Sharing Love

Series: “Longing for Christmas”

Part 4

"Sharing Love"

Pastor Jerry

John 1:1-14

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Have you given anyone your love today?  Have you received love from anyone today? Giving and receiving love is the most precious experience you will have today. The desire to share our life with someone is the expression of our soul.  Have you ever tried to share your love with someone, but they would not accept it? Or, has someone ever tried to share their love with you, but you didn’t allow it? Well…Christmas is about sharing love… it’s about God sharing His love with us…and if you have not received Jesus into your life …you have not accepted God’s love for you! People get all messed up about getting ready for Christmas. A kindly 90-year-old grandmother found buying presents for family and friends a bit much one Christmas, so she wrote out checks for all of them to put in their Christmas cards. In each card she carefully wrote, "Buy your own present" and then sent them off. But she sent them without the checks! That's a Christmas they will long remember! Giving gifts at Christmas is a way of sharing love. Giving and receiving love is the most precious gift and experience you will have this Christmas. Today, I want to talk about our desperate need here to be loved and our misunderstanding about it. Desperately inside, we are screaming out “Love me.” Some of you may not want to admit it. We have a deep need to be loved by God. We need to let God show us how. Our ways are not God’s ways.  We’re all in different stages of our spiritual journey. There are trying to find out if God is real, some of you don’t feel worthy enough to be love, and, some of you are totally committed to Jesus Christ. That’s good, that’s what we all should be trying to be. No matter where you are in your spiritual journey, my prayer for today’s message is that when you leave, you would not leave the same person. We’re spinning around in a love starved world.  And we desperately need love. You look for love in many places…but, it’s not what your heart and soul needs. “What does your heart and soul need?”  Your greatest need is not money, it is not more time, and it is not another partner. Your greatest need is to be loved. You need God’s love. The Bible boldly proclaims there is only one love in the universe that has what it takes to meet this love-starved need. And it’s God’s love. That’s why Christmas came! I pray that today the love of Christmas will become real to you.  And because we so desperately want to be loved, we’re willing to do desperate things to get love.  That’s where God’s love is so different. You don’t have to do anything …except let God have your heart. Have you experienced God’s love? Have you experienced that God loves you on your good days? And God loves you on your bad days? Why? Because “God is love.”  Have you ever had a misunderstanding of God’s love for you. And therefore when God came to offer you His wonderful love…you turned it away? God loves you…like no one else can. I remember before I had kids that I said my kid is not going to be like some of those children I saw at that time. Oh no. my kid is not going to act like that. I remember being invited over to some friend’s house for dinner and they sat me next to a one-year-old. And it was by far the grossest experience of my life. Here I was trying to eat and the kid has got ten pounds of yams coming out his ears. And then the parents give him Jell-O. He’s got Jell-O everywhere. Then he puts his hands toward me and I whisper to him, “You touch me and I know I’ll drop dead!” (That’s before I had kids my own). Then it wasn’t too long after I was married that I was in a delivery room. I was right there. I wasn’t in the lobby, Then the baby came and there were four of us in the room. And you go crazy. I run out of the room to call my wife to tell her what happened! (She wasn’t home!)   When my child was born it was at that moment I started crying at the miracle. I experienced the love of the universe. Then the doctor said, “Do you want to hold him?” I thought, “No, he looks slippery.” But I took him. And as he grabbed my pinkie it was as if God reached into my soul and grabbed me and said, “Jerry, the love that you’re feeling right now, you multiply that times infinity and that’s how much more I love you.”  I can’t explain it but at that moment I experienced God’s love. Everything I had studied, everything I had heard, everything I knew seemed insignificant now, because it was here in God’s presence that I experienced His love and it was unbelievable. That’s just a reflection of the joy and miracle and love of the birth of Christ at Christmas! When we get our arms around God’s love and we know that it’s personal, we live again, we live anew. I can live because God knows everything about me and He still loves me. His love for us is not based on whether we respond to it or not. God is love. It’s unconditional. No strings attached. The big idea is that God would love us as if there were only one of us to love. I challenge you this Christmas. Share love with someone. When you give true love away, you get a little bit of the glimpse of God’s love for you.  A recent story during the pandemic reads like a made for the movie story. It’s about a young woman who catches the Covid virus which causes heart damage. She is beating the virus but she can't live much longer without a heart transplant. A second young woman who is happily married is involved in a car accident and fatally injured. Her heart is salvaged and placed in the body of the first young woman with the damaged heart because of the Coronavirus. Eventually, the grieving husband begins to move back into life. One day he served by a waitress who happens to be the recipient of his dead wife's heart. Their eyes meet and fall in love. He invites her to dinner in his home. She finds the “thank you” letter she wrote to the donor of her new heart. She is living because his wife died. The man falls back into grief. The shock is too great. He cannot bear that this woman is living while his beloved wife is dead. She has to disappear…she runs away. Working through his grief he admits his love. He pursues her and they're reunited. From the mixture of pain and joy they're granted a gift of new life. It’s a love because of sacrifice. The gift of a new heart comes at Christmas and we hold it in our hands. We never completely own it. We only receive it and use it. God blesses us at Christmas with that Gift! God blesses us with the gift of Jesus. That gift can give us a new life. The words of Jesus come ringing down from heaven, "I have come that you might have life….” I Love you! That is God's gift at Christmas. Will you make room in your heart for God’s love? Will you let Jesus love you? Christmas is about God sharing His love with us. God loves you and He wants to share His love with you right now.  That why we are celebrating Christmas. Would you just pause right now …open your heart …and let Jesus love you!