Romans 5:6-8 “The Kind of People God Loves” Romans 5:6-8, “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Turn now
to the book of Romans, chapter 5, Romans chapter 5. And we’ll just be looking at verses 6, 7, and
8, Romans 5, verses 6, 7, and 8. As
we look at the kind of people God loves.
“For while we were still
helpless” Paul says in verse 6, “at the right time Christ
died for the ungodly. For one
will hardly die for a righteous man, but perhaps for a good man someone
would even dare to die. But God
demonstrates his own love toward us in that while we were yet sinners
Christ died for us.” Ever kind
of wonder what kind of person God really loves? I heard David in the Old Testament spoken of
as a man after God’s own heart. I
hear that Abraham was “a friend of God”.
But you know, I don’t know if I’ll ever make it to be a man after
God’s own heart. I don’t know
if I’d ever be classified as God’s friend.
But you know what I want to know?
I want to know whether or not he loves me.
God reveals the kind of love that he has for us here in these
verses. The first thing I see in verse 6, is that God’s
love for us is unconditional. Look
at verse 6 again, “For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the
ungodly.” Who qualifies to be loved by God? Good, respectable and moral people? No. That
might be what you’d expect to hear, but instead the Bible tells us that
“while we were yet sinners Christ died for the ungodly.” Jesus (Yeshua) didn’t just die for the goody-goodies,
the good people. He died for
ungodly people. And that means
you and I can qualify to be loved by God.
God’s love for us, secondly, is incomparable.
Look at verse 7, “For one will hardly die
for a righteous man, though perhaps for the good man someone would dare
even to die.” You
can’t compare God’s love to human love.
I mean, he tries, he says, ‘Well, you know, maybe you could comprehend
somebody dying in the place of someone else [Tale of Two Cities], if
that person was really a good person.
I mean, for lack of a better illustration, he’s been the number
one most admired, most trusted American for what, 20 years, and that’s
Billy Graham. Let’s say, hostages had him, and they said ‘Look,
we’re going to kill someone, and it’s either going to be Graham or someone
else.’ And unless someone steps
forward to let us kill them in his place, he’s dead.’
Well I know and you know, somebody would. Right? But
what if it wasn’t Billy Graham held hostage, what if it was Adolf Hitler?
And they said, ‘Look, it’s life for life.
Either someone steps in and takes his place or we blow him for
here to eternity.’ Man, I know
I’d struggle with that, wouldn’t you? I wouldn’t have my hand up ‘Oh me, oh me, I’ll
take Hitler’s place.’ (Maybe
he deserves it, Lord.) He’s a
creep, Lord. Human love is always
conditioned by a person’s behavior and intrinsic goodness.
That’s why it’s so easy to love the people that get along with
you. Don’t you just love people that like the things
you like, and like to do the things you like to do, and think the way
you think? I just love those
kind of people, don’t you? I
like to be around them. They
agree with me, and I agree with them.
But there’s some other people that I have a hard time being around,
people that don’t think like I think, people that disagree with me--people
that don’t like what I like. Man, it gets harder to love them, doesn’t it?
Human love will always let you down. Some of you are banking, and you’re doing it
mistakenly, you’re banking on human love.
Well, my spouse loves me, I’m getting my fulfillment in life
and security in life out of that. She
loves me, he loves me. Hey, I
talk to broken hearted men and women all the time, who never expected
that their spouse would step out on them.
Human love will let you down.
I know my Daddy loves me, I know my Mommy loves me.
Yes, but you know, human love will let you down.
I know people who have been hurt and wounded by well-meaning
parents. But no parent is perfect, they’re going to let
you down. ‘Well my friends will
stick by me!’ (chuckle) You haven’t
lived long enough [if you think that], that’s all (if you say something
like that). Human love will let
you down, I don’t care who it is. But
Jesus Christ [Yeshua haMeshiach] will never let you
down. He’s the friend, the Bible
says, that sticks closer than a brother.
[David said that of Jonathan, Saul’s son and his best friend—but
they were both believers] Human
goodness is conditioned always, human love, I mean, is conditioned always
by a person’s goodness and their good behavior.
When I was growing up, the philosophy I was taught as far as
God’s love for me could be summarized by just half of the song “Jesus
loves me, I know”. Actually this is a verse I never heard until
I was a Christian a few years. But
there’s a verse that summarizes my whole experience in what I thought
it was to be a Christian, and it starts out by this verse, “Jesus loves
me when I’m good, when I do the things I should.”
