Great Expectations: Rediscovering the Hope of AdventНамуна

The fourth Sunday of Advent is the Sunday of love. "For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only son." Advent is a time when we prepare our hearts to celebrate the birth of Jesus. The most powerful demonstration of God's love for us is that He gave his one and only son to take on flesh, die, and be raised again for us.

But God's love for us didn't begin with the birth of Jesus. His love has no beginning and no end. The Bible tells one long story of God's love for us. And the gift of Jesus is at the center of the story. Now Jesus already existed before his birth, enjoying the perfect loving fellowship of the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Jesus loved us from the beginning as He participated in the creation of the world. God didn't create the world because He was lonely or that He needed us. It was out of this overflowing trinitarian love that God made the world and everything in it.

The Jesus storybook Bible puts it this way:

God wrote, I love you. He wrote it in the sky and on the earth and under the sea. He wrote the message everywhere! Because God created everything in His world to reflect Him like a mirror to show us what He is like, to help us know Him, to make our hearts sing.

For God so loved the world that He called what He made good and blessed it. And He blessed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden with all they needed to flourish. And best of all, they enjoyed intimate communion with God. But all that changed when they disobeyed God and ate the apple. Their loving fellowship with God was broken, and they felt ashamed and hid from Him.

But out of love, God already put a plan in place to restore us to Himself. The entirety of Scripture tells of God's relentless pursuit to reconnect a loving relationship with us. In the Old Testament, God told Abraham that He would make him into a great nation and that all families on earth would be blessed through him.

Abraham's descendants became Israel, and God called them to be a holy nation, a kingdom of priests. Israel was to be set apart as a community of worship, love, and justice. So that they could represent God to the other nations. They were to display His character so that the other nations would come to know Him.

And God also sent prophet after prophet to point to the coming Messiah. There are at least 300 prophecies in the Old Testament that were all fulfilled in Jesus.

For God so loved the world that at the right time in history, God carried out the plan that He had from the beginning. It culminated at that moment more than 2,000 years ago when Jesus, who being in the very nature God, who was with God in the beginning, was born as a baby in a manger in Bethlehem. He fled to Egypt with His parents as refugees and grew up in Nazareth, likely learning carpentry from His stepfather Joseph. Jesus only spent three years in public ministry, where He was functionally homeless as He traveled and ministered. Jesus humbled Himself in every way to live and walk among us and to show His great love for us.

In His short time on earth, He alone perfectly revealed who God is to the world. Jesus loved us to the very end by giving His life for us, and by His death and resurrection on the cross, the world is saved through Him. Now in Christ, all who believe are adopted into God's family. Now we are all the kingdom of priests, joining Jesus and His mission to make God known by living a life of love.

Jesus said, "A new command I give you, love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this, everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

This command was new because before Jesus came, we didn't know what love incarnate looked like. Jesus embodied the heights, depth, and breadth of the love of God in a person. And He made the love of God fully accessible to us through what He accomplished on the cross. This new command Jesus gave us can be summed up by this question, How can I love others as Jesus loves me?

May we daily ask ourselves how we can love like Jesus in humble, gentle, sacrificial ways, big and small. Mother Teresa said, "I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world." May we all be instruments in the hand of God as He continues to write the story of His love through us for the world today.

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life." One day all things will consummate in an act of love when Jesus comes again in the second Advent to fully reconcile the world to Himself.

(Adapted from a message by Joyce Koo Dalrymple.)