The Love of the Trinity
1. The Father...
"For God so loved the world that he gave" - this is God the Father.
Our Father is a loving father! Love is an action, according to God; God's love GAVE us his only son.
Love isn't feeling, but doing! God is a giver.
The Lord's prayer... We ask God for a lot! Because we have a good father who loves to give to our children.
Luke 11:9... ask and it will be given.
Our Father is quick to love, to give, to forgive us. His love is action! Abundant, sustaining. He provides, he gives!
For he so loved "the world"... He loves all of sinful mankind! He gave his son to the unlovable world!
2. The Son...
He gave "his only Son"...
John 3:16 shows us HOW God loves us.
His son would be crucified and lifted up. He loves me so much that he sent me his son (so that we may kill him instead of dying ourselves!)
Christianity is all about the cultivation of our private relationship with God. We must make sure we're spending time with God, or we will spiritually shrivel and die!
We should be like a tree planted by the water! (Psalm 1)
Go to God, who freely gives! He even sent his Son.
3. The Holy Spirit...
"Whoever believes in him"... You're going to heaven ONLY because you believe in him.
"Believes" is present tense. It must be ongoing, not just a decision you made in the past! An ongoing belief. If you're a Christian, go to church, read his Word, repent of your sins continually.
Once saved, always saved, yes! But... if you walk away from the Lord, it may be that you're an example of bad soil rather than good. You may not have really been converted. If your belief isn't ongoing, in the present tense, it's not genuine. How do you continue to live your life? You'll know a tree by its fruit.
Yet it's not about your works; it's about the state of your heart.
True belief results in faithful endurance to the end. Be all in!
The Father so loved the world, that the Son came, and the Spirit awakened us.
4. Why must we believe?
God is good, and we are not. He is perfect, and we are imperfect. The wages of our sin is death! We deserve to die when we meet the Judge. God cannot ignore evil, because he is good! Unless we receive the gift of the Son, then the holy, just wrath of God is on us!
We need help, and in Jesus, we have it! He absorbed God's wrath, so every sin we'll ever commit is paid for!
This is the Gospel message!
Revival...
God pours out his spirit on the people, and they're induced to follow Jesus, to live righteously in holiness, following him!
But we must not yet to treat the symptoms of the world before we diagnose the disease. Symptoms would be greed, lust, poverty... The real disease of our culture is that the West has forgotten her King!
We need an outpouring of the Holy Spirit! A revival of people submitting to and following Jesus Christ!
Receiving the gift of Christ gives us eternal life..
5. Humanity's hope... Eternal life!
John 17:3... To believe is to enter eternal life! Eternal life starts now, not only in the afterlife. You have access to God Almighty now!
And it lasts forever. To receive him is to have everlasting life! Through Jesus Christ, we don't have to be afraid of death.
Ps118:17... I shall not die, but live, and recount the deeds of the Lord.
We enter Heaven, and our first words will be "Thank you!!!" We start singing about the cross!
To receive the Lord is also to be under the love of the Son. A decision for Christ is to live eternally in his love!