And that sort of summarized my whole walk with the Lord.
In fact I just discovered some books that we had stowed away,
they’re little story rhymes for children, published by the church I
used to be part of. Oh, what
horrible stories, man. These little kids did something bad, and the
angels were frowning and crying, but that’s what I was raised on. I read it and thought, ‘Man, this is nice stuff
growing up to…Jesus loves me when I’m good, when I do the things I should.’
“What a tragedy, that the world doesn’t understand
that the kind of people God loves are the very people who think God
doesn’t love them.” But you know the truth of the Scripture goes
way beyond that. The next stanza
says “Jesus loves me when I’m bad, even though it makes him sad.” Yes, Jesus loves me, Yes! Jesus loves me! ‘Yes, Jesus loves me, the Bible
tells me so.’ God loved us when
we were helpless, ungodly, sinners, who were living their lives in opposition
to him and to his will. We were
his enemies. And God has proven
his love for us. Look at verse
8, “But God demonstrates his
own love toward us…” The word “demonstrates” could be translated “God shows” or “God proves his own love for us, in that while we were
yet sinners, Christ died for us.” God wasn’t content with merely mouthing the words
“Oh, I love you”, you know. He
knew we needed a little more to hang on to than that.
Talk is cheap, especially knowing that we would go into situations
where we might wonder, ‘Does God love me?’
‘If God loves me, then how could I be going through what I’m
going through right now?’ [that
question was just answered in the preceding sermon “Assurance in Suffering”] ‘If God loves me, how could I be told by the
doctor that I’ll never be cured of the disease I have? How could I be told that I’ve lost my savings?
How could I be told, that I’m going to be laid-off next week
if God’s a God of love?’ God knew he needed more than words. And so God proved it, he backed it up, he demonstrated
it. Because, how else do you
prove or define love? You can
talk it, but you have to show it, don’t you.
“God so love the world that he”--what?--“he gave…” He backed it up with action. Look at 1st John. Keep a marker here in Romans. Near the book of Revelation. 1st John chapter 4, verse 9. “By this”--John tells us about God’s love and
how God’s proven his love and demonstrated it--“By this the love of
God was manifested (or shown) to us, that God has sent his only begotten
Son into the world so that we might live through him.”
In this is love. You want
to know if God loves you?--you have to look at the cross. You have to look at what happened when Jesus
(Yeshua) died on the cross. “In
this is love”. “Not that we loved
God” he says in verse 10, “but that he loved us, and sent his Son to
be the atoning sacrifice for the propitiation for our sins.”
The result of that is verse 19, “we love him, because he first
loved us.” Oh, God help us to
begin to comprehend just how much we’re loved by God.
A lot of times you hear people saying, “If I were living a better…I
would come to Christ.” Or “I’m
just too bad for God to love me.” What
a tragedy, that the world doesn’t understand that the kind of people
God loves are the very people who think God doesn’t love them.
Isn’t that incredible? Think
of it, when Jesus was on the earth and the proud Pharisees and Sadducees,
the religious leaders of the day, they walked around, and Jesus actually
said they strutted around in
their robes and they had tassels and fringes on their garments, and
they loved to swing around and the tassels would fly, you know.
And they loved to pray long prayers, and they’d pray prayers
like “God, thank you, oh thank you God, that I’m not a sinner like she is”,
you know. And there you are,
sitting there thinking ‘Guess God doesn’t love me.
This religious person thanks God he’s not a person like me.’ And yet, who gave Jesus the hardest time?
His whole ministry, who fought him—tooth and nail, and nailed
him to a cross? These religious
goody-goodies, who outwardly were so right, and inwardly were so wrong.
But who was drawn to Christ (Yeshua haMeshiach)?
Who did Jesus love? He
loved the people who needed help. He
loved the people who needed a savior, he loved the people who were sick
in sin, who were “hopeless cases”, who were at desperate ends.
Those are the people Jesus loves.
And he loves those people today, he loves me, he loves you. How can you be too bad to come to Christ?
How could you be too gross for Jesus (Yeshua) to love you?
