Life in His Love

## IntroductionWe are on the verge of a new year. I know a lot of you are going to be really sad to say goodbye to 2020. We’ve all really bonded with this year and as we say goodbye, we might experience some detachment, mourning, and grief associated with genuine loss. But with a stiff upper lip we’ll try our best to move forward and not just live in the nostalgia of Covid and masks, rioting, political debate. Now in all seriousness, 2020 will be part of your story. You will look back and tell future generations who did not live through it what it was like. These events shape us. The story of 2020 will be a shared experience that will forever be part of your life. Telling our story and knowing how our story fits into the greater story is one of the most fundamental aspects of being human.Story is so ingrained in us. It’s so fundamental. You prove this just by how our culture is structured. You turn on the TV or go to a live theater production and you watch stories. Video games are not challenges, they are stories. Our brains are hardwired to ingest stories. An often cited clinical study shows that experiencing an event and hearing a story about the event is almost identical in terms of brain activity. Why is that? Because stories, more than perhaps anything else, help us understand and discover meaning. I begin with the concept of story because today we begin a new study in the book of John entitled, “The Story of Amazing Love.”And this is the story of all stories because this story claims to solve two of humanity’s greatest problems. The story, as told in the gospel of John, gives you answers to two of the biggest human problems you experience in life whether you are actively asking the question or not. These problems are so enormous, 99 percent of people have given up trying solve them. These questions are so giant, so significant, most people don’t even think they are solvable and so they just try to find a way to cope, to manage, to shove the problems away. So I’m going to introduce the two problems. Here’s the first one.How can I be both known and loved? Here’s how this problem goes. Let start with the first half: I want to be known. Solving this problem is definitely possible. I can start letting people in. And at first it feels good to disclose who I am and tell my story and divulge things I’ve never told anyone else. And that feels great doesn’t it? It’s incredible freeing to just disclose our deepest secrets and finally tell someone that thing that we’ve been carrying around like a ball and chain. It just feels completely liberating! But as we do that we discover something not so great. When people see who we really are, they begin to withdraw. They don’t like what they see. We see the shock in their eyes and the horror on their face when they see who we really are. And that causes us to freeze.You see, we want to be known but we also want to be loved. We solve this problem in this exact opposite way. In our desire to be loved, we don’t disclose who we really are; instead, we project a more loveable image in hopes of that being received. We manipulate our image. We post pictures to Instagram or Facebook that look very attractive. We hide the failures, project the success, and now suddenly we are loved but it’s fake. It’s pretend. We are loved but not known. How do we get both? How can we be both known and loved? That’s a hard problem to solve and most don’t think it’s solvable. This is the first problem the gospel of John claims to solve. The problem of being known and loved - that’s a pretty tough nut to crack. But you think that’s a tough problem, try this one:Now I say it that way, not to be crass but to awaken us to the reality that we too often forget about. It’s a physical problem that has to do with blood pressure and oxygen levels and tissues and DNA and organs. Our lives are coming to an end and as amazing as modern medicine is, there is nothing that can be done to fix this problem. And that’s kind of significant: whatever meaning you discover in life will be stripped away from you in death. So how do I not die? You want to talk about a fundamental problem to the human race? Try death. Death is the problem of problems. Death is the ultimate destroyer. It’s the grand-daddy of all problems.So in my estimation, these are the two greatest problems that humanity faces. One’s a spiritual problem and the other is a physical problem. Here in the gospel of John there’s content that solves both these problems. It solves the problems by telling us a story that is simultaneously both meaningful and true. Some stories are meaningful but not true, such as The Chronicles of Narnia. They don’t deal with reality but they do help you with meaning. Other stories are true but are not meaningful, like the newspaper article I saw four weeks ago about gas prices. They deal with reality but they don’t help you with meaning. The gospel of John is meaningful because it’s true. In other words, it solves the meaning problem by dealing with a reality problem.The gospel of John, this story of amazing love, tells you how you can be known and loved and how you can have eternal life. As we get into the book you will see how it deals with the problem of unworthiness and how it deals with the problem of death. The answer isn’t short or simplistic. It will take us 21 chapters to do that. But here’s the thing you need to realize for our purposes today: it can only solve those problems if you believe that the story is true. You must believe that it’s true. If it’s just a story, then it certainly can’t solve the death problem because nothing in reality has changed. The cells that break down, the physical aging process, the brain cell loss, all of that is still happening. If it’s just a story, it can’t solve the loved and be known problem either. Because nothing materially has changed. The deep dark, unflattering, and unlovable secrets are still there. In order for this story to solve those problems it must be true. It must be history.But now we introduce a third problem. The claim that this is a true story is a problem. We are