Majestic Is The God Who Loves His People

Introduction

Well, good morning. In my Bible, I’ve opened the book of Ephesians, chapter 3, and I’d like for you to do the same, if you will, please. Ephesians 3. We’re going to spend most of our time together in this in this hour in this great New Testament passage. While you’re opening your Bible and getting settled, I too join the welcome you received. If you’re visiting with this church family as I am today, we especially welcome you. Thank you for being here. We hope you’ll have occasion to come back and worship with these good folks again. And I will take just a minute at the very beginning and tell you how happy I am to be with you today. I have looked forward to being with you for quite some time.

I’ve known a lot of good things about this congregation for many years. Appreciate very much the men who preach for you, Bob and Josh, both. And I know that you do too. And it is a particular pleasure to be with you for these four days. I’m grateful for the invitation of your good elders to come and be with you and trust that our time together will help us all as we’re trying to navigate our way from earth to heaven. I want to especially thank you for letting the Temple Terrace Church borrow Bob today. He’s been there several times with our people, and our folks just love him to death, and so I know that they’re going to uh they’re going to enjoy him an awful lot.

I also know that what I will hear when I get home is, boy, Don, we didn’t know what we were missing. And uh, they really love Bob and love to hear him preach. And so we appreciate you letting us borrow him, borrow him for a little while today. Look forward to being with you today, and Lord willing, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday night, we’re gonna talk about some very practical things and basic things as we talk about living the ancient faith in a modern world. For several years, I preached up in Indiana. In the last place that I preached there, outside of Indianapolis, we had a wonderful young couple with us named Brad and Sonia. Now, Brad was a good old Indiana boy, and Sonia was a Latin American girl from Columbia.

Her parents had sent her to study in the United States. And Brad and Sonia were attending separate colleges, although in the same town. And one evening Brad went into a restaurant, saw some friends at a table, and waved to them, and they motioned for him to come over and join them. And Sonia, this Latin American beauty, was at the table. Well, Brad, he kind of worked his way where he could sit by Sonya, and I want to tell you, he was smitten. Now, other people may have been talking, but he was only listening to what she had to say. He was taken with her completely. Well, somewhere in the evening, he heard something in the conversation at the table about skydiving. Now he didn’t hear exactly what it was, but he heard something about skydiving.

And he noticed that this interested Sonia, that she kind of perked up when she heard that. And so he took the cue and he said, skydiving. Tell you what, I have always wanted to skydive. I think that’d be just for the most fun thing in the world. And she looked at him with all the innocence in the world, and she said, Really? We are going tomorrow morning. You may join us. And Brad said that 12 hours later he found himself jumping out of a perfectly good airplane, trying to impress this young lady. I want to ask you this morning, what do you what do you trust that much? It takes a lot of trust, doesn’t it, to jump out of an airplane with a backpack that you hope and pray will open in order to save your life.

What do you trust that much? What do you trust enough that you are willing to commit your life to it? I want to tell you the psalmist answered that question for us regarding regarding his life, and he said, I trust in your unfailing love. My heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord because he has been good to me. And so he says, I just, I trust in God’s love. I want to tell you that God will never act in a way. It isn’t a reflection of his unfailing love for us. Now, it doesn’t always seem that way, just as when I was a boy, and my mom and dad would discipline me. I didn’t always interpret that as love, and yet I look back now and realize that they had my best interest at heart.

And so God says, I know the thoughts I think toward you, says the Lord. They are thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you future and to give you a hope. I want to tell you, if we could, if we could bottle and market those two things, future and hope, we’d have people lined up down the block today trying to get it because not a lot of folks in this world have it. But God offers that to us because he loves us. Let me ask you this morning.

How do you know for that matter that anybody loves you? Well, really, there are only two ways that you can know that. One is if someone tells us they can say to you, I love you. Well, God has done that. He’s declared his love for us over and over and over again. You no doubt have heard the old illustration about Carl Barth, a theologian visiting America, and he was asked, What is the most profound theological discovery that you’ve ever made? And he said, It is simply this.