Explain it to me. The
death of Christ, you see, doesn’t become effectual for you when you
become good enough. There’s nowhere in this book where you can see
that it’s stated that God will love you as soon as you become this
good. Nowhere in
the Bible do you see God telling you, ‘That in this book, he says, that
if he looks in you and finds a particle of goodness, he’ll love you.’ You won’t find that in the Bible. Instead, you’ll find that the only reason why
God loves you, and the only reason God loves me, is not because he looks
in and he sees a speck of goodness in us, but because he is love, and
he just chooses to love us, period.
It is not based on anything emanating from us--not based on anything
in us. That has tremendous implications, because that
would mean that he couldn’t stop loving us either. [Now here is where the theology of various parts
of the body of Christ have different interpretations. Some very real Scriptures say, Jesus’ own words,
“that unless our righteousness far exceeds that of the Pharisees, we
will not enter the kingdom of heaven.”
Only way to square this with what Pastor Martin is saying here
about Romans 5:6-8 is to realize that God even loves those he’s forced
to throw into the Gehenna fires of hell, which is true.
It’s hard to imagine, but God must still love Satan and the demons,
which must infuriate Satan. So
don’t confuse God’s love for a license to do as one pleases with total
disregard for God’s laws of love. And
I’m not talking about some legalistic guilt-trip here.
As we shall see when we get to Romans 7 and 8, the only way to
fulfill the Holy Law, which James calls the royal law in James 1, is
by the empowerment of the indwelling Holy Spirit who dwells within believers
of Jesus, Yeshua. Then as Jeremiah
31:31-33 and Hebrews 8:6-10 bring out, God’s Holy Law is written in
our hearts and minds (by this same indwelling Holy Spirit).]
In this section of Romans chapter 5, Paul reveals the kind of people God loves. He loved, proved his love, by dying for those who deserved it the least. He died for us when we first of all, verse 6, when we were helpless, or NIV says what?--“powerless.” Do you see that? When there was nothing we could do to help ourselves. When we were absolutely helpless, Christ (Yeshua haMeshiach) died for us. And if you’re helpless this morning, and somehow by the grace of God you stumbled in here, and it was all you could do to stay, but you’re listening--listen, if you’re helpless, he died for you. There’s a little story Jesus told in the gospel of Luke where he’s talking about the kind of people he came to save. And one of the stories he uses was, he said, “A certain woman lost a coin” and he was talking about in those days, and still you go over and look at the Bedouin who wear their riches on their forehead and around their necks. And many women, when they became engaged, they weren’t given a big hunk of rock on a ring, instead they were given a chain of coins, and they would wear them around their heads. And it was very precious to them, just like ladies, your engagement rings are precious to you. Now he says, "What woman among you, if she lost her coin, and it fell into the dust somewhere”--because they had dirt floors--“wouldn’t sweep that house and search diligently until she found it?” He says, “It’s that way with me. There are people he’s saying today are like that lost coin. They are stuck and can’t do anything to help themselves. What could the coin do to help itself get found? ‘Here I am. Whoa, here I am.’ Roll out a little? No, I mean a coin is a perfectly helpless object, isn’t it? The only way it could be found is if somebody else did all the finding. When you were helpless, Christ died for you. Christianity, Messianic Judaism, is not a self-help religion. But some people, you know, they look at Christianity, like here’s a guy drowning, and they start getting out the life-saving manual and saying ‘Lesson # 1 of swimming is…kick your feet.’ There’s no time for that. You see, Jesus, Yeshua has got to be the Savior that pulls you out. And he is. Secondly, the kind of people Jesus, Yeshua
died for, verse 6 says, for the ungodly. “For while we were still helpless, at the right time
Christ died for the ungodly.” An ungodly person is someone who’s living like God
doesn’t even exist. That’s what
ungodliness is. It’s just living
like “There isn’t a God.” Just
living like a dog lives. You
know, just for yourself, for your own pleasure, for your own gratification,
sniffing around the world, looking for something to get into.
‘Oh, here’s a piece of dead meat.
I’ll eat the road-kill. I’m a dog.
I don’t know it’s not good for me, I’m just a dog.’
And there are people today who are living like there isn’t a
God, they eat the road-kill of this world.
And they wonder why their lives are so miserable, and they’re
so sick. I’ll tell you why you’re sick. It’s
because you’re living like there isn’t a God, when there is a God. And there’s
a God who loves you, and a God who has prepared a place for you, and
a God that you can never be happy until you know.
