I want to speak to you about God’s love for us, revealed to us in the life and especially the death of Jesus his Son – and the impact this is to have on our lives, not least on our suffering for him. But first I want to approach this by considering the significance of human love in giving meaning to life. For, as I’ve said previously, if there is no God, then love has no profound meaning at all – it is reduced to a selfish biological imperative, no more.

As for suffering, so often made an excuse for not believing in God, or at least a loving one – this also is – logically – for an unbeliever no problem, since there is no meaning to be found in what happens by chance. Suffering – ‘undeserved’ suffering – is strictly a problem for the believer. A problem that Job wrestled with – and received no answer beyond the need to trust in the great love, wisdom and power of God – a trust vindicated for us by what God has shown us in Jesus.

The concept of sacrificial love.

I think all will accept the proposition that human love gives meaning to our lives. We’re so devastated when that love is lost. A pre-war English Christian writer, G. K. Chesterton, wrote something very perceptive about love. At a time when casual sexual intercourse was praised as ‘free love’, Chesterton said,

What today is called love is so often without real commitment, and could justly be called self-gratification or self-indulgence – because, as the writer said, the nature of true love is to bind itself. Love is not love when it is manufactured for the moment. Love is the posture of the soul which is bound by its commitment. Love and sacrifice go together, and love outpoured enriches life.

The present day Christian writer, Ravi Zacharias, tells a story learnt when he was a child in India. It is a parable about love.

A young man falls in love with a woman from a neighbouring village. His love was genuine, but she only exploited his feelings to her own advantage. She made it a game, demanding more and more proof of his love for her. At last she demanded the unthinkable. “If you really love me, I must know that it is an unrivalled love. I ask you to take your mother’s life and bring me her heart as a trophy of my victory over your love for her.”

The young man was confounded for weeks and grief-stricken by the choice. At last, unable to withstand his “loss”, in a frenzied fit he killed his mother and took her heart from her body. He ran as fast as he could to present it to the girl, all the while fleeing his guilty conscience. While running through a wood, he stumbled and fell, the heart bouncing out of his hand. He searched for it and, as he picked it up, he heard a voice from the heart saying, “Son, are you hurt?.. Son, are you hurt?”

Zacharias asks, What is it about this love that wins our admiration? He suggests that such a concept of sacrificial love could not have come from mindless matter – it must have come from our Creator, God himself.

Dr Stanley Jones, a missionary to India, much respected in his day, used to tell of a man, a devout Hindu government official, to whom he was trying to explain the cross of Christ. The man kept telling him he could make no sense of the cross and of the love of God. One day this man became involved in an extramarital affair. But it tormented his conscience and he could not live with himself.

Looking into the eyes of his devoted wife, he told her of his betrayal. Her anguish and pain became weeks of heaviness in her heart. Nevertheless, she confessed to her husband not only her deep sense of hurt, but also her promise of undying commitment and love.

Suddenly, like a lightning flash, he found himself muttering, “Now I know what it means to see love crucified by sin.” He bent his knee in worship to his Saviour – and embraced his wife anew.

God’s love and true reconciliation

Only in the Christian faith is life with God always portrayed as a relationship of love. Not a sentimental emotion, but the life-long commitment of the will, in utter gratitude to God for what, through his love for us, he has done in Christ.

The parable of the errant son told by Jesus, is one of the best known and loved – because the situation it describes is so human, so timeless. We can all identify with a story of broken relationships, and many long for such a wonderful reconciliation. Above all, it tells us that God, the Father, loves us and longs for it, and although he has good reason to do otherwise, he makes reconciliation possible.

What Jesus told in story form, Paul states and explains in his letters. He fills in the parable’s gaps and expands its horizons even more. The concept of reconciliation – as a description of what God has done for us in Christ – meant a lot to Paul. He alone in the N.T. describes the cross as a work of reconciliation, and he does so five times. (Rom 5:9-11; 11:15; 2 Cor 5:16-21; Eph 2:11-22; Col 1:20-23)

Of course, this is not the only picture that Paul uses, even in the course of the above passages. But it is a picture that is understand-able and personal in the present day, where so many suffer from divisions caused by broken relationships – in the family, between husbands and wives, and between parents and children – in the workplace between managers and employees – in society, between men and women, rich and poor, black and white – and between other ethnic and religious groups, Tutsi and Hutu, Kurd and Turk, Russian and Chechen, Muslim and Christian...

And even where there are outwardly good relations, there can be unspoken tensions, a lack of real engagement and acceptance... Do we not all need to heed this call for deep reconciliation and love, so we may know the oneness Jesus died for, and calls us to? We are not to paper over the cracks, but deal with the causes.