being asked to believe something that at first blush, seems rather unbelievable. Being asked to believe this story is history is for some a difficult pill to swallow. We have giant claims that a man born of a woman is in fact part of a triune God, water to wine miracles, blind people seeing, people rising from the dead. That sounds like a great story but it can’t possibly be true. Nobody is expected to easily believe that, right? If you believe it too quickly, you wouldn’t be respected. It has many, many elements that are not easily believable. But, here’s the deal, the fact that you are asked with a straight face to believe it suggests that maybe it’s worth investigating.The story of amazing love is very hard to believe. But guess what? Here’s the good news. This is why the gospel of John was written. There are four gospels, and each gospel has a unique purpose. Did you know this? Here’s some interesting facts about each of the gospels. Matthew was written to Jews to present Jesus as Messiah to a Jewish audience waiting to receive their Messiah.The gospel of Mark emphasizes that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and comes at it from the perspective of three groups of people that didn’t understand Jesus.Luke was a historian and he wrote Luke and Acts to Theophilus to provide an accurate account.Now while these gospels differ in their content, there is a large amount of overlap. Compare this to the book of John.John writes a gospel in which 90% of it is unique. This is to make the point that John has a very unique purpose in the book.This was the last gospel written and it was intentionally written to not primarily describe what happened. That’s what the other gospel writers have already done. John writes for a purpose. And he states that purpose very clearly at the end of his book.Now do you see? John was written so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, that the story is history, and do you see the connection? That by believing you might have life in his name. It is the belief that is the prerequisite for life, both spiritual and physical!Belief that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God is the prerequisite for your deepest spiritual need and your deepest physical need. John was written so you might believe this unbelievable story. So everything we read in the book was written with this purpose in mind for you to believe that this story is true. To believe that this is in fact history.So I want to talk to you today if you do not yet believe this. Maybe you are watching online. Either way, I’m glad you are here. I’m glad you’re not just biting this off hook, line, and sinker. That shows critical thinking. It shows that you are a person who is seeking truth. I want to warn you. This story has convinced millions of people. It is very convincing! And I want you to be convinced because look at the benefits. Truth believed is incredibly life changing. Feel free to talk to me at any point if you have questions. I’d love to help you get answers!The Concept of NothingToday we are only going to cover the first five verses of John. Now interestingly, John’s gospel doesn’t begin with a genealogy or the Christmas story or the early boyhood of Jesus. Thankfully, we have just come off the Christmas season and so that is all fresh in our minds. John begins with the eternal non-beginning of a pre-created universe and a non-created God. Here’s how John starts his gospel:This is intended to transport us not to the beginning of Jesus’ earthly life, but to the beginning of the space-time continuum of our physical universe. This transports us right back to Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”Now I want to stop right there. We are so familiar with this, but try to not be for a moment. In terms of philosophical grounding or in terms of worldview cornerstones, this is massive. To say that God created the heavens and the earth is like being lost in a snowstorm and pulling out your spiritual compass and finding north. The fact that God, the eternally existent one, created everything we see is the bearing off which everything else is oriented. In the beginning God was. In the beginning was the pre-incarnate Word. That totally orients us so we can begin making sense of what we see. This is strictly the point he’s making. God always was. In the beginning God was wasing. In the beginning, God.Here’s what John is doing here, we will soon be introduced to this person who appears very human. We will be reading about Jesus, this very human man with flesh and bones who drinks water, talks with people, gets tired and needs to sleep at the bottom of a boat, and who weeps when friends die. John is connecting that man with the eternally existent triune God. In the beginning, God.Now to appreciate this, I want you to try to imagine nothing. The best illustration of nothing that I can think of is darkness. Have you ever been in a cave and turned the flashlight off? In most other situations when you turn off the lights, your eyes adjust and you can make out faint sources of light, maybe starlight or a LED from a device or a pinprick of distant light from a lamp. But when you are in a cave deep underground, there’s just nothing. You can stay there two days or two years. There’s zero light.That’s darkness, but we still haven’t arrived at the concept of nothing. You have to take away all objects. So take away the cave. Take away the rocks. Take away the grass and trees, the land, the water, the cows, the goats, the hamsters, the earth, and all the planets. We are getting closer. That’s still not enough. We now need to take away the air. So no air which of course means no sound since sound has to travel through a medium. And finally we need to take away the heat. So your body chills to a frigid absolute zero temperature of -459.67 degrees F.No sun. No stars. Which means no light waves, no energy waves. The darkness, the nothingness is now complete. You are suspended in space, in absolute absence of light, absolute absence of heat, absolutely absence of movement because after all motion has to be in reference