The third kind of person that Jesus died
for are those who are still sinners.
Look at verse 8. “that God demonstrates, shows,
proves his own love towards us, in that while we were yet sinners”--or
still sinners--“Christ died for us.”
In other words, right now. You walked in here, you’re still sinning, maybe
this very minute--I don’t know what you could be doing, but you’re sinning.
Christ died for you. Sometimes we get this idea that he might have
died for us right up to that point.
The verse says he died for us while we were still
sinners. You know, before you
can really appreciate the love of God and experience his salvation,
you’re got to admit that you’re a sinner.
Many people today aren’t interested in doing that.
We call sin any name except sin.
Don’t we? The sin of adultery ‘Awh now, we call it a fling,
just a fling, an affair.’ Oh
that sounds so nice, come sit in my office and listen to the broken
hearts and the broken homes. Listen
to the cries of someone who’s messed up his marriage, or someone who’s
messed up her life, and you call it an affair and a fling.
Sodomy, the sin of homosexuality, by an interesting twist of
words, is now being gay. Explain it
to me, I don’t get it. I’m really
bugged by it, every Christmas I’m so bugged, because I used to love
“Deck the Halls”, but I can’t sing it. How
can you walk down the street singing “Don we know our gay apparel???” They’d think we were a bunch of perverts wouldn’t
they? We have to sing now, “Don
we know our happy apparel” now, I guess.
But we don’t want to call it sin.
Drunkenness, it’s a disease.
Give me a break, a disease? They
why doesn’t a stay in a hospital cure it? Where’s the drug.
It’s not a disease, the Bible calls it sin. Infanticide, killing babies, we call a choice today. Isn’t that clean and antiseptic sounding?
And now if you’re in favor of murdering babies, ripping them
apart, limb by limb and pulling them out of a mother’s womb, you’re
pro-choice. It sounds better than pro-murdering babies,
doesn’t it? “I’m pro-butchering
babies.” That just wouldn’t sell. You wouldn’t get public support. So let’s dress it up, let’s call it pro-choice. Rebellion
has become low
self-esteem. Oh, that’s the problem for everything, isn’t it?
Oh, no, the real problem is, your parents did something
wrong.
Amen? Man, that’s got
all the bases covered. Right
there, ‘Mon and Dad messed up and that’s why I’m the nerd I am today.’ ‘My parents, they dropped me.’ ‘My mother, when she was pregnant with me, burped
wrong, and I’ve never gotten over it.’
‘You know the prenatal influence, well I’ve been taken back into
my mother’s womb.’ I hear Christians
getting into this [modern psychology] garbage, regressing. Watch out, gang, don’t get involved in counseling
that takes you back in your past. That
is wrong. It is metaphysical,
it’s part of the whole New Age deal.
You don’t have to go back. Paul
said, “Forgetting the things that are behind me, I press on, I go on
to the goal of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus, I press toward
that mark.” I don’t go
back and, ‘Oh, let me see, it was in the delivery room.’ ‘Oh, it was the bright light in my eyes, that
was it! That’s made me the person
I am today.’ Give me a break. And then I think the funniest of all is when
your kid is hyperactive. You
got to change all the labels nowadays, I got to be so careful of what
I say. Because we don’t have hyperactive children anymore.
Did you know, there aren’t any more hyperactive children anymore,
there isn’t a hyperactive child to anyone who belongs here.
Did you know that? They
are attention-deficit children
[attention-deficit disorder]. Now if you have a child with attention-deficit, aren’t
they hyperactive? But I mean,
it’s like, give me a break. Call
sin by it’s name, it’s sin. [There
really are a few children who truly are hyperactive, where proper treatment
with a drug has made them normal. But
not the huge numbers of misdiagnosed ones by school systems and state
agencies who only want to drug “problem” kids as a temporary fix to
solving a far bigger discipline/child-rearing problem they chose to
ignore.] The story is told, that one day Frederick the
Great, King of Prussia visited a prison and talked to the inmates, and
as he interviewed each of the inmates, they began to tell him these
long drawn-out sorry-stories, endless tales of how they were innocent,
and their motives were misunderstood, or a miscarriage of justice has
taken place, or they were the wrong person in the wrong place, at the
wrong time—and this was all a terrible miscarriage of justice.
