A Love that Chose Us

I sing in a song that's a popular song around this time of the year. It's been around for a long, long time. The song Joy to the World was written in 1719 by a guy who is known as the Father of Hymns. He wrote over 750 different hymns. He grew up in England. He grew up in a time where only the Psalms were allowed to be sung in the church, but things began to change, and they began to allow hymns to be sung in the church. And so this guy by the name of Isaac Watts wrote many, many hymns. He was a guy who was very short in stature and struggled with health issues most of his life. And when he was in his mid-40s, really struggling physically, he went to a place just outside of London. And it was there during his stay, a time of just trying to get renewed, that he wrote the words to the song that we sang earlier, Joy to the World. What's interesting about that song is that you'll notice there's no mention in the song of shepherds or of wise men or of a manger or of angels or of a baby. And the reason for that is that Isaac Watts never wrote that to be a Christmas song. He wrote it about the second coming of Jesus. A hundred years later, a guy by the name of Lowell Mason

set it to music from a handle, and it then evolved into this very popular Christmas song. The fourth verse of Joy to the World says this, he rules the world with truth and grace and makes the nations prove the glories of his righteousness and wonders of his love. So we've been in a series the last couple of weeks called Wonder. We talked about the wonder of his name last week. We talked about the wonder of his arrival. Here's what I want us to look at today, the wonder of his love, the wonder of his love. Hey, do me a favor, watching us today, literally thousands of incarcerated men and women all over America, we wanna wish you a Merry Christmas and from the refuge, come on, give them a big welcome this morning. We love you. We're so thankful that you could join us today. We're gonna look at a couple of passages of scripture, one out of John 15, one out of 1 John chapter three. Would you do me a favor and stand to honor the word of God this morning as we read a few verses. If you don't have your Bible or device, it's on the screen behind me. But in John chapter 15, beginning in verse nine, we find these words, as the father has loved me, so I have loved you, Jesus says, now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love

just as I have kept my father's commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this, love each other as I have loved you. And then verse 13, greater love has no one than this to lay down one's life for one's friends. Greater love has no one than this and one would lay down his life for his friends. We're gonna pause today, we're gonna look at the wonder of his love. Let's make some declarations together before you're seated. Everybody in the room, everybody watching online, nice and loud, here we go, ready, go. I will hide this word in my heart that I might not sin against God. This word is life to my body. I will be a doer of the word and not a hearer only. And I am confident of this, that he who has begun a good work in me, in Jesus' name, amen. Come on, if you're excited about the word of God, somebody say amen this morning. Listen, I believe one of the greatest dangers and one of the greatest threats to our faith is not rebellion, but it's familiarity. You see, I believe we can become so familiar with sacred things that we lose the ability to be awed and amazed by the things of God. You see, the word wonder, we've said in this series,

literally means a cause to be amazed and astonished at something. And I think we become so familiar. familiar with things like the love of God, that we've somehow lost the ability to really be amazed by it. You see, in our culture, we're not amazed by much. We see feats of greatness and amazing athletic accomplishments and these incredible acts of kindness along with violent acts and random acts of love over and over and over and we just stroll right past because we just saw the same thing an hour earlier. But let me tell you something. The love of God is not just something for us to believe, but I believe the love of God is something for us to behold. And that's why John says, in 1 John 3, verse one, he says, see, everybody say see. He says see, he doesn't say study it, he doesn't say ponder it, he doesn't say prove it. He says, I want you to stop and I want you to behold and see and gaze with wonder and be amazed and astonished by the great love of God. And that's what we're gonna do for the next few minutes, for the next three or four hours. I caught some of you sleeping right then. You were like, what, what? Oh gosh, we gotta go.

We're gonna pause and we're gonna see if we can recapture the wonder of his love. We're gonna look at three things. First of all, I want us to look and be amazed and I want us to consider the wonder of a love, the wonder of a love that chose us, that chose us. Look with me, if you will, in Ephesians chapter one, verse four and five, it says this. Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, watch, and it gave him great pleasure. It says there before he made the world, that means before you messed up, before every flaw, before every act of rebellion, before every dumb decision and before every sin and before we got our act together, he chose you. You see, there's a concept that some people have that I've messed up too much or I'm too addicted or I'm too immoral and I could never come to Jesus this way so I need to get my act together first. Let me listen to some more TED Talks. Let me read some more books that maybe will help me in 2026 get my act together and then maybe I'll come to Jesus and the wonderful and amazing thing about his love is that he says, I want you to come just like you are with your addiction, with your immorality,

