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Holy Trinity Anglican Orthodox Church
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The Measure of God's Love |
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Romans
5:8 Easter
Sunday March
23,2008 Love is measured by giving. Some mistakenly think it is measured by feelings or desire, and people often say they love something when they really mean they desire it. But, when someone says he loves you, you measure his love not by how much desire he feels for you but by how much he is willing to give to you. Even giving does not fully measure love. For this we must move beyond giving to sacrifice. Love is measured by what the lover is willing to sacrifice for the beloved. So, when God wanted you to know how much He loves you, He had to find a way to make a sacrifice big enough to express the greatness of His love. He had to find a way to sacrifice Himself for your benefit. Your creation and preservation from conception to this moment is not a full measure of God’s love for you. Great as that is, it is not much of a sacrifice to God. To God the nations of this world are like a sprinkle of dust on a scale that measures weight in megatons. Heaven is His throne and earth is His footstool. Indeed, all things exist in the mind of God, and He Himself is greater than all else combined. So to keep you alive is no great effort for Him. To provide for your needs costs Him very little. Giving gifts of worldly possessions is not a full measure of the love of God. Yes, He gives them, and yes, to us they are wonderful blessings, but they are mere drops in a bucket to God. To give the entire creation to you would not be a full expression of God’s love. If He were to give it all to you, as He did to Adam and Eve, it would not really be much of a sacrifice for God. He can make countless universes just like this one, and He can make them in a nanosecond. To give one to each of us would be less of a sacrifice for God than putting a penny in the Salvation Army pot at Christmas would be for you. A more accurate measure of His love is the way He puts up with you and bears with you in spite of the fact that your ways are often contrary to His. Have you ever been in a situation where you have to put up with someone’s faults, just for the sake of love? Perhaps you have a family member you love dearly, who has this one terrible habit that drives you crazy. If it were anyone else you would avoid him forever, but you love this person, so you endure this fault. After all, he does have some endearing qualities. But, in the eyes of God you are all “faults.” He does not love you because you are good, and He doesn’t endure your faults because you have so many good qualities that endear you to His heart. You are all faults, with nothing endearing about you to commend yourself to Him. The confession of sin in our service of “Morning Prayer” accurately assesses your situation before God; saying you have; “erred
and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.
We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own
hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws.
We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and
we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no
health in us.” We are all faults, but God is faultless. He is absolute perfection. If we compare Him to light, there is no darkness in Him at all. His goodness is absolute. There is no variation or dissimilitude in Him. So His toleration of you is an act of love. He loved you while you were a sinner. He has sacrificed His peace and His rights, to allow you to exist in His presence with all your shortcomings and with all your faults. Yet, even this is not the full measure of God’s love. For God not only puts up with your continued existence, but also allows you to have a kind of friendship with Him. He allows you to call on Him in prayer. He allows you to read His word in the Bible. He allows you to worship Him and to be a member of His Church. In fact, He encourages these things. He invites you to pray. He invites you to worship. He invites you to come to Church. To even allow us to just call upon His name is an act of unspeakable love, yet He invites us to do much more than merely call upon Him. Truly this is a great expression of His love, but even this is not enough to show the depth and scope of God’s love for you. There was only one way for Him to show how much He loves you; He had to sacrifice that which is most dear to Him. He had to give it up. He had to sacrifice it for you. He had to give His life for you. He had to snatch you from the jaws of death and hell, by taking them on Himself in your place. We have seen or heard of instances where people gave their lives to save another. We have marveled at the bravery and selfless love that leads a person to make such a sacrifice. And yet, we have all felt that way sometime. I dare say every person in this room would lay down his or her life to save his spouse or children or parents. So we can understand just a little of what God had to do to show his love for us. But, after all, we are only human, as are the ones for whom we would lay down our lives. We are equals, one with another. But God is God. No one of us is His equal. None of us individually, nor all of us together could ever be worth the sacrifice of the life of God. The fact is we are all criminals against the only true law of justice that exists in any place or any time. We have all broken the just law of God, and in breaking His law we have rejected Him as surely as the people rejected Christ by choosing Barabbas. In breaking His commandments we have mocked Him as surely as the Roman soldiers mocked Jesus when they placed the crown of thorns upon His innocent head. We have lived as though God has no claim on us, as though we owe Him nothing, or as though He is a pet or a possession to be toyed with and enjoyed on our own terms, according to our fickle whims and passions. There is no greater rejection. Perhaps you have known rejection in your life. Every time you sin you are treating God with the same kind of rejection you experienced, and God is offended by your rejection. Does not this God of love have the right to justice? Do we not become debtors to Him for our sins? Does He not have the right to be angry at us? Does He not have the right to punish us for our crimes? And if the punishment should fit the crime, does our sin require anything less of us than hell forever? We have rejected the ultimate Good, should we not reap the ultimate evil? But God loves you so much He took your death and your hell on Himself. He suffered in your place, and bore it all for you. That’s what the cross of Jesus Christ was all about. It was love so great it gave everything for you. God died so you could live. “God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” We need to be sure we don’t minimize the magnitude of Christ’s sacrifice. I heard a person ask once what was the big deal about Jesus’ dying on the cross? If He was God He knew He was going to rise again anyway, so it just wasn’t that great a thing. It is true that Jesus was and is God. But it is also true that He became a man and made Himself live by His own rules, with no special insights, no special knowledge, no special power that were not available to every other human being. He didn’t cheat. He made Himself live by human limitations, and made Himself live by faith, just exactly the way you and I have to. Therefore, it was a great trial for Jesus to face the cross. It was a great trial, and He feared it as other men would fear it. He prayed that it would pass from Him, that he would not have to drink that “cup.” It is impossible to overemphasize the faith this required, even for the Son of God. But He was willing to face it. He was willing to go to that cross, willing to suffer that horrible death. Why? Because the one thing He did not leave in Heaven with His divine power and divine knowledge, was his divine love. How do you know how much God loves you? He died for you. Many people today hate the cross. They see it as a symbol of wrath and an emblem of hate. In reality it is the greatest symbol of love this hate-filled world has ever seen. If love truly is measured by sacrifice, the cross shows the greatest sacrifice that has ever been or ever could be made, all done for you because God loves you. But Jesus didn’t just die, He rose again. He ascended into Heaven and He said He has gone there to prepare a place for you, that where He is there you may be also. And He proves that death is not the end. He proves that there is more than the grave, and more than hell ahead for His people. As He rose so shall we. As He lives forever, so also shall his people. Christ died, and Christ arose. Thanks be to God. Amen. The Rev. Dr. R. Dennis Campbell, Vicar, Holy Trinity Anglican Church,
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