Christmas 2025 Sermon 05 John 3.16-18 For God So Loved The World

At the start of December this year, a reporter hit the streets of Wellington to find out from locals what they thought of the city's three taxpayer-funded Christmas trees. And people were generally positive about the Christmas trees. They thought it was a festive nicety for the time of year, a reminder of the season. However, when the reporter told them about the cost of the Christmas trees and what the taxpayer had to pay, the question was then whether they were worth the cost. Now, what this illustrates is our human tendency to measure value. We are obsessed with measuring things. The dairy farmer wants to know what milk solids are produced compared to last year. A businessman looks at units sold last quarter. My wife checks Pak'nSave's website every morning for meat week deals. Fitness junkies use apps to track their workouts. We measure time, billable hours, average sleep, our commuting time in cars. We are in a constant flux as people of measuring, evaluating, and finding value in the world.

A question for you this Christmas morning: have you ever really paused to consider and evaluate the love of God? We have our ways and methods of measuring, it seems, everything else, but how do we measure the love of God? I believe the answer for us this morning to this question is right before us in the Gospel of John. And the way we can know, evaluate, test, and measure the love of our Creator for this world is found in the person of Jesus Christ, whose birth we remember, especially again today.

In this passage, Jesus issues perhaps the clearest summary of the Christmas message in all the Bible. It's the good news of Jesus Christ preached from the lips of Jesus Christ. And Jesus invites us this morning to do what we naturally do: to pull out our rulers, so to speak, our scales, and to measure the love of God. And what we will find is that this is an immeasurable love.

So let's consider the nature and manner of this love. First, consider with me in the text God's love that gives. God's love that gives. This is the nature of Christmas. God has given. Many of you will give gifts to one another on Christmas, perhaps already this morning or later in the day, if you kids have got to be patient. Well, God too has given to us. God has given us a priceless gift. A gift is an act of his great love. The message of Christianity, you see, has nothing to do with what man has done for God, but it's what God has done for man.

Now, some cultures in history express their love in strange ways. Apparently, in Austria, perhaps with a tint of folklore, if a woman fancied a man, she could try to win his love by dancing with an unground nutmeg, an unground spice, under her armpit, and after a night of dancing and her sweat had soaked the nutmeg, she would then slip it into a man's drink that she fancied, hoping that it would make him chemically attracted to her. A strange expression of love.

See, we use a stethoscope to evaluate the condition of a heart. We use a pressure gauge for a tyre pressure. And the way to measure the love of God is actually by fixing our focus on Jesus. You see, this is a top down story, friends. It is heaven descended upon man. It is heaven descended upon a lost and dark world in the person of God the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. And so the gift is one of incarnation. It's deity assuming humanity. The birth of Christ is a totally miraculous working of God out of love as we cannot comprehend.

Now, there are a lot of people in the world today, and perhaps even you this morning, who do not think that God loves at all. They have their own ways of measuring God's love, and they find that it's non-existent. You see, many people look at the world around them. They look at the news, they look at the Internet, they see hurt, hate, suffering, violence, bullying, bombing, starving children, mass murders, great atrocities of evil as we all know in this world. And yet all without divine intervention, and they say, "Well, if there is a God, there is either no love in him to stop evil, or he has stopped caring and he is simply letting us be." Or they say, "Just look at the world and the mess that man has gotten himself into on this lonely blue planet." And so they think we are essentially lapping the sun around and round until we as a race or the sun as a light expires. There is not a God who loves, they say.

Or perhaps their test to measure the love of God started with themselves. They look at their own lives, their tragic circumstances; poor decisions perhaps have ruined them in some way. There's divorce, there's death, there's cancer, there's bankruptcy; all sorts of things to make them think that God cannot love. "I haven't known the love of God," they say. "Look at my life." But my friends, if this is you this morning, you have it all wrong. You have the wrong instrument for the job, the wrong presuppositions, the wrong worldview. Your measurement is comparable to putting a stethoscope for the heart on a car tyre for an air pressure reading. You're seeing things all wrong, and it's not going to work.

What instead does the Bible say? The answer is found in our first look at the text in verse sixteen. Here is the yardstick, here is the measuring wheel we are to use: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son."

See, this text is telling us that the answers to our queries, any reasons we might think up to doubt this love, are all answered fully and completely in Jesus. It is Christ himself. It is this man born into the world two thousand years ago according to prophetic promise. It is he and what he has come to do and what it means for us that reveals the extent of the Creator's love. So if you wish to learn of God's love, you must come to Jesus this morning, or you will remain in the dark. Christ reveals all. He is our means of analysis.