with your fear, with your pride, with your anger. Jesus says, you come to me just like you are, broken and messed up because I chose you before you ever did all that stuff. And he loves us with an everlasting love. He loves us in a way that says you don't have to get your act together first. You come to me and I'll get you cleaned up. Aren't you thankful that God didn't pick us the way we pick teams for a pickup basketball game? You remember that? You be a captain, you be a captain, pick your teams. And then the captains would go down the line and say, that guy looks athletic, I'll take him. The next one would go, that guy looks really quick, I'll take you. Next one, that guy's really tall, I want you on my team. And they'd go back and forth picking, and you just hoped you wouldn't be the last person picked. And what you hoped even more than that is that the captains weren't fighting over who would get stuck with you. You know, at the end, they're fighting, going, I had Stuart last time, you gotta take him this time. No, no, no, no, no, I don't want him again. I've had him four times on my team, and we always lose. Aren't you so thankful? God didn't pick us that way. Listen, I want to remind you, God did not pick you based on your talent.

God didn't pick you based on your looks. Thank God. Most of you would have been in serious, serious trouble. God didn't pick us based on our abilities. God didn't pick us based on our charisma, but he picked you and I solely based on his love for you. And here's the wonder, here's the wonder. We're just stopping and looking at the wonder of his love. The wonder is this, that you were wanted before you were faithful. You were loved before you were lovable. And God chose you before you were changed. Come on, somebody ought to say amen this morning. Come on, are you thankful for his love today? We're just stopping, we're just pausing. We want to see this great love that the father has bestowed on us. The second thing is just to stop and to gaze on the wonder of a love that pays it all, that pays the ultimate price for us. Listen, love is not communicated just in words, but it's more communicated in sacrifice. Salvation is free, we're thankful for that, but it's very costly for heaven. The Bible says, very familiar verse, John 3, verse 16, God loved the world, and that includes you and I so much that he gave his one and only son that whoever would believe in him would not perish, but have eternal life. God sacrificed everything, everything for you and I

so that we could be redeemed. That word redeemed means to be bought back. And he didn't redeem us with gold or silver or Bitcoin or stocks, he redeemed us with the precious blood of his son, Jesus. Let's just stop and look at that for a moment. And I've told people for years, if you would have been the only person on the planet, God still would have sent his one and only son, Jesus, to die for you. That'll blow your mind, because there's not a one of us that deserves that kind of love. And that should amaze us. He didn't just give some, he didn't just give some token gift, he gave the very best thing that he had to offer. And listen to me, the cross was not God's backup plan. He didn't scheme up some plan where he thought mankind could be saved and redeemed, and then that didn't work, and so he said, well, gosh, I guess I've gotta go to my backup plan. I guess I'll have to sacrifice my son, Jesus. No, from the very beginning, his plan was to sacrifice Jesus for you and I, because God looks and he sees this chasm between himself and man, he sees this gap, and he knows that we have no way whatsoever of being cleansed of our sin. We have no way of making up the gap and having relationship with God.

And the thing he wanted so much was relationship with you and I. That's why he chose us, that's why he was willing to give everything, so that we could come back into relationship with him. That should amaze us, that should blow our minds. Listen, love gets, love costs. As a parent and a grandparent, when it comes to one of my kids or one of my grandkids, the price for their soul doesn't matter. Listen, I'll sell my house, I'll give an organ, I'll give a kidney, whatever I have to do, because that kind of love that the Father has bestowed on us doesn't negotiate and it doesn't hesitate, it just says, what will it take? What will it take? And that's what God said about you and I. What do I need to give so that I can have relationship with these folks? First Peter chapter one, verse 18 and 19 says this. For you know that God paid a ransom to save you from the empty life that you inherited from your ancestors. And it was not paid with mere gold or silver which lose their value, it was the precious blood of Christ, the sinless, spotless Lamb of God. I'll just pause for a moment, would you? And remind yourself of a love that gave everything so that you could have relationship with the Father, so that you would be adopted into his family, so that you could cry, Abba, Father, I belong to you,

