The Father's Generosity

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0:00Good morning, everybody. I've met a few of you this morning already, but for those who I haven't gotten a chance to meet yet, my name is Isaiah Thomas. I am an associate pastor from one of your sister churches, West End Presbyterian Church. So it's good to be with you all this morning. I was able to be with you guys a few years ago. It's before Abby and I had kids, so at least over two years ago. Yeah, so it's good to be back. Thankful to have an opportunity to worship with you this morning. Thankful that Joel thought to ask to have me here. So we're going to be looking at a relatively well-known passage in John chapter 3. If you've grown up in church, or maybe even if you are a newer Christian, there's a good chance you've probably heard this passage said or read before. But it's in your bulletins and may also be up on the screen behind me.

1:02I'm going to read it, and then we will pray, and then we will see what the Lord has for us this morning. So this is the word of the Lord in John chapter 3, verse 16, and it says, For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life. And this is the word of the Lord. Let's pray together. Lord, thank you that we have the opportunity to worship together in peace this morning, that we have a space that we can gather together in the power of your name to be reminded of the truth in a world that preaches, so many different things other than what you'd have us to believe is the truth. I pray that both as we gather here this morning, and as we go out from here this afternoon, that we could be reminders of the truth to one another and to those that you put in our lives. Help us open our hearts, open our eyes, open our ears to the truth of your word this morning, as you give it to us in John chapter 3.

2:19And we ask all these things in Jesus' name. Amen. So our attention is important, right? You could maybe oversimplify the marketing industry to an attempt to captivate our attention, right? The main point or the main goal of social media is to captivate our attention for better or for worse. You know, there are people in your life every day, whether you recognize it or not, companies, organizations that are vying for your attention. It feels like almost every minute sometimes, right?

2:59Our, so Abby, my wife Abby and I, we have twins, Shiloh and Elijah. They're two years old, and they're mastering the art of getting our attention these days. We were at a party with some friends a couple months ago, and we were talking in the kitchen with somebody, and I can, I'm holding Shiloh, and I can hear that she's saying something in my ear, but I'm trying to maintain a conversation with the person in front of me. And she's gotten to the point now where she recognizes if she grabs my face and turns her to me. She can, she can, she can confirm that I have seen or heard what she's trying to get. So I'm trying to talk, and I'm hearing her, her little voice in my ear, and he, or she grabs my face, and then she turns my face to her, and she says, chip, chip, because we were standing next to some chips and salsa. So all that to say, our attention matters, and, and who or what we give our attention to matters as it has the ability to shape and form the types of people we're becoming.

4:19And so this passage in John chapter three, in this particular conversation, we've actually been looking at up at West End for a few weeks now. Nicodemus, a man named Nicodemus, who is a Pharisee, one of the religious leaders in his community, he's sought Jesus out, it seems, in the middle of the night, which people have speculated for years what that may imply. But for some reason, he desires to have Jesus's attention, right? There's something about who Jesus is and what he's done up to this point in his ministry that has captivated Nicodemus's attention, even though there are those within his community that see Jesus as a problem. And up to this point, you know, Nicodemus has sort of initiated this conversation, but particularly with what Jesus is telling him at this moment in verse 16, I would imagine that Jesus probably has Nicodemus's attention. And so I would also submit to you this morning that Jesus is trying to get our attention as well with what he is trying to tell us. And as I've said, this is a pretty well-known passage. All I really want to do this morning is to navigate this by asking two simple questions. What do we learn about God in this passage? And what do we learn about people, that is ourselves? So first, let's consider what this has to teach us about God. I don't know how you tend to most readily relate to God. Or when you think about God, what kind of being or person you imagine you are interacting with. But, you know, maybe you tend to most readily think of God as Lord, as a ruler

6:15over your life, over the world. Maybe you tend to relate to God as a provider, which he is, as your protector, which he is. And I don't necessarily have specific statistics for you this morning, but I'd be willing to bet that one of the most common ways that the Lord presents himself to us throughout Scripture is as a father. And we see that in different places throughout the Bible. We see it in Psalm 2, where it says the Lord says to me, you are my son today, I've begotten you. So there's that fatherly language. In Exodus, he refers to Israel as his firstborn son, the nation of Israel, that is.