So now I want you to see here in John, secondly, that God's love saves. God has sent the Son, Jesus, into the world, but now the right question for us is: what is it in particular about the coming of Jesus that proves the love of God beyond a doubt? The answer is: you see why he came.

And so look at the latter half of verse sixteen again. It says that "whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." "For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him." So it is the Son and his work at the foreground of God's love. And here we find two parts to the salvation that we need to understand.

First of all, Jesus says he has come so that those who believe in his name may not perish. There's an interesting clip that I've seen a few times, and perhaps you have too on YouTube, and it's a clip of some young babies in a room with professionals watching on, doing a study, and there's a whole lot of babies in a room on the ground crawling around, and there's a whole lot of snakes in the room with the babies. I'm not sure if you kids have ever seen a snake in person, but they can be pretty scary. But anyway, all these babies are on the ground, and there are all these different-sized snakes around them. But you see, the babies don't understand snakes, and they're not afraid of them. They don't understand that snakes can be deadly. You see, they do not fear what they do not understand. They were undisturbed.

I think there is something comparable here with Jesus' words concerning perishing. You see, you are not inclined to think much of God's love expressed in salvation until you understand perishing. Now, perishing, you ask; what is this perishing? Does it mean not dying? Is that the promise? Because you might say you're not overly worried about dying. Sure, there might be some pain involved, but then it's a sweet release of death, as a friend once said to me. Is it not? As I saw one internet comment on Reddit recently, they said, "Death is as natural as sunshine and ultimately unavoidable. Fearing it is crazy."

But here Jesus has quite a more serious view on death. You see, the Bible doesn't want us to think of death as a normal thing, but a warning sign of the judgment that awaits us because of sin. We die because of sin. When the world was first made and God put man in it, man did not die nor would man ever perish, but something changed, something went wrong, and man through disobedience of God's law entered a state of spiritual deadness, and this deadness resulted in death, the wages of sin, and then following our judgment for sins and eternal separation from him.

And so the psalmist says in Psalm 89:48, "What man can live and not see death? Can he deliver his soul from the power of Sheol?" The answer is, by ourselves, no. And so Christmas is a serious time as well as a time of great joy, because life and death, salvation and damnation all hang in the balance of this babe of Bethlehem.

And Jesus is saying he has come as an expression of love because of our issue of perishing. You see, the perishing Jesus refers to here is not merely your temporal death. It is the eternal death. It is what the Bible calls elsewhere the second death. The perishing is that of an eternal perishing, an eternal conscious torment in hell. It is that place where God's righteous anger against evil is fully manifest. It is Jesus has come to save us from this. He has come into this world that we would not perish, that we would not have to pay the penalty for our sins in hell.

This is the message of the gospel. He's come to save us from this lake of fire, this outer darkness; this place where man's existence shall be a ghastly, frightful horror when, after ten million and a hundred million years, their nightmare has not even yet begun. You see, we are creatures made in God's image and likeness, with souls and his life breathed into us. We are distinct from all God's other creatures, and we have defied him. Creatures from the dust that have defied the living God, and justice awaits.

Recently, our ex-police deputy commissioner got off with a slap on the wrist for crimes which would typically see ordinary citizens put behind bars. The people cried out, "How is this just?" But you see, human courts are one thing. It is God's courts that you ought to fear, friend. The perishing that awaits God's court is a court of perfect justice. And this is why Jesus has come, he says. He has come from God and is God himself in flesh to make the way of escape for us.

Now, you might say, "I thought God was a God of love, and now you're saying he is a God who is angry, a God who condemns. How can you justify this?" Well, the Bible says God's wrath is revealed from heaven against all unrighteousness and ungodliness of men. We suppress the truth. God's nature is against all that is wicked. In Psalm 7:11, it says, "God is a righteous judge and a God who has indignation every day."

God's love expressed in the coming of Jesus Christ is only properly understood against the contrast of what is deserved otherwise. Then we understand love when we understand what we truly deserved. A little understanding of perishing will result in a little understanding of love. The love of God is not a love we merit. Quite the opposite; God loves because he is love, and for his own glory he has moved in accordance with that original promise of a Saviour.

But now, see here, Jesus says that to believe in him is to receive eternal life. God's love declares in Jesus' birth that all is not lost. The serpent's lie and Adam's sin shall not have the final word in this story. He says, "Here is my Son. Here is the second Adam. Here is your substitute. Here is the one in whom is a full and free salvation, leading to everlasting life with me," God says. And so, though it is perishing that we deserve, it is grace that is granted to sinners who call upon him in faith. And there is all the mercy that you need, friends, in Jesus, and it's not to be earned. It's not to be received. It is life eternal from a well of salvation that will never run dry.