It was with this in mind that Archbishop Desmond Tutu addressed a church conference in South Africa in 1990, that first brought together leaders of the white and black churches:

How God has reconciled us to himself

So it is, that Paul speaks of the need to deal effectively with sin, and does not side-step the issue of offence. The cause of our alienation from God is that we are ungodly, we are active sinners. We don’t stand on neutral ground – there is none in the presence of our holy Creator – we have become his enemies, not only by our behaviour, but also in our thinking! (Rom 5:6-11; Col 1:21) God couldn’t ignore this hostility or just sweep it aside – it has created a barrier that had to be removed by dealing justly with our offence.

Paul makes it clear that we were powerless to do anything about it, had we even wished to (Rom 5:6). What could we offer God as recompense for our past behaviour? Nothing!

The wonder is that while we were helpless, God took the initiative. Paul says that three times in the space of four verses (2 Cor 5:18-21). God reconciled us to himself through Christ.. God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them.. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Away then with any thought that Christ, by his death, had to persuade a reluctant Father to change his attitude towards us, from anger to love. Father and Son were acting together. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.. (John 3:16) But what they did together had primarily to do with God himself, and his own character of utter holiness. For it was while we were still enemies, we were reconciled to him. Moreover we receive this reconciliation – it is a gift, it is not something we can bring about!

How could this be? For the simple reason that God is the offended party – we cannot undo what we’ve done, remove the hurt or appease his just anger against evil. Only God could do that – and amazingly, he did! God reconciled us to himself through Christ...(2 Cor 5:18) We were reconciled to him through the death of his Son. (Rom 5:10) In Christ Jesus you, who once were far away, have been brought near through the blood of Christ.(Eph 2:13)

Paul gives us clues how God brought about our reconciliation. God was.. in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them.(2 Cor 5:19) In his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished. (Rom 3:25) Our sins are not just overlooked – their debit is accounted instead to God.. in Christ.

And in verse 21: God made him, who had no sin, to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Here (says one commentator) is the most profound sentence in Scripture – we should approach it therefore with awe and humility.

He who had no sin. Other passages also teach us that Jesus lived a sinless life. (Heb 4:15; 7:26; 1 Pet 2:22; 1 John 3:5; John 8:46; Matt 3:17..) Only a sinless man could die in our place, the death our sins deserve. And only a willing self-offering could be acceptable. He humbled himself and became obedient to death. (Php 2:8; Heb 10:7) Not as I will, but as you will. (Matt 26:39; Mk 14:36)

And it does not say that God made his innocent Son a sinner, but sin. He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed..the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. (Isa 53:5,6) And as a result of this tremendous exchange, we (may) become in him the righteousness of God. Not righteous, for we do not become instantly holy, but accounted as holy, acceptable to God as having in Christ his righteousness. (Rom 4:24; 8:1,3) We are put into a right standing with God.

And it is in Christ alone, that is, by our personal trust in him and what he has done for us on the cross, and by our commitment of ourselves to him henceforth as our Lord, that we may receive our reconciliation to God and the forgiveness of our sins.

And this is so much more than a bare pardon. For a pardon says, You may go; you have been let off the penalty your sin deserves. But being put into a right standing with God – the technical word is justification – says, You may come; you are welcome to all my love and presence. It is the welcome home of the repentant son in the parable.

God wins through weakness, and so must we

No other religion presents us with a God like this! A crucified God and Messiah is a scandalous impossibility for a Jew; an unbelievable blasphemy to a Muslim; a ridiculous weakness to this world’s powerful; an absurdity to the intellectual – but the glory, power and wisdom of God to the believer. For here is a God who comes to us in all our weakness, sinfulness and suffering – and that is wonderful – but he does so much more – he lifts us up to himself!

Tom Smail puts it this way:

Here is undeserved love, utter grace on God’s part. No human analogy can come anywhere near it, but we are called to reflect it in the way we live too. It is not the way of the world.

When Jimmy Carter became President of the USA, one of his first acts was to ask the Georgia Pardon and Parole Board to release Mary Fitzpatrick into his custody so that she could take care of his daughter, Amy. Mary was a poor black woman who, without the benefit of proper legal representation, had been convicted of murder and was serving a life sentence. She lived in the White House, ‘performed her duties in an exemplary manner’ and became very close to Amy. Later she was granted a full pardon by the State of Georgia. The Carters, of course, received some ugly letters for doing such a thing.

I know of nothing but the cross that can answer the question of suffering, especially ‘undeserved’ suffering. In many lands today our brothers and sisters in the faith are suffering just because they are Christians, and refuse in the face of severe persecution, torture and death, to deny their Saviour. That should shame our own timidity..

When Peter wrote his first letter, his readers were facing similar suffering, so he wrote, If you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God. To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. “He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.” When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead he entrusted himself to him who judges justly. He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed. (1 Peter 2:20-24)

They overcame [Satan] by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death. (Rev 12:11)

                                                                                              Amen.