Well, that’s exactly right. God has told us that he loves us. It’s an amazing thing. It is an unbroken thread from Genesis to Revelation. It is a tell of God’s love for us. I have loved you, God said, with an everlasting love, and there with loving kindness. I have drawn you. Would you please look at the screen for just a second? There’s an important note there that we ought to get out of the way and get rooted carefully to begin. Did you notice that God said, With loving kindness, I have drawn you? A hundred and fifty times the Old Testament speaks of God’s loving kindness. Now, sometimes it may be translated by the words mercy or simply kindness, but 150 times God says, I want you to know that I love you.

We ought to correct, therefore, I think the misperception that somehow in the Old Testament God was in an extraordinarily bad, foul mood. But thankfully, in the New Testament, he became a Christian and he brightened up. Well, you know, in the Old Testament, he was just as loving, just as kind, just as gracious, just as magnanimous toward his people. We often don’t realize that. But from Genesis to the end of the Bible, it’s a record of God’s love. And I’ll tell you the amazing thing about that is that it’s self-initiated. God loves us because of his nature and care for us. He doesn’t love us because we’re all that lovable. You know what we are? We are, ladies, we are like the back table in an obscure store in an outlet mall, and you go in on that back table, nothing’s neatly folded.

It’s all just piled up there and has a sign on it that says, slightly irregular. That’s what we are. You know what that means, don’t you? It means all those garments have a flaw. Now they won’t tell you what it is, you’ve got to find it, but you’re forewarned. There’s a flaw in all of those garments. Well, that’s what we are. We are flawed people. We are slightly irregular. And we all share the same flaw. All of sinned to come short of the glory of God. None righteous, no not one. As we saw in the Bible class, period, all of us, like sheep have gone astray. Every last one of us. He didn’t love us because we were perfect. He loved us because that’s his nature.

A preacher was once asked about Romans 9 and 13. Jacob I have loved and Esau I have hated. And a man said to him, that’s a tough verse for me. And the preacher said, You’re exactly right. That is difficult. He said, I have trouble understanding that. And the man said, That’s right. How could he say, Esau I have hated? How could God say that? And the preacher said, That’s not the part that troubles me. The hard part for me is the first. Jacob I have loved. How could God love a character like Jacob? But it begs the question, how could God love you and how could he love me? Because the fact of the matter is that we are all flawed before him. Well, God, God has told us that he loves us.

And then, secondly, of course, God’s demonstrated his love toward us. You know, real love has to be expressed tangibly. I can say to you, I love you, but the only way you’re really going to know that then is if I behave in a loving way toward you. Well, of course, God renews his mercies. The prophet said, every day, every good and perfect gift is from the Father of lights, in whom there is no variation or shadow of turn him. And so God sends tokens of his love every single day. Now, the greatest expression of his love, as you well know, was the gift of his son. God demonstrated, didn’t just say, I love you. God demonstrated his love toward us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

By this we know love, because he laid down his life for us. And therefore, we ought to do more than just sing about loving our brethren. And saying we love our brethren, we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. This is love. Not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. Ladies and gentlemen, nobody, nobody has ever been loved anymore. Nobody will ever be loved any more than you, so that you could be God’s people.

You thought I forgot about that, didn’t you? I want us to read together a passage out of Ephesians 3, where Paul has prayed for these brethren. He cared about it, that he loved a great deal. And he says, This is what I pray for you. If you don’t have a Bible, take a look at the screen. He said, I bow my knees to the Father on your behalf. And he said, I’m praying that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height, and to know the love of Christ, which passes knowledge, and that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

1. God’s Love Is Wide Enough to Include Everybody

Did you get that? Paul says, I’m praying that somehow, somehow, at some time in your Christian life, you may come to grasp, comprehend, understand some things about how much God loves you. He said, I’m praying that you will just glimpse something of the height and depth and length and breadth of the love of God. And it’s almost as if he’s saying, you know what? If we could see that, understand that, grasp that, know that, it would radically change our lives. If we just knew how much God loves us, it would motivate us to be the people that God wants us, wants us to be. May I talk about that with you for just a minute? And I suggest to you just what Paul did. That number one, God’s love is wide enough to include everybody.