And the contrast could not be greater. So on the one hand, when justice is executed in the courtroom of God, the sinner in the dark receives what they have earned: judgment for sins, perishing. On the other hand, those who receive grace find that it is not of themselves that they have release. One will receive the due recompense for sins in hell; the other will receive what they did not deserve and the bliss of heaven and full communion with God. But how can this salvation be possible? It's not like God can just wave his wand and all of a sudden salvation is possible for man. What work had to be done? That's the question.

You see, Jesus is the one with the authority, right, and power to save you from perishing. And not one who comes to him in faith will fall short of inheriting the salvation promised. Come to him, and you shall taste the love and goodness of God, who is willing to save and longs to save. In Ezekiel 18:23, it says, "Do I have any pleasure in the death of the wicked? Declares the Lord God. Rather that he should turn from his ways and live."

See, Christ will never cast you out this morning if you wish to be saved from your terminal condition. The Saviour took your place in those docks. He cried out, saying to the Father, "Upon me will the wages for their sin be. Place it all on me, charge it to my account. And I will drink that cup of divine wrath, of that perishing. I will be redemption's price. Charge it to me, Father." Such is the love of Christ for sinners. Such is a love vast as the ocean. It's a loving kindness like a flood.

And so our striving of self-merit must cease. Without the Child of Christmas who has come to save, our good works are as rags, and the Sun has come to do what we could not. You see, our race, confirming its lost condition, took a man like Jesus, one so pure, one so holy, and deemed him unworthy. The Jews gave him to Romans to crucify him, to put him away. You see, that wooden manger that he was laid into foreshadows the wooden cross at Golgotha where he was crucified.

A man of sorrows, Isaiah said seven hundred years earlier, acquainted with grief, and one like from whom men hide their face; he was despised and we did not esteem him. "Surely our griefs he himself bore and our sorrows he carried, yet we ourselves esteemed him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. But he was pierced through for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the chastising for our well-being fell upon him, and by his scourging we are healed."

At the cross, Christ gave his life so that we might not perish but have everlasting life. Full satisfaction; it is finished. Mission complete. Hallelujah. God loves, and the Son has died for the sins of a world in darkness like the night, but the light has shone in the darkness. Jesus said it himself, did he not, in John 10:15, "I lay my life down for the sheep." Willingly did he come.

The Son exchanged a crown of righteousness for a crown of thorns. He who was rich for our sake became poor. You see, only a sinless substitute would do. One who had clean hands and a pure heart; one who had kept the law that could be our representative. Jesus is all that you need, friend, and more.

And this is love: "Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent the Son to be a covering for our sins." So what is keeping you from placing your faith in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour this morning? He is ready to save sinners. His hand is extended. In John 6:37, he says, "The one who comes to me, I will certainly not cast out." He is a willing Saviour for you this morning, friends.

The Scripture says that the one who believes in Jesus is he who overcomes; who will not be hurt by the second death. Can you praise God in faith, as Simeon this Christmas day did, and say of him, "For my eyes have seen your salvation"? Romans 5:8 says, "But God demonstrates his love towards us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."

Finally, briefly here, I want you to see God's love that warns in verse eighteen. On Boxing Day in two thousand and four, a huge earthquake struck off the coast of Indonesia, causing a cataclysmic tsunami. Two hundred and thirty thousand people, estimated, died and perished that day. And even more would have been lost if it were not for the ten-year-old Tilly Smith, who was holidaying with her parents in Thailand. Recognising the signs, she sounded the alarm, and many were able to escape.

Friends, the warning siren of the tsunami of God's wrath is sounding again this Christmas as his word is preached. The Saviour has come; the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the gospel. How would we describe the fool who hears this message and does not act? It would be like someone running into a burning building to save you from a house fire, and you're huddling in the flames, and you say, "No, I quite like it here."

Flee from the wrath to come, and run to the embrace of a God who loves, of a God, a Creator who redeems. Run to the Christmas Child. Jesus Christ is your only way of escape. God's love is such that through Christ he is snatching for himself those like firebrands from hell; a people for his own possession. And Christ stands in the gap for now as a Saviour, and yet, as the Scripture says, if you will not believe, there's a coming day as your judge.

See, we dangle as by a thread over a Christless eternity if we will not believe upon him. And so the Scripture says in John 3:18, "He who believes in him is not judged. He who does not believe has been judged already because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God."

My prayer is that you would believe upon Christ this morning, if you have not already, and receive the love of God that he has manifestly shown and will pour out upon all who call on his name. Let's pray.