As we extinguish the Advent candles, we linger in the warm glow of our most cherished theme: love. Aided by the profound words from 1 John 4:7-9, we unwrap the Christmas narrative and its portrayal of God's ultimate act of love. This isn't just another holiday conversation; it's an invitation to witness love as the vigorous verb it's meant to be, challenging the conditional love commonly peddled by the world.
As we extinguish the Advent candles, we linger in the warm glow of our most cherished theme: love. Aided by the profound words from 1 John 4:7-9, we unwrap the Christmas narrative and its portrayal of God's ultimate act of love. This isn't just another holiday conversation; it's an invitation to witness love as the vigorous verb it's meant to be, challenging the conditional love commonly peddled by the world.
Hello and Merry Christmas from Real Life Community Church. Welcome to the Real Life Friends podcast. I'm here with my dad and our church's pastor, Pastor Chris.
Speaker 2:And who are you and what's your name, my name's? Addy, oh nice to meet you, Addy. Thanks for hijacking our podcast. Yeah, way to go. So we're down to only three episodes.
Speaker 1:Yes, and we only have one more theme left to do. We have done peace, hope and joy, and now we're on to love. Yes, and we just finished with our Wednesday night fellowship. Instead of having our usual Wednesday night service, slash hybrid Bible study. We do a variety of things in there, but this time we just brought out the food and I tell you what I saw one of my favorite things over there. What was that? I love chocolate cake, I thought you were going to say meatballs.
Speaker 1:Well, you just look like a meatball guy, that's right, you just look like oh, I'm glad you said guy, at the end I'm like what I look like a meatball. That's fair. That's fair play actually.
Speaker 2:Hey, by the way, tonight was a case study because I always make the claim that you know, for a Wednesday night service or prayer meeting we have very few people, which is normally the case. But I said, if we serve food you know we did do about double tonight.
Speaker 1:as far as the number of adults, I think we had over two dozen, which was wonderful.
Speaker 2:It was. And speaking of love, you could really sense in all seriousness the love in that place that our people have one for another.
Speaker 1:Indeed, but my love for chocolate cake is where we were. Quite frankly, now you jumped the gun on me. You've actually kind of skipped ahead, because when I am using that term love or how much I love chocolate cake, even German chocolate cake, which is my favorite texture I absolutely love it.
Speaker 2:We have really trivialized the word love, haven't we in the English language?
Speaker 1:We've at the very least it would be fair to say we've given it a lot of different definitions or we use it a whole lot of different ways.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we you know, I say I love my wife, I love my dog. Most of the time I love my children, I I love Chick-fil-A, and obviously there's different, different degrees of love.
Speaker 1:That's one of the greatest loves that can be yeah. Yeah, that's the apex Almost.
Speaker 2:That's right. So you know. It's interesting, though when we think of love, we normally think of emotion, right. Right, it's something that we feel and, biblically speaking, you know, certainly we are to feel affections and emotions towards God and one another, but often, most often, in the Bible, love is actually used as a verb. It is very, very action-oriented. For me to love my neighbor, for instance, is not just to feel good feelings about them, but it is just to serve them in any way possible, to go out of my way, to be kind and to actually do tangible things for them.
Speaker 1:Yes, I think one of the greatest manifestations of love and the way we can describe that, a couple of words I made here my notes from when we talked before we started was were sacrificial and demonstrable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really good, yeah, that's rich. And you know, as we think about the Christmas story, there is no greater manifestation of love than God sending His Son into this world, jesus coming and taking on flesh, and then the apex of that love is seen through what Jesus accomplished at Calvary.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the ultimate sacrifice demonstrated.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's a great text in 1 John that actually ties, you know, the theme of love into the Christmas story. So we're going to begin in verse 7.
Speaker 1:Okay, and this is from 1 John 4. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. One who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this, the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.
Speaker 2:God's love was beautifully demonstrated for us in the Christmas story. Let's just focus on verse 9, meditate on it for a moment. In this, the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world that we might live through him. So we see here that God's motive for sending his Son into the world was love Unbelievable. God loves us not because of what we've done, but because of who he is. God is love, and so we're reminded at Christmas that God loves us immensely and he loves us unconditionally. And in this text we see three qualities of this love, and we're going to focus on the first one today.
Speaker 1:Yep, that's absolutely right, and we're going to talk about the life-giving aspect of love.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:So if you would read verse 9 again, with the emphasis on that very last part of the verse, In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.
Speaker 2:Yes, we've all sinned. We've talked about this throughout the podcast. And Romans 6.23 says for the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus, our Lord. So we are a broken people, apart from Christ, destined to perish. But God, in his great love, he offers us eternal life.
Speaker 2:And you know other religions. They all have some prophet or some guru who tells you what you have to do to have eternal life, or nirvana or what have you. But the burden is all on you. You know it's like well, follow this set of rules, do X, y, z, abc, 1, 2, 3, and then perhaps, if you're good enough, moral enough, you know, if you do enough good works, then perhaps you'll get what you're looking for. But John 14.6, jesus says I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. So isn't it great that God did not send Abraham? He didn't send a Moses, a new and better Abraham, a new and better Abraham, a new and better Moses. But he didn't send us. He didn't send us just a prophet, he sent us himself. He came. Yes, god the Son came and took on flesh to do for us what we could not do for ourselves.
Speaker 2:So the purest manifestation of love that could ever be through Christ, because Christ came, because he came with a mission to save his people from their sins. Through Christ we can live and I love. We talk much here about the kingdom of God, and when we put our faith in Jesus Christ we move from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. We move from, you could say, a kingdom of death into a kingdom of life. And all of that because Jesus came and he has brought us near to God and God's love is no longer a concept to us, but through Christ that love was made manifest.
Speaker 1:And so we're always looking for ways to tie these things into practical things that we're all doing, going through seeing throughout Christmas, and we struggled a little bit for how we wanted to divide these up and do it, and it occurs to me I know a great way to end this one, so do tell.
Speaker 1:Well, when we were talking about what are some of our favorite Christmas traditions, when we were having our fellowship time early with everyone, bud, one of our congregants said that Christmas isn't complete, particularly for his wife, until she is driven out and going to see the lights. So when you're going out until you get to the lights, really you're in comparative darkness, especially right before you get there. So something you can think about, because we're all going to go driving around looking at Christmas lights of varying kinds this is something that you can keep in mind, that you are moving from a darkness into a light, and so when you see that, think about yourself having moved from darkness into light because of your belief in Jesus Christ and your acceptance of his manifestation of this pure and perfect love.
Speaker 2:Well done. We're so grateful for the love of God that has come through Christ. It's been made manifest to us and that's something we need to relish every day. Thanks for listening. Join us again tomorrow.