God’s love is wide enough to include everybody. God’s always wanted to be that way. He made a promise to Abraham back in Genesis chapter 12, that in you and in your seed, all the nations of the earth shall be blessed. His love is wide enough to include every single person. Let me tell you about an old testament prophet who understood that about God. He understood that about God, but he didn’t appreciate that about God. His name was Jonah. And at the end of the story, he says, I know that you are a gracious and merciful God. You are slow to anger. You are abundant. Here’s our word again, in loving kindness. You relent from doing harm. Now Jonah’s attitude was bad. But his assessment of God was extraordinarily accurate.

He knew exactly who God was, that he was gracious and merciful, that he is in fact slow to anger. He is abundant in loving kindness, and one because he loves us is willing to relent from harm that he would have to do because we are disobedient. When we obey him, that love is enacted on our behalf. Well, God’s love is wide enough to include everyone, every nation, every race, every sinner.

Now, maybe you’re here this morning and you listen to that and you think, you know what, Don, that sounds good. But when you say that his love’s wide enough to embrace and to forgive and to save everyone, I’m not sure that it is for me. You don’t know where I’ve been, you don’t know what I’ve done. I have in my pocket this morning two one dollar bills. They are very different from each other. Let me show you the first one. Here’s the first one. It is about the nastiest one dollar bill I’ve ever come across. I don’t particularly even like to touch it. I have no idea where this one dollar bill has been. In fact, I really don’t even want to know where it’s been.

I would imagine that it’s been in some unsavory places. It’s probably seen some unsavory things. It’s just filthy. It’s obviously been used and abused. It’s just kind of worn out. I have no idea where this nasty abused bill has been. I have another one dollar bill. It’s in much better shape. Now it’s not brand spanking new. It’s been in circulation, but it’s still crisp, and as you can tell, it’s still pretty clean. It’s been in circulation a bit, but doesn’t seem to have been abused. Probably hasn’t been in any unsavory places. It’s not entirely new. It’s not pristine and pure, but it’s in pretty good shape, all things considered. It just looks pretty nice, doesn’t it? Now let me ask you a question. Let’s suppose that you have these two dollar bills in your possession.

You go down here to the mall and you go to the, you go to the dollar store, everything a dollar. How much will this dollar bill buy you? Well, probably only about 50 cents worth, won’t it? Maybe 75 because, but you know, it’s not in very good shape. It’s been, it’s been abused. It hasn’t been, it obviously hasn’t lived a very good life. And so, sure, no, you say, well, no, Don, that’s just wrong. It will buy one dollar worth of merchandise. Well, how about this one? It’s in pretty good shape. So maybe it will buy you a dollar and a quarter, maybe a dollar and a half, maybe even two dollars worth of merchandise, because it’s in such good shape. You say, well, absolutely not.

Both of them will buy only a dollar. Well, why? Because the inherent value and worth of each is the same. You may not have lived a pristine life. And in comparison to others, your life thus far may be far less than what it ought to have been. But the fact of the matter is that for you, because you are made in the image of God, his love is wide enough to include you. That’s what John 3 16 means, ladies and gentlemen. And God so loved the world. If you’ve always read that just the world, then you need to, you need to place your name there. God so loved Don True X, and he so loved put your name right there, that he gave his only son for you that whoever believes in him should not should not perish, but have ever everlasting life.