7:01In that famous passage, Matthew 28, the Great Commission, as Jesus is sending his disciples out, he says, make disciples in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, right? And so we see the Lord presenting himself to us as a father also in this passage, as he says that he's sent his one and only son into the world. And on top of all those things, right, God is the creator of reality. He has created whatever mind-blowing aspect of science, of the way the world works, of people, at least the good aspects, right? That is all God's design. So he's not only this transcendent, all-powerful, almighty figure in our lives, but he is that who desires to draw near to us as a father.

7:56In 1 John chapter 3, verse 1, written by the same apostle that writes the gospel of John, he says this, see what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we, the church, should be called children of God. And so we are. So this is also how God would have us to understand who he is to us, right? He is all of those things, creator, provider, protector, but he wants us to know him as a father to us. And if God is who he says he is, and he is, then that is something for us to consider this morning. What does it mean that God would have us, have you, have me to know him as a father?

8:43At the beginning of the summer, so part of, or really most of my job at West End is to oversee our youth ministry, middle and high school students. So I am basically like Gavin at West End. And at the beginning of the summer, we host a couple of really just cookouts at our house to get the students together, to celebrate moving up in school, to celebrate the end of the summer, all those kinds of things. And so we had a lot of kids running around our backyard early on this summer.

9:16And one particular afternoon, I'm spending time outside with Shiloh and Elijah. And we're not doing really anything in particular. They're just kind of running around. And we have this wooden pallet that covers an old and out of order well in our backyard. And Elijah was pushing around a scooter, as toddlers do. And he rams the scooter into the edge of this pallet, which I just mostly am checking to make sure he is okay, because he fell over with it. And he seems fine. And I'm like, okay, cool.

9:58But then I start to see these bugs swarm up out of the ground, like six or seven, kind of fairly small bugs, honestly. So I'm hoping that it's not what I think it is. And they're just kind of like small flies or gnats or whatever. And I turn around to make sure Shiloh's not getting into something I don't want her to get into. And then all of a sudden, I hear Elijah screaming his head off. And I'm like, oh, no. Oh, no. Something you should know about me is I don't really enjoy the presence of wasps or hornets just in my personal space. And so I turn around to see a yellow jacket digging itself into Elijah's arm. And Abby's the one that kills all of those types of bugs in our household, unless I have the can of Raid that has like the 20-foot shot radius. But Abby's not home at this point. I'm the only one outside with them. And so I take a second and just start swatting all these bugs and hopefully killing them so that Elijah's not getting stung anymore as he's screaming his head off. And this is the first time this has happened. I don't know if he's anaphylactic.

11:05And we also have chickens. And they were grazing at the time. And I'm looking around. I was like, these chickens are just going to have to figure out how to survive. Because we have like foxes in our neighborhood and stuff too. So like, look, if it's Elijah or the chickens, I'm choosing Elijah. So I scoop both the kids up inside. And we actually have a friend living with us temporarily right now. And she's trying to ask like what's going on. But I'm just laser focused because I need to make sure Elijah's okay. Like I said, I don't know how he's going to react to this. And I can hear our friend Aiden talking to me. But I'm just like watching Elijah to make sure he's okay. And I share that story to say if a new, relatively inexperienced dad reacts that strongly to one of his own children being in danger, imagine how much more the creator of the universe, your heavenly father, has his eyes on you thinking about what you need in order to live. So that's the first point I just want to put before us this morning. As we consider, again, this well-known verse that we see the fatherly heart of God in this passage. And not only that, we see that our heavenly father is a sacrificial and generous giver. You see in the passage that it says that the Lord God so loved the world that he gave his only son. Another way to read that is that he gave his one-of-a-kind son. As in his son who was radically different. As in his son who has no equal. If you look back at the beginning of this account of the gospel, in John chapter 1, John opens with, in the beginning was the word, right?