to something else. There’s nothing to stimulate sight, sound, taste, touch, or smell. You are a frozen block existing in nothing. That sounds cheery. What existed at this moment? Well the text says that the Word existed. Now we know that the Word spoken about here is representative of Jesus because down in verse 14 it says:So just tuck that away, that the Word is Jesus Christ. That’s where we are headed, but we aren’t there. John 1:1 is talking about the pre-incarnate Word.This is the pre-incarnate Jesus. What does that word incarnate mean? We get our word carnivore from that root. A flesh eating animal. So pre-incarnate means pre-enfleshed. Before Jesus had a body. In the beginning, before Jesus had a body and was just spirit, was the Word. It’s not talking about the Jesus with flesh and blood. It’s not talking about a man with legs and arms and flesh and a heart. He became that. Jesus’ life did not begin like our life did at birth. Jesus had no beginning. That’s the point the author is making.In the beginning, if you could be there at that moment, there would be nothing to see, nothing to smell, nothing to taste, nothing to touch, but there would be something there. In the beginning was the Word. In dimensions totally other, God existed.Now why do I mentally back us up to this point? I do this to make the point that if you are going to change from a state of nothing to a state of something, energy has to be injected into the equation. Zero plus zero is always going to equal zero. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz the father of calculus and the binary system said over three hundred years ago, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” That’s a pretty good question. If you look around and see something, if you discover anything other than absolute zero nothingness, then logically there must be a source of energy, power, and life to infuse something into nothing. The Bible likes the logic of Leibniz. Which is why John, after saying that the Word was with God from the beginning, goes on to say:Notice that it is not said that all things are made by him. We take things in the universe and manipulate them. Works of art are made by humans. Houses are made by builders. But the universe was made through God. To bake a pizza you have to send it through the oven. The source of power is the oven. The world was created through Jesus. So all the energy, power, and life that we experience here on planet earth is a result of the energy, power, and life that comes from the pre-existent God who eternally exists.This God-Man Jesus Christ, existed before all times and was in fact the creator of all things. We don’t tend to think of the second person of the Trinity, the Word, as the creator but the Bible makes it explicit on many occasions.Here we are told that all things are created through him and that they were created for him. That is means and purpose.So clearly, we are told that Jesus Christ is the creator of all things. That means that Jesus is really powerful. Really powerful. Try to geek out with me for a moment. He can speak a word and the entire universe spins into existence. Now let’s think about what exactly that means. Can we just pause a moment and think in concrete terms about the creative ability of Jesus? One of the ways to conceptualize this incredible act of creating all things is to just think in terms of raw power. Power is what is needed to do work. So if you need to turn on your mixer, you need power. If you want to run a mile, you need power. If you want to drive your car, you need power. This is essential to get out of the state of nothing. You need power. Think about power. Here is a chart that explains the energy output of various things in the universe.The chart is in Joules of energy. I can’t picture a joule of energy, so I put this little dot on 1 calorie which very, very close to 1 joule. Four joules equals 1 calorie so it’s a very small amount of energy.As we work our way around the chart, every increment is a power of ten. Ten to the eighth power (10^8, 10 with 8 zeros) joules of energy represents the amount of energy in a gallon of gasoline. To give you an idea of how much power is in a gallon of gas, if you convert that to calories, that’s about 30 million calories or 300,000 bananas. If you could drink gasoline, you’d only need about 4 gallons to fuel your entire life.10^9 is the amount of energy in a ton of dynamite.10^11 is the amount of energy in a ton of hydrogen.10^13 is the first atomic bomb.10^18 is the annual energy production of the U.S.10^21 is all the energy since the invention of the Tesla coil.10^32 is the daily output of the sun.10^47 is all the yearly output of the Milky Way.10^55 is the yearly output of the universe.10^70 is all the energy in the universe.Those are eye watering amounts of power.Jesus Christ is powerful. John 1:1 is connecting the man Jesus with this creative power. That’s amazing. Now the text goes further. Not only is Jesus Christ the source of all power, he is the source of all life. You get this astounding two sentences that will become the entirety of our remaining meditation.Not by him, not through him, but in him was life. Here’s the incredible point that is being made here. God is life in himself. God is the source of life. He is life. So to have life, you must be in the source of life in the same way that to be wet you must be in water. It cannot be any other way. This is why, when you read the New Testament, one of Paul’s favorite ways to reference a Christian is those who are “in Christ.” In him was life, both spiritual life and physical life.The ApplicationSo I want to come back to it and help you see where John is going in this book. The book of John claims to answer some of the greatest questions known to man. How can I have spiritual life? How can I be known and loved? How can I have physical life? How can I live forever? John begins by saying, this life that we all are longing for can only be found in Jesus Christ. And let me try to explain what a bombshell this would have been.Our English translations say, “In the beginning was