We’re the ones who put limitations on the love of God. I mean, the world is full of if love. I’ll love you if you will. And then we we fill in the blank. And we sometimes reason that way about God. God would love me so much more if, if I hadn’t done some of those things that I did in college, if, and we fill in the blank, and we forget, ladies and gentlemen, that David was an adulterer and Moses a murderer, and Rahab a harlot, and Paul was a blasphemer, and Peter a denier, and Thomas a doubter, and yet God loved and forgave them all. The amazing thing about the love of God is that it isn’t sourced in our nature, it’s sourced in his nature.

2. God’s Love Is Long Enough to Last Every Day

That’s why the Bible says God is love. And then, secondly, God’s love is long enough to last every day. God’s love is long enough to last every single day. I’ll tell you that’s hard for us to believe as well. I would imagine that there are people in this room this morning who’ve been hurt by loves that did not last. I would imagine, an audience of this size, there are probably people in this room this morning who stood maybe in a building just like this and stood before God and man, and you made a vow and a commitment of your heart to someone, and that other person made a vow and a commitment of their heart to you as well. And they vowed to you, they promised you, they committed to you that they would love you and be faithful to you and loyal to you until by death you were to part.

Probably people in this room this morning who had mates who didn’t do that, who didn’t keep that promise, who didn’t love endlessly. We need to understand that God’s not like that. Ladies and gentlemen, your faith did not create his love, and your failures and your foibles and your faults cannot destroy his love. And so over and over and over, the Bible says, Oh, give thanks to the Lord for he is good, his love endures forever. I will declare that your love stands firm forever, that you established your faithfulness in the heavens themselves. Or as God said through Isaiah, the mountains shall depart and the hills be removed, but my kindness shall not depart from you, nor shall my covenant of peace be removed, says the Lord who has mercy on you.

That’s hard for us to fathom, hard for us to grasp, isn’t it? Because in our human relationships, when we err, when we disappoint, it changes the relationship somewhat, doesn’t it? When we make a mistake in a relationship, when we hurt someone, even when we go back and we say, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have done that. Will you forgive me? And even when that person says, Yes, I will forgive you. The problem is that as humans, we don’t have a delete button in our in our brain. We don’t have a cancel button on the calculator that is our mind. And so often that wrong gets in the way of the relationship. God’s not like that.

3. God’s Love Is High Enough to Cover Everything

Why is that? Well, thirdly, because God’s love is high enough to cover everything. I want to ask you a question this morning. You don’t have to raise your hand, just answer in your in your own heart. Anybody in this audience ever make just a mess of your life? Maybe the question we probably ought to ask is anybody in this audience who hasn’t made a mess of your life. All of us have at some point. All of us at some point in time have made bad decisions and we have thought the wrong things and we have spoken the wrong words and we have taken the wrong actions, and yet Paul is saying God’s love is high enough to cover everything. Let’s be honest this morning. God knew exactly who you were, and he knew exactly who I was when he sent Jesus into this world.

God’s always known that. I mean, God’s always known what we’ve done. In the Garden of Eden, when God went walking in the cool of the day. And he and he said, Where are you, Adam? He wasn’t looking for information. He was looking for a confession. God has never once looked down from heaven at you or at me and slapped his forehead and said, I can’t believe that. I cannot believe that they are acting that way. He knows exactly what we are. And he loves us anyway.

He had been high sticked in the head and was bleeding from the face. And it showed a it showed a college wrestler, and he was off to the side and he was dejected and he had a big old cauliflower ear. And it showed a soccer player. And he had been, he had been spiked. And so he’s on the bench and he’s got a gash in his leg and he’s bleeding and he’s hurting. And what made this commercial memorable was that there was no dialogue to the commercial at all. There was a Nike squish. But the only thing you heard in the commercial was the old Joe Cocker song playing in the background that says, You are so beautiful to me. And I wonder if that’s the way, if that’s the way God looks at us.