12:48He's talking about Jesus. In the beginning was the word. And the word was with God. And the word was God. He was with God from the beginning. So when we see this passage, and when we look at Jesus on the cross, we see God giving his very self, right? We see a father who has not held anything back from us. So to go so far as to give himself on behalf of our life so that we could have life with him. Something we do at our church is in the spring with our seventh grade class, we take a few weeks to talk to them about the specifics of what our church believes the Bible to teach. And this past spring, we went through what's called the Nicene Creed, which is a really old, essentially, profession of faith that the early church came up with. And there's a line in that creed that in talking about Jesus speaks of him as being very God of very God. And emphasizing the fact that Jesus is not a separate entity, but he is the image of the invisible God, as Paul puts it in his letter to the Colossians. So when you read, you know, God has given his one and only son, don't let that pass you by without considering how insane it is that God essentially emptied himself so that he could have life with you, right? It's a really, especially if you've grown up in church, it's a really easy thing to just hear that. And you're like, yes, like, this is good news that happened. But no, sit with how insane it actually is that for, as we'll reference in a few minutes, right, that God saw his enemies, which is what we were as sinners in choosing to disobey him,

14:38and he emptied himself. He gave himself, right, so that we could be his children. And we see that more so in looking at the specific use of the word the world. We see the world and we probably rightfully think about the literal globe, right, all the people in the world, which is good, but particularly for Nicodemus, for the Jews, this actually probably would have been a little bit of a scandalous statement. Because in their minds, they're prepared to hear, for God so loved Israel, right, for God so loved the Israelites that he gave his one and only son. Well, what Jesus says is, for God so loved the world. And what we know about the world is that that includes sinners.

15:21That includes people who do not, who do not warrant that God would do this for them, right? So we also see the Lord's generosity in that he did not save himself just for people who had worked their way towards him or who had earned the right to be sacrificed for or who were religious enough to be saved. But people who actually done the opposite, people who are actually moving in the opposite direction of God the Father, he says, no, I'm going to chase you down and I'm going to make it possible for us to be in right relationship with one another. And Paul says it this way in Romans chapter 5, but God shows us, shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us, right? So again, the sacrifice, the generosity to give of himself for people who actually weren't even necessarily looking for it, or at least didn't know they were looking for it. And lastly, to just drive home the point of the fact that God is a giver, you know, the verse literally says he gave, right? Jesus himself says in the gospel according to Mark, for the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. So he is giving himself up on behalf of his enemies. And one of the reasons that it's important to sort of really hone in on this is if you look up a few verses earlier, or literally a couple verses right before John 3 16, Jesus is saying to Nicodemus that as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. And what Jesus is doing there is he

17:07is connecting the work that he is going to do to an Old Testament passage that Nicodemus as a Pharisee would have known really well. He's referencing a story that happened while the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness on their way to the promised land. As the Israelites were prone to do in that season of their history, they were grumbling against the Lord even though he was providing for them day and night, right? And in response, the Lord unleashed, it's described as fiery serpents upon the Israelites because of their grumbling. And the only way that they could have been saved from, that they were to be saved from those snakes was by Moses fashioning a bronze serpent on a pole, and he raised it up. And the only way that the Israelites would be saved from those snake bites is if they looked upon the pole and received the salvation that God was giving them through the work that Moses and that pole was doing. So similarly, what Jesus is saying is that he is being given up, and as we now know on the cross, and all that we can do is look upon the work that he's done and receive the gift of salvation that he's won for us. So just as in the wilderness, you know, God sent deliverance for people who are actively dying, God the Father has given us his Son to save people who are actively dying. So God is not only a good Father to us, but he's also a good Father who is a sacrificial and generous giver. So those are just some of the things, right, that we can reflect on that this passage has to teach us about God. And I want to pivot to what does this passage,

19:05what can this passage teach us about ourselves? And I want to go back and direct your attention to the Old Testament passage that was read for our hearing earlier, and just reread that in Ezekiel chapter 33. And it says, and you, son of man, say to the house of Israel, thus have you said, surely our transgressions and our sins are upon us, and we rot away because of them. How then can we live? This is a great question to ask, right, as people, if you are at a place where you recognize your own brokenness, you recognize, as we'll talk about, your own need.

