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April 16, 2006, Easter
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2 Peter
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Pastor Brian Shimer
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"God's Recipe: To Brotherly Kindness Add Love"
2 Peter 1: 1-11
- When I arrived yesterday for the children's outreach, an incredible event with over 50 children, it was a sea of children, of all sizes and varieties, running about, screaming and laughing and having a wonderful time, hearing about Jesus raised from the dead. And it was just a delight!
Evan Medinger met me at the door. He grabbed my hand and dragged me across the room and said, "Pastor Brian, you do need a bracelet." In the minute that I walked in, he was showing me a little bit of brotherly kindness.… the brotherly kindness added to our faith, which I talked about last week that helps us, make it all the way home.
And so, I'm wearing my bracelet. The bracelet says, "He lives!" Now isn't that a good thing to wear on your wrist?
Evan was showing me that incredible gift of love. Where did his love for me come from? It comes from God.
- All things originate from God. It is God who has testified just how much He loved us. It was God, who before the creation of the world, purposed in his heart that He loves the likes of you and the likes of me.
It was God who created all things, things such as the beauty of flowers that spring out of brown earth to become incredibly glorious things. Flowers such as those on the top of the Alps to be seen by no one, except perhaps some mountain hiker passing by, who may find that wonderful eidelweis so close to the ground, high high up on a mountain even where no one will roam, except that one of His children may pass even up there to witness this beauty. God's creativity and love is immense and vast.
- Think about it. Think of all the ways in your life that you see little testimonies of, wow! God loves even me! ...water purifiers, the gift of having clothing to wear.... God loves even you.
God worked with the people of Israel, displaying His love. He was like a parent in the wilderness leading his wayward people. God taught them right from wrong, led them to become a nation different than the nations around them, and disciplined them from evil.
God displayed love to them, through the sending of prophets and kings who spoke God's word. Like a Potter with a pot, God worked with His people that they would become the vessel intended, but they would harden themselves against His touch. They would resist and God would be unable to form them as He wished.
God was like a Husband wooing his bride into the desert and into relationship with himself. Always loving, even declaring that his love for his people was as high as the heavens above the earth, so great was His love.
And then God gave the ultimate expression of His love for not just the Jewish people but for all people, for all the Sons of Adam and Daughters of Eve, God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to be born, live, and ultimately die on a cross.
Romans 5:8 declares it that "This is how God demonstrates his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us." While we were sinners, while we were enemies, while we were dead, Christ died and that proves God loves you.
Yes, Jesus loves you. It is true. He died for you before you were a twinkle in your mom and dad's eyes, He died 2000 years before you were even a thought. But you were a thought in God's heart. God had you in view. God knew You before He faced the cross for your sin and mine, and that cross demonstrated just how much he loved you.
And he loved when he created the first man and woman, he placed them in a garden, he made them gardeners under God the great Gardener. But they rebelled against his love, became weeds not plants of blessing, and lost the relationship God had established for them to have. So God showed love in the "way back" He made for his people.
- Yes, God was willing to die so that you could experience life. But this God loves you so much that he didn't stay dead. In fact, that's the most provable fact of ancient history. Did you know the fact that Jesus rose from the grave is even more provable than that Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, was assassinated in the Ford Theater in Washington D.C.?
Now if you think that is a provable fact, it is more provable historically that Jesus rose from the dead. So when we say that He lives we're not just saying nice words, we're saying the reality, the truth, the greatness, that God loved us so much that He would deal with sin so triumphantly that we indeed could have life.
You know, the point of Christianity, is not to get us out of the world and into heaven. That's a mistake! The whole point is to get the world out of us by putting heaven into our hearts, and then sending us back into the world to live holy lives of love for God and love for our neighbors. Holy life, filled with love! That's the point. It's the transformed life that God was about, woking from the inside out so that we could be people we could never be unless God, the holy one, could come and work in us and we could experience the fullness of that work.
Yes, Jesus loves even you and He loves even me. He came and He died and He lived so that we could experience that love. So we come to the great testimony: the cross of Jesus Christ and His resurrection. This testimony is declared in the scripture that we read today. Peter knew that none of these things he wrote about could be added to our lives, were it not for the fact that Jesus was raised from the dead.
What happens to the women as they come to the tomb, unlike the guards? What a contrast between these tough soldiers and the women! These guards couldn't handle an angel of God. They were filled with fear and became like dead men! … but not the women! The angel calmed their fear and gave them an assignment: "Go tell everybody that Jesus is alive." What do they do? They ran to tell everybody that He lives! God loves us so much, not only to die, but to live so that we can live and experience the love of God.
They do not ponder telling some lesser great news, like the new dress they bought for Passover, or the great sale they found or restaurant they had just visited in town. No, they do not minimize nor avoid the greatest news, instead they go tell it.
- From the pinnacle of God's love for us in Jesus, then we are to grow into love as well. Like those women, we can become vessels of God's love by sharing the greatest news that anybody could possibly share.
So to our faith we can add God's agape love. We add the love that's a sacrificial love. We add the love that says, "I'm not going to love myself so much that cannot love others more. I'm going to show them love like Dana preached. I'm going to demonstrate through my life that you have indeed changed me, that you indeed are the God that has transformed me.
Now Jesus says "greater love has no one than this than to lay down his life for his friend."
This can describe the love of those 5 missionaries killed by the Waodani Indians in Ecuador in about 1956. Their story has recently been released in a marvelous documentary called "Beyond Gates of Splendor" and the more recent movie End of the Spear. The story tells how after Jim Elliott, Nate Saint and the other three men died seeking to reach this tribe that was systematically killing itself off, some of their wives and Nate's sister went into the jungle to the tribe and won them to Christ and the Gospel. They went to tell the good news. That alone is a powerful story.
Can you imagine forgiving the murderers of your husband enough to live among the very people who killed him?
Can you forgive some of those who have hurt you in your lives with such a total forgiveness?
It was Jim Elliott, one of the five who said:
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep (his own life) to gain that which he cannot lose (eternal life)."
But what Jesus said, does not only mean to die for someone else. It may mean what he refers to in our year's theme verse on being a disciple: "lose your life for my sake, you will find true life."
We are not being asked to die for the Gospel but are begin asked to live for it, to give up our own ideas of life and live into what God has given us.
This is what we see Peter capturing in this growth to maturity in the first chapter of 2nd Peter. This is the recipe to walk in that holy life of love - it is the means by which God works to cause us to get the world out of our hearts. It is love like God loves, it is this "agape" love that he tells us to finally "add to our brotherly kindness" after adding the brotherly kindness to perseverance which we added to self control, which we added to knowledge, which we added to goodness with we had added to faith. The pinnacle, the goal is love, love from a heart transformed by Jesus that expresses itself by way of sacrifice.
For Jesus that love meant that he became the first missionary who left home to die in a foreign land so that I could know him. He died for me while I was his enemy, and invites me into love like that, saying "greater love has no man than this, then that he lay down his life for his friends" (John 15: 13)
Could "losing my life" mean not giving into the fear of what people will think of me if I speak now about my faith in Jesus? Could losing my life mean giving up the opinions I hope others hold toward me?
Greater love has no one than this… love enough to tell them about Jesus? Like those women running to share the good news!
- This is not something I can do on my own, but rather, I need to receive God's love into me in order to allow Him to work. Again, this is what Christianity is all about - God transposed into human life. God comes down to live in and through you, in and through me.
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