Introduction
As we saw last week, one of the great
benefits of justification is reconciliation--a restored personal relationship
with God. When you come to God through faith in Christ, he no longer relates to
us as a holy Judge, but as a loving Father who welcomes us into presence. God
wants you to know and to be confident that he loves you. This passage is about
how you can be sure of his love.
Why is this so important?
Because this knowledge of God's love is the foundation upon which all healthy
spiritual development and maturity develops.
We have a close
analogy in the area of childhood development. Millions of tax dollars has confirmed
through research what good parents have long known through common sense. From
failure to thrive of infants deprived of physical nurture, to higher incidence
of unwed pregnancies and divorce for children from broken homes, the connection
is clear. "All things being equal, apart from the intervention of the grace
of God, all of us know that for a human being to grow to a full emotional and
interpersonal maturity, the stability of a loving and disciplined home is an indispensable
ingredient."
The
same thing is true in the spiritual arena. "To be sure of the love of his
or her parents is almost indispensable to the healthy emotional development of
a child . . . To be sure of God's love brings even richer
blessings. It is the major secret of joy, peace, freedom, confidence and self-respect."
This is why Paul prays as he does in Eph. 3:18,19 (read). Why does he pray
that we may comprehend the extent of God's love for us? " . . . so
that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God," which is a synonym
for spiritual maturity (see Eph. 4:13).
This is also the
major path of healing for those of us who were deprived of healthy love in our
families of origin, or who are having to raise children in broken homes. Many
of us in this room can testify how becoming sure of God's love has substantially
healed deep wounds and mitigated the damage we pass on to our own children.
How
can you know that God loves you? How can you become increasingly confident in
his love so that you grow into the person he designed you to be? In Rom. 5:5-11,
Paul discloses the two avenues through which God does this: one is a "demonstration"
and the other is a "pouring out."
God "demonstrates"
his love by sending Christ to die for us.
Read 5:6-8. How can you know
that God loves you? Re-read 5:8. To "demonstrate" (sunistaymi)
is to show openly, even to prove. We saw earlier that God demonstrated his justice
by sending Jesus to the cross (3:25 - endeiknumi), because there he showed
humanity that he will not allow sin to go unpunished. But the cross is also God's
demonstration of his own unique love for us.
Now according to the Bible,
the essence of love is giving. And the degree of love is measured partly by the
costliness of the gift to the giver, and partly by the unworthiness of the recipient.
The greater the chasm between these two, the greater the demonstration of love.
Human
love at its highest gives costly gifts to worthy people (read 5:7). People are
very rarely willing to give their lives for others--even for people they consider
to be very worthy. They sometimes do this, but not for people who are bad and
unrighteous.
WWII veterans recount G.I.'s who fell on a grenade
to save their buddies, but I know of no account in which a G.I. fell on a grenade
to save a Nazi. A fireman may risk his life to rescue his neighbor from an arson's
fire, but there are no accounts of firemen offering to go to prison for the arson.
A parent may mortgage everything he has to ransom his child, but I have never
heard of any parent who offered to post bond for his child's kidnapper.
Now
this is precisely the way in which God's love is unique. God gives his most precious
gift--the Messiah, his own Son.? And to whom does he give this gift? Notice the
downward progression of Paul's description of humanity: "helpless;"
"ungodly;" "sinners;" "enemies." The gulf between
the preciousness of God's gift and our unworthiness is humanly inconceivable.
Only a love way beyond our own would do such a thing. Yet this is exactly what
God has done! And he did it for us "while we were yet" this way. He
did not extend his love to you only after you turned to him; he extended his greatest
gift of love to you even while you were headed the other way (Lk. 23:33,34).
In fact, it is the realization of this fact that motivates us to turn to him.
There
is a beautiful illustration of all this in Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables."
Watch closely the interaction between Jean Valjean (Liam Neeson) and the bishop.
WATCH VIDEO. This was the "demonstration" that changed Jean's life.
It was a decisive proof of God's love for him which (when he opened his heart
to receive it) ransomed him from cynicism and despair and led him into a life
of loving service to God and others.
How can you
know God loves you? Because God has given his Son for you. He did this openly,
in history. He predicted by the Old Testament prophets so you could know it was
his doing rather than some historical accident. He explained it both through Jesus
and his apostles so you could know exactly why he did it. You can go back to this
as often as you need to. When the evil in the world around you screams that there
is no loving God, when your heart within you is full of darkness and despair--you
can come and stand on this ground and be anchored by this demonstration that God
loves you.