19:44It's a great question to ask, how then shall we live? Especially if you're willing to acknowledge that because of our sin, we deserve punishment. And the Lord says this in response, say to them, as I live, declares the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked. Do you hear that? Like, for the Lord himself to say that as the one who would have the right to dole out punishment for our sins, for him to say, I actually have no pleasure in the death of the wicked. I'm saying that's important for us to sit with this morning, especially if you're here today, and maybe one of the ways that it feels like God is to you is mostly a rule enforcer, mostly somebody who cares about just you doing what's right versus what's wrong.

20:41wrong. The Lord actually would rather the evil turn from their evil ways, as Ezekiel goes on to say. And all that brings me to the one of the first things I want to say about what this passage teaches about us is that before we get up in the morning, before we, you know, sin in whatever ways we are about to sin in the day, regardless of whatever you base your identity on, you are loved. This passage clearly identifies us that we are people who are loved, regardless of whatever brokenness you feel like weighs you down, regardless of however you tend to ground your identity on, whether it's the success of your job, the success of yourself as a parent, having the right reputation, none of that really moves the needle in God's eyes for you. He already, before, as I've said, you even wake up, sees you as beloved. And I think that's incredibly profound and incredibly freeing when you think about it, as we live in a world that places so many burdens, heaps so many burdens on us, right, for the ways that we ought to live, for what we ought to do to be successful, for what we ought to do to have meaning in the eyes of the world. God says that you are loved. Even as his enemies, we are loved.

22:09The second thing I want to draw our attention to that we can learn about ourselves in this passage is that we are needy. And maybe that's less exciting to hear than you are loved. But I think it's actually good news for us this morning. Our youth staff this summer is reading a book by a pretty successful restaurant, I don't know what to call these people, restaurateur? That sounds too fancy for me to say, but I guess that's what he is. His name's Will Guidara, and he wrote a book called Unreasonable Hospitality. And he's really just sharing about lessons he's learned from his experiences working in the food and service industry. And one of the things he opens his book with is that the human desire to be taken care of never goes away, right? So even for the most successful among us, we have a desire for our needs to be met. We have a desire for something or someone to fulfill us or satisfy us.

23:09There's an insane quote by John D. Rockefeller of the, you know, Rockefeller Plaza, those Rockefellers, right? That somebody was interviewing him at the height of his wealth, and they asked him how much money is enough, and he says one more dollar, which is just insane. But I share that to say, right, so even somebody at the height of human worldly success, for him to feel like he needed more, right, that desire, that itch, that scratch that we need to be satisfied, that we need to have something, some sort of need or some sort of void fulfilled that never goes away. And at our annual youth retreat this summer, the speaker had us look at just different episodes of Peter's life with Jesus. And in Peter's initial encounter with Jesus, this really weird moment happens after Jesus gives him, gives him and his friends some fishing advice. And after they've had a night of wildly unsuccessful fishing, he tells them to cast their net into a certain area, and they come up with a literal boatload of fish. The first thing that Peter says is, get away from me, Lord, because I'm a sinner. So there was something about seeing Jesus, about who Jesus was, that highlighted Peter's need to himself. And there's something about coming face to face with our needs that actually prepares us or makes us receptible, maybe is the way you might say it, to who Jesus is.

24:54So as I've shared, Abby and I, we have twins, and they're two years old now. But it actually was very hard for us to get to the point of becoming parents. A lot of months and years spent trying to have kids unsuccessfully, several miscarriages. And during one of those years in particular, it was the same year that Abby's dad passed away. And I remember at some point during that year, standing in worship singing a song that spoke to God's faithfulness, and I just wasn't having it.