Finally the king stopped at the cell of a convict who remained
silent. He didn’t volunteer anything [like] ‘Oh, your
majesty, I need to talk to you, it was my attorney that did me in, he
was in collusion with the other person’ you know.
The king looked at this guy who hadn’t said a word yet, and says
“Well, I suppose you’re an innocent victim of a miscarriage of justice
too.” And he said “No sir, I am not.” “I’m guilty and I deserve my punishment.” Turning to the warden the king said, “Hey!
Release this rascal before he corrupts all the fine innocent
people in this place.” [laughter] It’s
interesting, his release came when he admitted “I deserve this”.
That’s why I just talked about sin.
It wasn’t to rile you. It wasn’t to make you mad at me. It wasn’t to pick on you. It was to tell you, ‘You’ve got to admit your
sin before you can be released from the bondage of that sin. Because you see, until you need a savior you
can’t be saved. Until you know
you are in trouble, and you deserve it, that’s when Jesus Christ (Yeshua
haMeshiach) is right there to pull you out.
But until then, I tell you, you don’t have a chance of being
saved, until you’re ready to admit your sin, and call it sin in the
sight of God, and stop justifying it. The Bible says that while we were his enemies,
we were saved by the death of Christ.
Look at verse
8 “For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to
God through the death of his Son…” The kind of people God loves, believe it or not, are
his enemies--the people who might shake their fist at God, the people
who at one point in their lives would love to tear God off his throne,
they hate him so much--do you know God loves you?
God loves you, you rebellious person.
God died for you. Think
of the crowd at the cross as Jesus (Yeshua) is hanging there on cross. Think of it.
As he hangs there, there are people who have spit on him, there
are people who have beaten him, bludgeoned him almost to death. There were people who had taken him by the beard
and yanked his beard out. They
hated him so much! He hangs there
as they mock him saying “You claim to be the Son of God. Well if God takes delight in you, let him deliver
you.” And Jesus
cries out “Father, forgive them, forgive them.” God loves you. During the Revolutionary War a pastor by
the name of Peter Miller--I bet you didn’t get this in the history class
last year, you won’t get it this year either--but during the war, the
Revolutionary War, Peter Miller, a pastor in a little town, had been
harassed for years by a guy who didn’t live too far from him.
This guy was a scoundrel, he was a creep. Today you might be able to get an order of protection
from the guy, but back then this man breathed out threats, he did mean
things, he constantly harassed Peter as well as his congregation. If ever, ever Peter Miller had an enemy it was
this old man. One day troops
came to town, a big commotion, everybody went out to the square to find
out what’s going on, and here was that terrible creep of a man in shackles
being led away. “What’s going
on? What did he do?” He was accused of treason. He was arrested and he was to be tried. Word got to Peter Miller that this man had been
tried for treason. If he were
to be convicted, he would be hanged.
So he began to walk and walk and walk, sixty miles he walked
[that used to be considered a day’s walk in those days, how unhealthy
we’ve become!] He walked until he got to the camp where General
George Washington was stationed. He’d
gotten there too late to see his enemy, he’d already been taken away,
they were getting ready to hang him.
Peter Miller began to use all his persuasive skills to try to
get General Washington to grant a pardon for the man. After listening a long time, Washington told
him, “Pastor Miller” he said, “I’m sorry, even though I’ve heard everything
you can say, I just don’t feel I should pardon your friend.” “My friend!?
Let’s get one thing clear General, he is not my friend! Why,
he’s the worst enemy that I have on the whole face of the earth.
He hates my guts. For years he’s been harassing me. Look, call him anything, but don’t call him
my friend.” Washington said “What???
You walked sixty miles, and you begged this hour for this man’s
pardon, and he’s not even your friend, he’s your enemy??
Why that sheds a whole different light on this.”
And Washington granted a pardon, gave it to Peter Miller.
Peter Miller quickly took it to the scaffold. He got there just as his enemy was walking up
the steps of the scaffold, the executioner there, you know, hanging
onto him, taking him up. The
crowd parted. Miller is saying “Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait!” His old enemy looked down and he said “Oh Peter
Miller, you’ve come to see me die, this is your way of getting revenge,
you’ve got to have a front row seat huh?