God "pours out" his love within our hearts through
the Holy Spirit.
There is yet another way God communicates his love to
us. Read 5:5b. God not only "demonstrates" his love by having sent Christ
to die for us; he also "pours out" his love within our hearts through
the Holy Spirit.
The image is of a shower of rain soaking parched
ground. So God soaks our parched hearts with his love through this work of his
Spirit (Jn. 7:37-39). One of the Holy Spirit's main roles is to "make
us deeply and refreshingly aware that God loves us."
And this is not
something that God does only for a few, privileged super-saints. This is something
he does for all who put their faith in Christ to justify them (5:1 defines
who the "us" is).
GOSPEL: Maybe you have come to understand that
God loves you because he gave his Son to die for you. But knowing this intellectually,
as wonderful and necessary as it is, does not make you a Christian, and it does
not fill the void in your heart. For that, you need to actually experience God's
love for you on a personal level. And God is ready and waiting to pour out his
love within your heart, if you will only open the door of your heart and invite
Christ in (read Rev. 3:20). What will you experience? Some people experience
a dramatic sense of joy. Others experience a profound sense of relief and cleansing.
Others experience a subtle but deep sense that they have made the right decision,
that they have come home. You will experience God's love in your heart--whatever
expression of it that God knows you need. Why not do this today?
But
while this "pouring out" happens initially when you receive Christ,
God wants it to be an ongoing shower on your soul (ekkechytai is present
tense). How does God's Spirit continue to pour out his love within our hearts?
This is difficult to describe exactly, because it is profoundly personal. We must
avoid demanding of God or prescribing to others how he must do this. Yet the scripture
provides us with an outline of what this looks like and how to receive it.
The
Spirit personalizes the Bible's teaching about God's love for us (1 Cor. 2:12;
Eph. 1:17,18). He opens our hearts to understand that Christ's death was
not just some abstract gift that God gave to humanity in general, but that Christ
died for me because God loves me. He takes passages and "brings
them home" to our hearts so that they nourish our confidence in God's love
and goodness. Some of you are experiencing this for the first time, or in a deeper
way, even as we go through these early chapters in Romans.
So
if you want to experience this outpouring of God's love, you need to get regular
exposure to God's Word.
The Spirit helps us to relate to
God personally, so that he goes from being an abstract, distant Deity whom
we acknowledge through ritual and memorized prayers to a warm and loving Father
with whom we share in very personal and intimate ways. He helps us to pour out
our hearts to God in prayer (Rom. 8:26,27), and he assures our hearts through
this interaction that we really are God's beloved children (Rom. 8:15,16).
So
if you want to experience this outpouring of God's love, you need to choose regularly
to draw near to God in prayer.
The Spirit grants us God's
hope and peace and joy (experiential awareness and assurance that God's good
hand is on us) in the midst of painful and anxious situations. This is
what Paul is talking about in 5:5, and this is what he says in Rom. 15:13
(read). God not only works through our sufferings to produce his character in
our lives; he also assures us of his love in the midst of these sufferings. This
is why, while non-Christians point to suffering as the proof that God is not loving,
Christians point to suffering as the context in which they experience God's love
in deeper ways!
So if you want to experience this outpouring
of God's love, you need to choose to go on trusting God and following him when
you suffer.
The Spirit expresses God's love to us through
his people. He "incarnates" his love through the members of his
Body, so we experience his forgiveness, encouragement, affection, etc. in wonderfully
personal ways (read 2 Cor. 7:5,6). They speak his word to us, pray for
and with us, communicate his peace and forgiveness and hope. And we get to experience
God doing this for others through us, too!
So if you want to
experience this outpouring of God's love, you need to be regularly involved with
other Christians--both willing to receive his love through them, and willing to
let him give his love to them through you. The best way to do this is to get involved
in a home group.
Conclusion
To summarize,
God makes us sure of his love in two different and complementary ways. The work
of the cross is public; the work of the Spirit is private and personal. The work
of the cross is historical; the work of the Spirit is contemporary. The work of
the cross is objective; the work of the Spirit is subjective and experiential.
We
need both God's "demonstration" and his "pouring out" for
healthy growth and development. Christians who focus only on the work of the cross
and neglect the work of the Spirit become sterile. Christians who focus only on
the work of the Spirit and neglect the work of the cross become unstable. We need
to be anchored securely in the work of the cross and animated regularly by the
work of the Spirit if we want stable and vital spiritual development.
Footnotes
Copyright 1999 Gary DeLashmutt