25:36At this point, I'm, you know, an ordained pastor, and I am standing there navigating this insanely difficult season of life, thinking to myself and God that I'm just not built for this. I cannot do a job where I'm in charge of other people's kids while I can't have my own, surrounded by death in various ways, and sing these words right now. I just, I'm not built for this. And that was probably the first season of my life, I think, where I actually genuinely just wanted Jesus to come back.

26:14I just wanted him to come back and end all of the suffering, because he would just be better. It just, the Bible says it would be better, and I'm at the point where, you know what, it actually would be better, because this is terrible. And I'm just, you know, thinking day in and day out. It's like, you know what, you said you're going to do it. I know you can't do it. Why don't you just come back? Just, just come on. Let's, we don't, we can, we can cancel all this right now and go on to something that actually would be better than what this world is giving to us right now. And maybe you're here this morning, and potentially in a similar season, maybe you're here this morning, and you actually struggle to reckon with or accept the idea that God is actually generous. And I, again, just want to point you to him to acknowledge that, and also to look to Jesus. As Paul says in Romans chapter 8, he who did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? So again, when we look at Jesus, especially when we look at Jesus acknowledging our own need, we see a father who has not held anything back. As much as the world and our sin would have us believe that he's holding back on us, we can look to Jesus and be reminded he hasn't, and he's not. And that need actually opens us up to seeing that he is the best thing that we, the best person that we could ever have and receive. Lastly, I want to encourage us and remind us that this passage points us to the reality that we are also people who are going somewhere.

28:02I read an article last year by a guy named Jake Meter, and it was in response to a tragedy that occurred in his community, and he was talking about just what do we have to learn about our relationship with Jesus? What do we have to learn about faith in times of chaos? And I think I have this quote on a slide. If not, I'm going to read it. But he says this, times of chaos do not actually change the call God gives his people. Indeed, the first readers of the New Testament encountered the call to love their enemies at a time when their enemies would soon be trying to kill them.

28:47Hard times do not change what we are called to. They merely help us to see the stakes of our lives more accurately and truly. They awaken us from ease and remind us of the urgency of living in a society of eternal beings, all of whom will one day stand before God and in that moment find that they either love him or hate him. This is a reality that we can be numb to, you know, right? The bills, the drop-off times, the deadlines, whatever is screaming at you or jumping at you in your day to day, it can numb us to the reality that we are actually going somewhere, right? And it can seem way more urgent than our relationship with Jesus. But Jesus here, as he says, so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life, reminds us that while what is going on in the here and now is important, it is not ultimate. He gives us two paths, right, to perish or to have eternal life. And that word perish in the Old Testament carried with it a connotation of coming to nothing, of being almost like a mist, maybe being here one moment and gone the next, just something insubstantial, right? And I think that's actually a fear, a universal human fear, right, of kind of getting to the end of the line and wondering, did what I do matter at all? Is who I am, is who I am mattering at all to anyone, right? And for those who see Jesus and reject his work, we will, they will get to the end of the line and they will end up living a life without him, which is what they've chosen. But for those of us who

30:37recognize our need, who recognize that we can't fulfill that need, who see Jesus and recognize that he is who fulfills that need, Jesus says, come all those who are weary and heavy laden, I will give you rest, right? He tells us to come to him and that whoever believes in him, he would not turn away, but they would receive eternal life. And maybe, you know, maybe you're here this morning and kind of thinking about the ultimate reality of those things feels daunting. Maybe you're here this morning and it is hard to trust that God is good, that God is generous. And I just want to invite us to consider, is it not good news that, to know that we have needs that we can't fulfill, to know that we live in a broken world that is crushing us or is trying to crush us, that God actually desires to be a father to us? Regardless of all the things that maybe come to your mind when you think about God, is it not good news to hear that he actually does not find joy in the perishing of the wicked? Is it not good news this morning to be reminded that the separation that has been created between us and the Lord, Jesus himself, God himself, has done all of the work needed to close that void, that we could be in right relationship with him.