I'm your son, I'm your daughter. It amazes us. Thirdly, I want us to. Consider today the wonder of a love that pursues us. A love that pursues us. Romans chapter five, verse eight says this, but God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. Listen, God made the first move. He doesn't just love us when we cross the finish line. He doesn't just love us when we act the right way all the time. No, his love for us is unconditional, and he loves us when we're in the ditch or when we're in the pig pen. He loves us exactly the way we are. But you've heard the old saying, God loves you the way that you are, but he loves you way too much to leave you that way. Come on, how many of you are glad for that? Come on, when you were shooting stuff in your veins or you were partying like it was 1999 and you were doing all kind of crazy stuff and the Lord still loved you and he still chased you down and pursued you and came after you. Listen, he chose you, you didn't choose him. He chose you. Come on, are you thankful for that today? Listen, Luke chapter 15 tells us three parables,

three stories, one about a lost sheep, one about a lost corn, one about a lost son. And in the first parable about a lost sheep, the story goes like this, that there was a shepherd who had 100 sheep and one of them goes away. And the Bible tells us in Isaiah, all we like sheep have gone astray. We've all been here, so the goal and the intention of Jesus in telling these stories was that we would write ourself into the story. And we would see ourselves as that one sheep that wandered off. Not only that, but we would see him as the one who goes after us. So in the story, the shepherd leaves the 99 sheep, you know the story, and he goes after the one. And when he finds him, what I love is that he didn't lecture the sheep, he didn't yell at the sheep, nor did he leave the sheep there to figure out how to get back to the fold. But the story goes like this. He picks the sheep up, puts the sheep over his shoulders, and he carries him back. In the second parable, there's a coin, a valuable coin that's lost. They search, they turn furniture over, they sweep, they do everything they can to find the coin. And then in the third parable, it's a parable that's very familiar to us

about a boy, a son, who runs away from his family and he runs away from his father. As a matter of fact, Luke 15 says he goes to his dad and he makes a demand of him. He says to his father, give me my share of the estate. Now the father was very wealthy in this story. He had servants, he had cattle, he had land, and he had a lot of possessions. And the son says, I want my inheritance now. Now, in Jewish culture, for you to say that to a dad who was not ill and was still alive was one of the greatest insults there was. It was the same as if he would have said, dad, I wish you were dead. But the father concedes and he gives him his share of the estate. In the story that Jesus is telling to a predominantly Jewish audience, the son leaves and he goes to some distant country. We don't know which country and we don't even know how long he was there, but here's what we do know. That boy takes all of the money and he gets involved in all types of immorality and he parties like it's his birthday and he blows the money and he ends up broke and hungry. He gets a job at a pig farm. And the Bible says he's so desperate that he begins to long for the food that the pigs are eating.

Now, sometimes in the past when I had read this parable, it was a little puzzling to me because in the first two, the shepherd goes after the one sheep and the person who loses the coin frantically searches for it and if we're not careful, we could assume that in this story, the father has just given up on his son because he doesn't go after him. He doesn't go try to find him in this distant country. Let me tell you something. that the father had for his son never changed one time. But the father knew until the son came to the realization that he needed his father, that if the father went after him, he would just be throwing his pearls before pigs. Look what happens in Luke chapter 15, verse 17. It says, when he came to his senses, talking about the boy, he said, how many of my father's hired servants have food to spare and here I am starving to death. I'll sit out, go back to my father and say to him, father, I've sinned against heaven and against you. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants. So he got up and went to his father, verse 20. Now for years when I read this story, and it's a popular story, I thought that this was his moment of repentance. I think probably most of you thought the same thing because it says, when he came to his senses.

But that Jewish audience that was listening would recognize that statement. And it literally translates like this. When he thought about himself, when he thought about himself, ha, his motives were completely selfish. And here's why. He's desperate, he's blown all the money, and this son knows that he cannot go back into the community according to Jewish culture unless he repays what he lost. And he knows he has no way of doing that. And again, Jesus wants you and I to write ourself into the story and to see ourselves as the one who has rebelled, the one who has squandered what God has entrusted us, the one who's laying in the slop of pigs, and that might be addiction, it might be immorality, it might be selfishness, it might be greed, it might be pride, it could be a host of many things, but he wants you and I to see ourselves that way. So here's this boy. He's desperate. He has no way to repay what he's lost. And so he thinks about himself. And he thinks, I need to come up with a plan that will manipulate the heart of my dad. I know what I'll do. He says, I'll go back to my dad, I'll conjure up some fake tears. I'll say, Father, I've sinned against heaven

and against you. No longer worthy to be called your son. Dad, just make me like one of your slaves. He kind of rehearses the speech a few times, laying there in the slop of the pigs, and he's like, maybe it'll work. I think there's a chance. And so the Bible says in verse 20, he gets up and he begins to make his way back to his dad. Not because he has repented, not because he's remorseful, just because he's in a jam and he needs a way out. On the other end, there's a dad whose love has never changed for his son. I can just imagine every day that dad going out to the edge of his property, peering across the horizon, hoping, maybe today will be the day. Day after day, nothing. But one day, as he's peering across the horizon, he sees a figure way, way off in the distance. Hope stirs a little bit in his heart, but then he's like, no, no, no, I shouldn't get my hopes up. It's probably just some shepherd out there. He's looking and the figure's getting larger. He knows he's coming towards him. Again, hope begins to stir in his heart. Maybe, maybe could today be the day? Is that maybe my son? And he's watching and he's looking