Well you watch me die.” And
then he saw Miller come up to the top of the platform and hand the executioner
a piece of paper, and he was told “You’re a free man. Peter Miller has just delivered your pardon.” While we were enemies of God, he sent his son
to die for us. Not while we were
good, not while we’d reformed, not after we got cleaned up and made
presentable, but while we were his enemies.
Obviously, this kid of love was based on something God saw in
us, get that through your head. Or
better, get it into your heart. God’s
love for you, that sent him to die for you while you were helpless,
ungodly, an enemy, was not because he saw anything good in you or lovable
in you at all. God doesn’t love you because you’re lovable. He loves you because he is love. And he’s chosen to bestow love on you. He’s chosen to love you, and that’s why he loves
you, not because you deserve it, not because you’re lovely, not because
you’re lovable. He was not loving
us in response to something to love about us.
I love my child. We were
in the mountains the last few days.
Beautiful up there right now.
It is indescribably gorgeous in the fields around Flagstaff.
The yellow flowers. If
you were to paint it, someone would say “I think you’re a little off
here” with all this yellow. It’s
just spectacular. Anyway, we were going on this hike and I said,
‘Come-on let’s go to the top of the mountain.’ Have you ever tried to haul two kids and an
arthritic wife up climbing the mountains.
Anyway it seemed to be a great idea until I started smelling
something. I was holding Ellie
in one of these packs where you can hold them in front of you and you
sort of support them on your shoulder.
And I thought, you know, these animals are very active, we must
be tromping right through their bathroom.
Boy, I can’t get away from that smell.
“Oh, gross, what’s on my hand!?”
She had pooped right through her diaper [laughter], and onto
me! And we’re in the middle of
a hike! And there’s no diapers
and no wipies, and what am I going to do with this kid!?
My wife can’t carry her. (It crossed my mind. Here Honey…)
Twigs, leaves, what do you do?
I moved her to my back, and I stayed so the wind was blowing
like this. The point is, my love for her was not in response
to something to love about her. I
mean, I was going to keep carrying her. I’m her dad.
She’s mine. And I love
her, even when she’s that way. When
we were spiritually bankrupt, when we least deserved God’s love, that’s
when Christ died for us. Christian
assurance is all hinged on this point, gang.
You know, it seems like things get simpler and simpler as we
go together in the Word, and I think this is one of those things that’s
really gotten simple. If you really believe God loves you unconditionally,
then you’re going to be sure of your salvation.
Because, this is really important because if you think that you
somehow deserve God’s love and favor, then you can never really be sure
that God will keep on loving you, because some day he might see something
in you that doesn’t deserve be loved, and he’ll stop loving you.
Wow, I just read the most incredible story in the Moody Monthly
Magazine this month about a lady, she’s now older, she was writing of
an experience when she was sixteen years old.
And she was a beautiful young girl.
She’d always taken a lot of pride in her outward appearance and
this beautiful physical stature. The family always referred to her as Daddy’s
sweet little beautiful girl, and she had a tremendous relationship with
her Dad all the time she was growing up.
Even when she was sixteen she still just loved her Daddy. They had a special relationship. In fact just two weeks before the accident she
had won a contest. Her Dad had
been standing there with his arm around her shoulder, so proud of her. ‘Honey, you’re so beautiful, I just love you.’
And then she had a terrible automobile accident.
All she remembers is seeing the car coming towards her, she remembers
like flying through the window and that’s it.
She woke up in the ambulance, her face burning.
She started to reach up and touch it, the attendant said, “No,
no, no, no, keep your hands down, lie quietly.”
Went into the hospital. For
weeks she was in and out of consciousness.
When she was conscious she kept asking for a mirror.
“I want a mirror.” She
could hardly talk, her lips felt like they were huge.
Her face felt just so tight.
And she could hardly open her eyes, just little slits that she
could see a little bit of light through.
“I want a mirror! Dad, I want a mirror! Let me see a mirror!” And he says, “No!, honey, and for the last time,
I’m telling you, No.” And then
she said some incredibly harsh words to him, she says, “It must be because
I’m so ugly now, and you don’t love me because I’m so ugly.” And she said to this day she remembered perfectly
her Dad’s response. He just sunk
down into the chair there in her room, put his face in his hands and
began to cry.” The next day,
still set on getting a mirror (and you know how clever 16-year-old’s
can be) she pretended like she was taking a bath, had the curtains closed,
and when the cleaning person came into her room she said “Oh, you know,
I’ve misplaced my mirror. Could
you hand me that one out there please.