That he sees us with all of our scars and our flaws and all that makes us ugly, and he says, You are so beautiful to me. Well, why? Because his love is high enough to cover everything. If we had time this morning, we’d read Ephesians 2 in the first many verses. If I may just summarize that for you, he says, you know what? You once were dead in your trespasses and sin, and you you walked in disobedience, and you were children of wrath because of your behavior. But then he says, God, who in his great love with which he loved us and his mercy with which he bought us, by grace, he saved you. Grace and mercy and love and salvation. Why? Because God’s love is high enough to cover everything.

Why’d he do that? Well, he loved us that way because he saw potential in us. And so he chose us in him before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and without blame before him in love. He predestined us to the adoption of sons by Jesus Christ to Himself according to the good pleasure of His will. God saw potential in you and me. And he said, I think there’s something in you that can be holy and that can be without blame. And so I’m going to make you my children. I’m going to have my son die for you. His love is high enough to cover everything. That’s why it’s dangerous and it’s wrong to believe that God’s love is insufficient to save you.

4. God’s Love Is Deep Enough to Be Everywhere

And then forth and finally, God’s love is deep enough to be everywhere. I pray that you will know the length and breadth and height and the depth of God’s love pulse. It’s deep enough to be everywhere. What are you under this morning? You know, when we come to worship, people always say, How are you doing? Now, our standard answer to that, by the way, in churches of Christ is I’m fine. How are you? I’m fine. How are you? Fine. Well, good. I’m fine, you’re fine, we’re all fine. Churches for fine folks. If you’re not fine, you need to go home and get fine so you can come back. And when somebody asks you, you can say, I’m fine.

But the fact of the matter is, we’re not all fine, are we?

And sometimes people be honest with you, and you say, How are you doing? And they’ll say, Well, I’m doing okay under the circumstances. And what they’re saying to you is that there is some circumstance in their life, and they are under that. That is, they’re holding, they’re trying to hold it up, not be crushed by it. And so they’re under that circumstance. They’re trying to hold it up, and sometimes it’s easier than others, but they’re being honest with you and telling you something’s in their life that is pressing down on them. So I ask you again this morning, what are you under? And I will tell you that no matter what you under and how deeply buried beneath that you think you may be, God’s love is deep enough to be everywhere.

Cory Tinboom found herself in a concentration camp along with her sister. Her mother and father had already been killed. And in this flea infested barracks, she said to her sister, this is the pit of hell. And her sister said, Corey, there is no pit so deep, but what God’s love is not deeper. We all, ladies and gentlemen, the circumstances of our life face two clear alternatives. Number one, we can allow circumstances to interpret God’s love. A lot of folks do that. Bad circumstances come in their life and they look at God and say, I will not love you unless you take better care of me. Or we can allow God’s love to interpret our circumstances. Listen to David. Want to read a fairly lengthy passage. I waited patiently for the Lord and he inclined to me and heard my cry.

He brought me up out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay, set my feet on a rock. He established my steps later in the same passage he said. Do not withhold your tender mercies from me, O Lord. Let your loving kindness and your truth continually preserve me. Innumerable evils have surrounded me. My iniquities have overtaken me. I’m not able to look up. They are more than the hairs of my head, and so my heart fails me. Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me. O Lord, make haste to help me. Let’s be honest this morning. The fact that God loves us doesn’t change, doesn’t change the reality of suffering and difficulty, even in the lives of Christians. Witness the number of Christians dispossessed from their homes in the last two weeks in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.

The world has never been a safe place to live. Not in Adam’s day, not in Noah’s day, not in David’s day, not in Jesus’ day, and not in our day either. But God’s love ought to change the way that we respond to that. The next time you go through a difficulty, you need to remember, please, that we have no claim on the love of God. Now, we sometimes say, you know, if God really loved me, this wouldn’t happen. And my response to that is, what claim do we have on the love of God? I mean, why are we expecting God to keep a deal that we unilaterally made with him? Not that he made with us, but that we made with him. Namely, all right, God, I’ll be a Christian, I’ll try to serve you, I’ll do the best I can.

