a foothold. Number three, we harbor resentment or hatred toward one another. You’ll see these are the exact opposites of the first four points that I first made. We harbor resentment. I think it’s really hard. As Christians, we love to preach forgiveness. But it’s really hard for us to extend it to certain people.

Jesus gives major warnings about this. Woe to you if you think you’re forgiven, if you don’t forgive others. Number four, we resist receiving love when it’s extended to us. Some of us, we just feel so deeply unlovable, and so we resist. We mask it in humility. But can we just name that that’s not humility at all?

It’s fear, it’s distrust, and God hasn’t designed you to live that way. John here is sounding the alarm. That fear is a foothold, and we’ve gotten so used to living with it, but it’s crushing our lives. And so Paul, that’s why John says it must be driven out, but how well we just read, the only way is it’s driven out by perfect love.

But let’s say we don’t wanna receive perfect love. Are there any other solutions? What happens if we don’t surrender and consent to perfect love? Well, first of all, without perfect love, we’re left to drown out our fears. We are in a cultural moment where addictions and distractions are always on offer.

They’re always at our fingertips. You may be in the room where you’re thinking, how come I can’t get away from the phone? How come I can’t get away from these addictions? And you’re not even sure what you are afraid of. But at a subconscious level, what your body and brain is doing is you feel that fear and you will do whatever it takes to get rid of it.

You’ll do whatever it takes to drown it out, see if Christmas didn’t happen. If God didn’t come down in the flesh to save us, instead of naming our fear, we’re only left. Our only hope is to numb our fear. What’s the other option? Without perfect love, we are left to divvy out our fears. This is why Paul always warns about gossip and backbiting.

What we begin to do, just look around. We spend our days pulling others into our anxiety by sharing the news, by spreading conspiracies. I will say this is a millennial thing to do, and I’m happily a millennial. I think it’s the whatever. Uh, I was about to say, it’s the best. That’s not true. Maybe it’s true.

Anyways, um, we blame our family of origin for a lot of things. As a church, I’m a fan of the genogram. It’s where you look at your family tree and name the sins of your past. I actually think it’s really healthy and really helpful, but at some point we must be set free from blaming our upbringing. At some point, we have to recognize digging up our past does bring so much clarity how we got here, but it doesn’t have the power to get us to where we want to go.

See this Christmas. We’re reminded if God didn’t come down. Instead of naming our fears, all we’re stuck to do is to blame our fears, blame our problems to everyone else around us. But here’s the good news. Fear doesn’t need distractions or explanations. It ultimately needs the incarnation. Incarnation means God with us.

One of the most, the most frequent command of the Bible is actually do not fear. My favorite scripture in the Bible is do not be afraid for. I am with you, Isaiah 41 10, and this is what Christmas is about. We remember the I am with you Emmanuel. God is with us. Psalm 23. Yay. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

Why for you are with me. I just think it’s, it’s really helpful for us today to remind you, Christmas is not a fairytale. His love is real. It’s sacrificial. It’s unconditional. Christ was born of aversion. He, he did live the perfect life. He died on our behalf. He was buried. He rose again. On the third day.

He appeared before his disciples and 500 witnesses, and then he ascended to the right hand of God and he’s daily making intercession for you and for me. Do you know him? Do you love him? Better question. Have you allowed him to love you? Anybody feel that? Anybody? Like, don’t raise your hand, but like when you have single friends and you just like, you feel like it’s your burden to connect them with, you know, like get them married off and, which I know is toxic, it’s bad, whatever.

But I’ve done this right? And it’s so hard because it’s like you found the perfect match. But then you put them together and you’re like, how did the dinner go? And you’re like, yeah, it just wasn’t the right fit. I’m like, not the right fit. This is, he’s perfect for you. Right. We did this a lot when we did college ministry.

We, we, a lot of people are married because, because of our ministry. I’m just saying, I feel this though when Iwhenever, I preach on love. ’cause I can say how good God is, how he loves you, but it truly is up to you to receive it. It’s up for you to make it personal. And I think this is why this is the most important thing to settle this Christmas because your vision of God’s love determines the version of your life.

I think everything you can, you can figure out a lot of life if you know that he loves you. And I personally don’t think we ever graduate from this journey towards perfect love. I think there’s grace along the way. I think today we have to ask the question, what is today’s version for me of perfect love and how can I grow into it?

I, I just believe every day is a new step. It’s a new revelation. It’s a new opportunity to surrender. The more I follow Jesus and try to embrace his love for me, I’ve realized it’s less like a map that we trace and it’s more like a scent that we follow. It’s just, you just kind of take the next step, where’s God leading you next?

And I think it’s just really important to name this. Every time we feel fear, we have to recognize it’s actually an invitation to love. I am only fearing because I am not remembering his love for me, or I’m not extending that love to others. And I think we need to be honest. We all have to grow into our understanding of God’s love.

Just look at the next line here in verse 18. It says, because fear involves punishment. Lemme put it this way, a sign. That fear has a foothold in your life is you interpret God’s activity in your life as punishment. Now, does God prune us? Absolutely. John 15. Hebrews 12. He’s a good father. He disciplines those he loves, but he doesn’t punish us.

And I’m speaking to Christians in the room. Christ atoning sacrifice for our sins means Jesus took the punishment in our place. Romans eight, one, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. So my simple question is, are you living in that reality? Do you see God’s love?

Because your vision of God’s love determines the version of your life, for example. I was so mad. Can we just confess here? I was so mad at Pastor Caleb. I’m gonna let that sit for a while. Um, he taught on Zechariah to start Advent that guy. Every year I’ve done Zechariah. It’s like my favorite Christmas story.

God bless you. I’m not actually mad at him. Just a little bitter. Anyways, I’ve given it to the father. Let’s move on. Here’s what I love about that story. When God silences Zechariah, what has been your interpretation of that action? I think most of us, we assume God’s angry. He’s disappointed, he’s upset, and so he punishes Zechariah saying, you should have just said, oh, I believe instead you are like, how could I?

Are you sure? And so it looks like punishment, but what if instead God is love. He loves his children. What if instead of punishment, what if God here was. Preparing him for greater things to come. What if in this story, God was blessing zacharia with silence so that Zacharia would stop talking and start listening to the loving voice of God?

I’d argue that’s what happened. Look at Zechariah when he could finally start speaking at the end of Luke chapter one. He’s filled with joy and love. He understands the plan of salvation. He gets where God is going. He had to step away from the noise of fear and step into the silence of love. That wasn’t punishment.

It his beautiful gift of preparation. And Christmas is a gift ’cause it’s that same reminder for you and me, for those who are in Christ Jesus. God is love. So I just wanna submit to you how might you need to reinterpret God’s activity in your life? ’cause fear is making you think he’s punishing you, but what if he’s actually loving you?

What I have noticed what fear does, what fear likes to do is it likes to grab control from God, but love gives consent to God. I have found fear wants us to believe the lie that we earn God’s love once we have no more sin. But actually, the gospel says we receive God’s love more and more. When we have no more secrets.

Our job is just to confess that sin and he is faithful. And just to forgive us of all unrighteousness, one John one says, how much better an invitation. You just give it to him, and that’s how I want us to end our time today. I want you to ask this question to yourself honestly. How is God inviting you further into his perfect love?