I’m finished my bath.” “Oh
sure.” And the hand went in-between the curtain, you
know, just an arm giving her the mirror…She took the mirror, looked
at herself, and her heart almost stopped.
She was so ugly, so hideous.
Still pieces of gravel in her face.
Still huge bruises. Her lips were swollen and cut and oozing.
But she was staring at that mirror and didn’t even hear her Dad
walk in and said “Oh honey, let me have that.”
And he had to pry her fingers one finger at a time away from
that mirror. And the
rage and the anger just spewed force, and she said “Now I see why you
didn’t want me to see, no wonder you don’t love me anymore, I’m so ugly.” And he sat down on her bed and says, “Honey,
you are so wrong. Honey, I’ve
always loved you. I’ve loved
you in the beautiful times and the ugly times.
Remember when you were a little girl and I was potty training
you, I loved you then, it wasn’t a pretty time.
Remember when you were older and sick and bent over the toilet
and I held your head? You weren’t
very pretty then, but oh I loved you.”
He said, “Honey, it’s not what you are on the outside, I love
you because you’re my child.” And
then in probably the most tremendous demonstration of love that I’ve
ever read about, her bend down and he kissed her broken, disfigured,
bruisy lips. There was no doubt
in her heart, she says “I know you love me, if you could kiss me in
all my ugliness I know you love me.” When you were at your ugliest, Christ embraced
you. The picture here in Romans
5 is ugly. When you’re at your
worst Christ loves you. He doesn’t
love you because he looks in and sees ‘Oh, some day you’re going to
do this, oh, some day you’re going to do that.’
He loves you because he’s chosen to.
And that has tremendous repercussions in a life.
Because if you believe that, then you’ll understand that even
when you get ugly again, he doesn’t stop loving you.
Were you ugly last week? Has
your life been disfigured and made gross by the sin in your life? Christ will accept you right where you are today.
Jesus said, “Whoever will come to me, I will never, no,
never cast them away.” It’s not a chance that brought you here today,
it was not coincidence, it was God.
He wanted you to hear how much he loves you. He wants you to know that nothing can separate
you from that love once you accept it from him. And you may turn ugly again. And precious Christian, you may be ugly right
now. But it does not effect at
all God’s love for you, because that’s not why he loves you. He has chosen
to love you—that’s why he loves you.
And that can never be changed.
He can’t love you more than he loves you now, he won’t ever love
you less. Some of you, because of the ugliness in your
life, you've been staying away from God.
Christians perhaps have been giving you the wrong idea about
God. Maybe you were raised in a church where you
got the impression that as long as you were lovely, you would be loved. But now you’re not, your life is far from lovely.
You’ve heard it for yourself. The kind of people God loves can be the ugliest.
I want to give you an opportunity to let God love you.
OK? I want to give you
an opportunity today to ask Jesus Christ into your life, to accept his
offer to love you. Human love
will fail you, you know it, it already has.
Today if you’ll accept his gift of love, you will actually be
finding what you are looking for, you’ll find your guilt will be taken
away. He died on the cross to
take away your sins. He was punished in your place. The emptiness in your heart, you’ve been trying
to stuff it with all kinds of things and you’re still empty inside,
that will be filled because there’s a Jesus shaped vacuum in your life. And only he can fill it. And you won’t have to fear death anymore.
The Bible says that men and women are held captive through the
fear of death all there lives. You don’t have to fear death anymore….The Bible
says, ‘Whoever will call upon the name of the Lord will be saved.’ If you believe in your heart that God raised
Jesus from the dead, and you’ll confess that with your mouth, you will
be saved. You are the kind of person God loves. Now, pray with me, ‘Lord Jesus, please come
into my life. I always thought
I was too ugly, Lord, for you to want to have anything to do with me. I didn’t know how much you love me. I’m so surprised. I need you so much. Please accept me, just like I am. Please forgive my sins and set me free. Take away my guilt. Kill the inside emptiness, Lord. I believe you died for me. And I believe you rose from the dead. I accept you as my Savior and my Lord right
now. Come into my life, in Jesus
name, Amen.” [transcript by permission of Romans 5:6-8, by
Pastor J. Mark Martin, Calvary Community Church, P.O. Box 39607, Phoenix,
AZ 85069.] end |