First Grace - Then Choice
- Reverend Dale Walker
- Mar 22, 2009
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Numbers 21: 1-9
John 3: 12-21 3-22-09
First Grace—Then Choice
Sing with me! “Jesus loves me, this I know/ For the Bible tells me so/ Little ones to him belong/ They are weak but he is strong/ Yes, Jesus loves me/ Yes, Jesus loves me/ Yes, Jesus loves me/ The Bible tells me so.” That’s what the most familiar verse in the Bible for Christians tells us: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
Grace. A gift to the whole world—unasked for, undeserved, unwarranted.
But what does it mean to us personally, and to the world itself—the cosmos of which John writes. The words are so familiar. Have they lost their power to move us? We do see it a lot. People tack up signs proclaiming “John 3:16” on telephone poles and hold up signs at sporting events and the Today Show. Rollen Stewart from
Before long, Stewart began to take seriously the message itself. He wore shirts proclaiming “Jesus Saves” or “Repent”. But then he went off the deep end, threatening violence if the world didn’t repent. He set off bombs in churches, in a Christian bookstore, and in a newspaper office. Finally, he took someone hostage in
Rollen Stewart heard only part of the message. Salvation is a gift offered. It is our choice to receive it and to live into it—or not. God doesn’t force it on us, but God loves us and the world so much that God places God’s only son in our hands, even knowing that we aren’t any more trustworthy than the Hebrews in the wilderness: that we, like Rollen Stewart, are more interested in ourselves than in Jesus--more involved with serving ourselves than with serving the world. Was God foolish to do such a thing? …
Paul wrote to the church at
But how does it transform us? Actually, as John’s gospel suggests, love alone cannot, apart from our belief in love—or more accurately, our believing into love, believing into Christ. It sounds awkward to us in English to say “believe into”, but it’s an important distinction. The Greek preposition John uses translates eis, meaning “into”, indicating motion toward something--rather than “in”, indicating a static position. If you believe in a chair, you see it and say, “Hey—there’s a chair.” If you believe into it, you back up to it, bend your knees, and trust the reality and the sturdiness of the chair enough to let yourself drop down into it. In order for God’s love to transform us, we must trust it, and God. We must move toward it and give ourselves over to it, and to God. We must be held in and by its power, and God’s. It’s more than saying the words, ”I believe in Christ”—it’s living in his way of self-giving love.
An example of the transforming power of love on a human scale is the experience psychiatrist Victor Frankl had in a German concentration camp during World War II. In his book, The Art of Loving, he recalls that what held him together during that dreadful time was his love for his wife. She too was in a concentration camp, and he had no idea if she was still alive or not. Nonetheless, every day, he would picture her in his mind, and talk with her. This concrete way of holding on to their love—of living in and by the light of love, and treating others as he would have if they were in normal circumstances, brought him sane through the war. After his release at the war’s end, he found out she had died years before. But her physical death hadn’t kept him from being intimately connected with her by love through those difficult years.
Living necessarily brings loss. We will die, and often, by the time we do, so very much within us and around us is gone: physical strength, possessions, people we hold dear. It is as though our life is poured moment by moment into a giant sieve. Some things pass through the sieve and are lost. But some things remain and are held. Even across the great divide of death, some things are held. We are held in what we’ve loved--held by love itself. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish, but may have eternal life.
God’s grace is freely given to us—but then it presents us with the need to make a choice. John continues, and this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light.
The light has come into the world, and brings with it eternal life. Eternal, abundant life arrived the moment Jesus was born, bringing the light, exposing evil and good for what they truly are. It begins for us the moment we believe that the cure for eternal death is the cross on which Jesus the Christ was lifted up—to die, and to be exalted. It begins in earnest with the transformation of our lives, as we start to love the light more than we love darkness—as we are born from above into awareness of God’s presence, into wanting the joy that life in Christ brings.
The reality, though, is that Christ’s saving presence is also a disturbing presence. He may not have come to judge, but his coming is a judgment, or a separation, as in the parable of the last judgment in Matthew (25: 31-46), when he separates the sheep from the goats. Lamar Williamson writes “It’s like turning a light on in a dark kitchen: moths will come to the light and circle around it in fascination, but roaches will flee from it and hide in dark crannies. The purpose of turning the light on was not to judge at all, but in the presence of the light, different creatures judge themselves by their response.…” (Preaching the Gospel of John, p. 38) A grotesque image, but Williamson makes the point that if we choose not to follow Christ, we are separated from him for as long as we choose it. On the other hand, if we choose to follow him—to believe into him and move into his way of life, then we are in his presence eternally, beginning this very moment.
But it’s not an easy choice for us, is it? Our response to the light of love often is mistrust. We draw back, not sure we really want to be fully seen, fully known, fully part of another person or of God. We like our independence, like making decisions without regard to others’ needs or wants, like our elbow room.
To believe in Christ is to share his life and to be willing to be changed by him--to be changed into his body on earth: righting wrongs, healing wounds of body and soul, reconciling ourselves with others, so that others—the world, even-–are changed, too, by the love and grace of God. This is life abundant—life eternal. Walter Rauchenbusch wrote, “We never live so intensely as when we love strongly. We never realize ourselves so vividly as when we are in the full glow of love for others.” For others. You know this if you’ve ever fallen in love. You want to be with that person all the time, to do what makes your beloved happy. That’s what God has done for us, giving us God’s most precious son, so our lives can be eternally abundant and joyful.
What amazing grace! What wondrous love!
