“God Likes Having Us Around”

John 3:14-21

I was asked to ponder the following question: “What is God up to in my life at this moment.” My answer: He’s telling me to relax. Remember who’s in charge. Stop trying to be perfect. Let go of the thought that I can always make everybody happy. Lose the fantasy of Grace ever being a perfect church. Trust others to carry out their responsibilities. Above all trust God to carry out his. And to never forget this truth: God loves me – a lot.

And I was reminded how much God loves me through one of Max Lucado’s devotional readings, from his book A Gentle Thunder. The title of the reading is “God Is Crazy About You.” “There are many reasons God saves you: to bring glory to himself, to appease his justice, to demonstrate his sovereignty. But one of the sweetest reasons God saved you is because he is fond of you. He likes having you around. He thinks you’re the best thing to come down the pike in quite a while… If God had a refrigerator, your picture would be on it. If he had a wallet, your photo would be in it. He sends you flowers every spring and a sunrise every morning. Whenever you want to talk, he’ll listen. He can live anywhere in the universe, and he chose your heart… Face it, friend. He’s crazy about you.”

Or as Jesus so much better said it, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not sent the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved.”

God is crazy about us. He always has been. We are his creation. That’s made very clear throughout Scripture but especially in Psalm 8: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.” From the get-go God has thought that each of us was the best thing to come down the pike.

It is also clear that our Lord Jesus Christ loves his Church, warts and all. In a “Christianity Today” article addressing the ongoing attempt to find or recreate the perfect church, Mark Galli wrote, “I wonder, though, if in our search for a ‘real church,’ we fail to see the actual church Jesus Christ calls us into. This church he created; it is also the church that, from the beginning, has proven to be a problem – for example, the church of Corinth, with its incest; the church of Galatia, with its legalism; and the church of Laodicea, with its lukewarm faith… Through the ages this church has proven itself incapable of living up to its own ideals. If we face the facts, we have to say this is the real church in history. And that’s a good thing, because this is the church that Jesus Christ is crazy in love with. The one he died for. The one he still – even after the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the Salem Witch Trials – puts his name on, like a father who, as he dresses to attend his son’s basketball game, proudly dons the school sweatshirt, even though his son has done much to disappoint him as of late.”

God is crazy about us. His Son Jesus is crazy in love with this imperfect church in which we are members. So the message to us all is: relax. God loves us. He loves us so much that, in the person of Jesus Christ, he suffered and died on a cross. It is he, who in the person of Christ, came not to condemn the world but that it might be saved. The world, meaning every nation, every tribe, every person; including you, me, and all the other sinners with whom we rub elbows.

As Presbyterians we believe another piece of Good News. We are not responsible for our own salvation. God saves us because he loves us, and he loves us simply because he chooses to. If we are in Christ – if we truly are a part of that rag-tag bunch of forgiven sinners with whom he is crazy in love with – we can relax. It’s in God’s hands and not ours. He’s in control of the situation. He’s taken care of the details. All we can do is accept his grace by faith. And of course, as the Catechism exhorts us to do, glorify God and enjoy him forever.

While driving to the church last Wednesday I found myself behind a beat up old car with a faded bumper sticker saying, “Be patient with me. God is not through with me yet.” I know it’s an oldie but it’s still a goodie. As I turned to my devotional reading later in the day a theme emerged. None of us is perfect, not even the best Christian among us. None of us will ever be perfect. We are each an ongoing work of God, one he has not yet finished; one that he won’t finish this side of heaven. Our lives in Christ are a process not perfection. All we can do is turn our lives over to him and trust him with the end result.

As the Apostle Paul made so painfully clear in Romans 7, even in Christ and in spite of our best intentions we are going to fail. We’re going to fall back into the darkness of sin. We’re going to run away from the light of Christ. We’re going to be hardheaded, soft-minded Christians, who try as we might, are going to make bad choices and listen to the wrong voices. We are all going to sin and fall short of the glory of God until the day we die.

And God is still going to love and forgive us. He is infinitely patient with us, and wants us to be more patient with ourselves: to not fall into despair because we’re imperfect, to not beat ourselves up because we’re human. This does not set us free to behave as we choose. It is not a license to sin freely. It is a reminder that we’re in God’s hands, that we have to trust his patience and love, that we need to maintain a close relationship with him, and that as best we can, should, day-in and day-out, seek to do what is right and true and good and faithful.

Our Lord came into the world not to condemn it but that it might be saved through him. It is not God’s will that any of us be condemned. He leaves it to us to condemn ourselves. As God made clear through the words of Joshua, we are called to choose this day who we will serve. As he made it clear trough the words of Moses’ final sermon to the Israelites, we must choose either life or death, light or darkness. A sad reality is that some people never come out of the darkness, never walk in the light of God’s love.

Why? That is a question for the ages. Is it totally their decision to reject salvation, or is it that somewhere within the mysterious workings of God’s providence, they were never meant to? This is a question that has been answered at different times and in different ways by differing Christian theologies, usually in debates about that good old Presbyterian doctrine called predestination.

A 20^th Century Presbyterian answer to that question can be found in the amended Westminster Confession of Faith: “The doctrine of predestination is to be ‘held in harmony with the doctrine of [God’s] love to all mankind… [and] with the doctrine that God desires not the death of any sinner, but has provided in Christ a salvation sufficient for all.”

That still brings us back to the question of who believes and who doesn’t and why? Is it their choice or God’s predestined-from-eternity will? Historic Reformed, or Presbyterian, theology, tracing it roots back to St. Augustine, comes down on the side of predestined-from-eternity. Historic Baptist and Methodist theology, what some folks call Arminianism, has come down on the side of free choice. Both use Scripture to prove their point. So who’s right?

None of us? All of us? In reality, who cares? I don’t. As a Presbyterian brought during an era of ecumenism the whole predestination thing was never a big deal. As a Presbyterian pastor, whose training took place within the context of the Neo-Orthodoxy taught by Karl Barth and other 20^th Century theologians, I was taught to never put God in a theological box of anyone’s making. And to never ever go through Scripture and cherry-pick the verses that proved my preconceived ideas; to always go where prayerful and diligent study of a text led me, not where any school of theology directed me.

The whole predestination debate is one that can drive us crazy. It’s another one of those things that I try to leave in the hands of God. God is sovereign. God is also gracious. Within his sovereign and gracious will God in Christ Jesus has opened the door to salvation for everybody. Everybody, not just a chosen few. That some choose not to take God up on that offer is a tragedy beyond comprehension. But I dare not lay it at the feet of God.

All I know is that God has offered his grace to me in Jesus Christ and I have accepted it. I don’t deserve it. I never earned it. But in Jesus Christ it’s mine. All I can do is say thank you. And one of the ways I say thank you is by not worrying about it all that much. My salvation is in God’s hands. My life and ministry are in God’s hands. As for others I can only follow the advice of the Second Helvetic Confession: “We must hope well of all, and not rashly judge [anyone] to be a reprobate.”

In the end I come back to the words of Max Lucado, “If God had a refrigerator, [my] picture would be on it. If God had a wallet, [my] photo would be in it… [God] can live anywhere in the universe, and he chose [my] heart.” Beyond that any speculation is a waste of time, energy, and peace. Amen.