the Word.” That’s the Greek word ‘logos’ and it’s a highly loaded philosophical term in the first century. Greek philosophers talked about it, the stoics talked about it, Philo writes entire books about it. It meant a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But the core idea was that this was the ultimate expression of meaning, fulfillment, and purpose. It was the highest ideal. And so these ancient philosophers, after debating this idea for centuries, came to recognizing something very important. They recognized that for that to even make sense, for there to even be a concept of purpose or meaning, there had to be a God.For example, I could show you this object and say, “Hey can you tell me if this is a good trinandoid?” How can you possibly answer that question? You have to first ask, “What’s a trinandoid? What’s it supposed to do?” Only after you know what it is supposed to do, can you then evaluate whether it is operating according to its design. This is not a trinandoid. I just made up that word. This is actually a mechanical calculator. So is this a good one? Now you can start evaluating. What are features of a good calculator? It calculates correctly, quickly, conveniently, and easily. So you’d test it by entering a math problem on the keypad to the right and then you’d see if it printed the right numbers on the roll of paper. You evaluate it based on its design. It’s a good calculator if it calculates.Ancient philosophers realized this. We can’t evaluate if a life is good or bad unless of course we know what the purpose of that life is. And so that was the quest. What is the logos? That’s why the concept of logos was closely linked with the concept of God. What is the ultimate meaning behind life? You need a God to even have a category for meaning. And from Plato to the present you have had all these attempts and philosophical theories that try to answer, “What is the logos?” Confucianism says the logos of life is to achieve harmony. Buddhism says the logos of life is to remove desire. Zoroastrianism says the logos of life is to bring happiness into the world to combat the battle against evil.The reason it’s so important to find the logos, and presumably the reason so many people are miserable, is that they aren’t operating according to their design. What if I tried to use this mechanical calculator as a hammer? Not only would it not be very effective at sinking nails, it would destroy the calculator such that it could not function any longer according to its design. You’d be smashing and smashing and saying, “This thing is a piece of junk.” It’s not a piece of junk, you just haven’t been using it as it was designed.Here’s the horror and tragedy of the Bible. We have been using the calculator as a hammer. We thought that the goal of life was to make everything revolve around us and our happiness. We thought the goal of life was to build a kingdom in which we are king. And because we were not designed to be fulfilled in that way, it means not only that we are miserable because we are operating outside of our design, but we have permanently destroyed ourselves so that even if we did want to operate in our design, our souls are wrecked such that we could never experience it. We can never experience the perfect design because we are wrecked! The gears are smashed flat by repeated hammering and all the keys are broken off. The thing doesn’t work any longer. Things are permanently damaged and irreparable.And I’m not overstating. We sense that problem in the two greatest problems mankind faces. How can I have spiritual life? How can I have eternal life?Now here’s where John just comes in a drops a bombshell. I mean this is like a philosophical nuclear warhead. “Guess what? There is a logos to life, but it’s not a truth brought by a person. It is a truth that is a person. The logos is not an abstract principle. The logos is not a theorem. The logos is not something you can find in a book. The logos is a human being, God come to earth. The logos became flesh and lived among us and we beheld his glory.”When you know this One and when you behold his glory and when you serve this One and when you worship this One, you find your reason for life. Now there’s meaning and purpose and life. This is what the book of John is about. It’s what Christianity is about. It’s solving these massive problems. Christianity is not a philosophy. It’s true that you can develop a philosophy from Christianity. You can talk about philosophy that rises out of Christian belief, but it’s not a philosophy. It’s life; it’s power. It’s being connected to God who is power and life. Christianity is a person. Christianity is Christ.Jesus is going to say later on in the book, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No man comes to the father except through me.” That’s what it’s talking about right here. Jesus Christ is not an abstract bit of truth; he is your Alpha and he is your Omega. He is the thing you were created by, and he is the thing you’re created for. That’s what gives you meaning. Jesus Christ gives you life and gives it to you abundantlyChurch ThemeEvery year we have a church theme as a way to really drive home a concept we feel like is important for us as a church body. In 2020, God providentially guided us through two sections of Scripture that were so incredibly helpful: Ecclesiastes and the story of Joseph. And we learned about the meaning of life, how to think about suffering, how to think about pleasure, and how to think about the sovereignty of God through it all. Our theme in 2020 was “Change What You Love.” Hopefully what you ended up loving in 2020 was God and particularly the love of God for you. Last year we wanted to focus on taking our eyes off the trinkets of the world, we want to encourage you through the book of Ecclesiastes to stop loving money, sex, power, pleasure and instead fear God and keep his commandments. Love the God of love. Love the fact that God loves you! So this year we build off that idea with the theme, “Life in His Love.” In 2021, we want to explore what it looks like to have life in his love.