and he looks like kind of the shape of my son. That could be him. And Jesus wanted not only for us to write ourself into the story as the son, but he wanted us to see the father who longs for us to come back to him. And all of a sudden the dad realizes, that's my boy, that's my son. And the Bible says he takes off running. And when he did that, he broke Jewish culture because a man on a long road. and this was a wealthy man, would never run in public. But this dad thinks, I don't care. I don't care what culture says, I don't care what anybody thinks, and he gathers that long robe up around his waist, and he begins running after his son. Was he excited to see him? Of course he was, but there was another reason that he ran to meet his son. And you see, according to Jewish culture, any Jewish boy who had lost his dad's inheritance to Gentiles was no longer welcome in the community. Matter of fact, from the Jerusalem Talmud, it's known that they had a method to punish them. It's called the Kesatzah ceremony. In fact, it's mentioned as well in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The ceremony was very simple. The people of the community, as soon as they caught wind, that someone who had done what this boy did,

they would take a large clay pot, they would fill it with burned corn and burned nuts, and they would run to the edge of the city limits, if you will, to the edge of the community, and they would meet that person there, and they would break, this was a ceremony, they would break that large jar at their feet, and the community would shout, so-and-so is cut off from our community! And they would publicly humiliate that boy. They would shame him. They would let him back in then, but nobody would have anything to do with him. This dad's excited to see his son, but he runs for another reason. He knows what's about to happen. He knows that the people of the city are about to meet his son. They're about to humiliate his son, and the dad thinks, I gotta get to him first. I gotta get to him before they shame him, before they humiliate him, if I can just get to him first, and the Bible says when the dad gets there to his boy with the smell of pigs and slop all over him still, before the son can say one thing, the dad starts kissing all over his neck. Loves him, not based on his behavior, not based on anything that he said,

but just because he's his son. And Jesus wanted you and I to see our father and our father who runs towards you because he wants to outrun the accuser. He wants to get to you first. He wants to get to you before the enemy can heap shame over you or humiliate you because you keep going back to that vice. You keep giving in to the addiction. You keep going back to that toxic relationship. You keep participating in immorality, and God says, no, no, no, you're my son, you're my daughter, not based on your behavior, not based on you saying the right thing to try to manipulate the heart of our heavenly father, but just simply because you're his. He pursues you, and he says, I love you, and I wanna kiss all over you, even with the smell of the world and the smell of sin still on you. I want to kiss you. I want to hug you. I want to love on you in the picture today as we stop and gaze at the love of a father lavished on us that we should be called children of God. Listen to me, we don't need some new truth. We need a renewed wonder about his love that he laid down his life for us. He lavished his great love on us. Can we just stop for a moment?

Can you just close your eyes right now? Can you just close yourself in with him and see, can you just see the great love of the father that's been bestowed on you, and then, can you just respond with. I wonder, can you respond with gratitude and with repentance and with worship? He's not asking you to get your act together first. No, he's saying, I'm kissing all over your neck just because I love you. Oh, the wonder of his love, the wonder of his love. He may be one of our friends that are in prison. I want you to see the father who loves you with an everlasting love. There's nothing you can do today to make him love you more than what he does right now. And there's nothing you can do that'll make him love you any less. He chose you. He paid the ultimate price for you. He pursues you today. That's the kind of father we have. So, Lord, I pray for every person in the room. I pray for every person watching online. I pray for our friends that are watching from a prison cell today. I pray that they would have a fresh revelation of your great love for us. They would understand, God, it's a love unlike anybody else's.

It's a love that doesn't purposefully demand perfection. It's a love that doesn't require that we stop something first, that we get our act together first. No, it's an amazing love. And I pray, God, for those that are not in a relationship with you that are here in the room or watching online or watching via Pando, I pray, God, if they're not in a relationship with you, that today would be the day that they allow you to embrace them. Maybe they were in a relationship before and they're not now, but, God, I pray that today would be the day on December the 21st that they come back into relationship with you. Lord, I pray for those that may be here that just need a fresh revelation of your love. Maybe the enemies beat them up over the same mistake over and over. I pray that today, God, they would just run into your arms. They would let Daddy just love, love all over them. Thank you.