But in return, I expect you to take pretty good care of me. And so, God, if you love me, I want a better job. If you love me, I want, I want better health. If you love me, I want a better marriage. If you love me, God, make my kids do better. If you love me, God, I expect you to insulate and isolate me from difficulty in this world. Let me tell you, ladies and gentlemen, as long as there is silhouetted on Calvary’s hill, the cross of the innocent Son of God dying in my place, you will never be able to convince me that my God doesn’t love me. God doesn’t want you to measure his love by how happy you happen to be. In fact, God’s not interested in you always being happy.

As difficult as that may be for us to believe, he is interested in our always being faithful. Even if that means that he must chasten us. Whom the Lord loves, he chastens. No chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful. Nevertheless, afterward, it yields a peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who’ve been trained by it. I have a good preacher friend who I heard ask in a sermon once as he read that passage has God ever given you a whipping? God ever just taken to the woodshed and given you a good spanking? Well, in honesty, yes, he has. He’s done that to me. And he did it because I needed it. He loves us enough even to correct us when we need that. There’s nothing in this world that can separate you from the love of God.

We sing a song in our churches, Oh, love that will not let me go. It’s a wonderful song. It was written by a gentleman named Dr. George Mathis. He wrote that song on the night of his sister’s wedding. After the events of the day and the wedding had taken place, he went back to his room that night. And there were just a flood of memories that came to him. And he remembered how when he was a young man, he had been engaged to be married. But during the engagement, he had been diagnosed with a degenerative eye disease, and he was told that he was going to go blind. And when he told his fiancee of that, she said to him, I have no desire to live my life with a blind man.

Conclusion

And she left him. And so that night after his sister’s wedding, when all of those memories came flooding back, he wrote this song that we still sing. Oh, love that will not let me go. I rest my weary soul in thee. And it’s based on good biblical ground because in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. I’m persuaded Paul said that neither death, life, angels, principalities, powers, things present, things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing shall ever be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Let me ask you as we close this morning, how do we grow in the love of God? I mean, how do we come to understand something of the height and depth and length and breadth of his love?

I just suggest two things to you. Number one, we need to regard God’s love as absolute. It changes everything when you center and submit your life in something as ultimate as the love of God. When you realize that you don’t have to have valuables to be valuable to him, that you are a value because you are created in the very image of your father. And secondly, we need to discard the substitutes. In the words of the old Johnny Lee’s song, we keep looking for love in all the wrong places. We we try to find love in education, occupation, human relation. And all of those things are fine, but they are finite.

All of those things are props. When Paul says what we need is to be rooted and established in love.

We sang a song a moment ago, The Love of God. I certainly did not have the credentials, nor do I have the background and expertise to critique songwriting. But in my humble estimation, the third verse of that song is the greatest verse of any hymn that we ever sing. That it encapsulates in the most succinct and powerful way what we’ve been talking about this morning of the height and depth and length and breadth of the love of God. Could we with ink the oceans fill, and word the skies of parchment made, where every stalk on earth a quill, and every man a scribe by trade. To write the love of God above, we drain the oceans dry. Nor could the scroll contain the whole, though stretched from sky to sky.

Would you open your song books, please, to the number that was announced a moment ago? We’re going to sing that song in a minute. It’s a hymn of invitation. Maybe you’re in this audience this morning, and you’ve never appropriated this great love that God has for you, to yourself, in the forgiveness of your sins. God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son for you. Paul said, We urge you, do not receive the grace of God in vain. If you’re in this audience this morning, you need to be baptized into Christ. Why, this invitation is designed for you. Or if you need to come home to your Father this morning in a response to his amazing love and grace, this invitation is for you.

So if there’s a response you need to make in a public way and we can help you, please let us. Let’s stand and let’s sing.