Redeeming Love

You know, we started ABC in 2008 as a Bible study. And God has just been so faithful to us as we've seen our church continue to grow every year that we've existed, to the point now we're looking to build a new a new facility on Main Street. And we when we first moved here, we got involved in church planting and we found out there was an organization that had been planting churches here since the 1950s. It's an organization called Biblical Ministries Worldwide. Stacy and I are a part of that organization encouraging church planters throughout that state. And today we have the privilege of having with us Andrew and Sarah Bonnell and Sarah, I don't know. I know where Andrew's at, but oh, there you are. There's Sarah. Sarah is sitting back here in this direction. So we have the opportunity to encourage them while they're here today. I asked Andrew if he'd be willing to come share with us. I always feel bad when I ask people to speak because I'm like, you got to do three services. You know, we kind of pack ourselves in and so we do the best we can where we are. It gets a little a little tiring by the end, but Andrew and Sarah lead biblical ministries worldwide. They have over 600 missionaries around the world in 70 plus countries, and it's my privilege to be able to introduce to you the President of Biblical Ministries Worldwide, Andrew Bunnell. Would you come up this morning and share a message with us? Would you guys give them a round of applause and just welcome him to the stage?

It's good to see you this morning. It's good to be in Utah. What did you do with the snow? Well, hopefully it'll be back next year. I was my wife shared an article with me that there's a whole group of great minds of the historic state here that are working to refill the great salt lake, the Great Salt Lake between now and the Winter Olympics. So be hoping that happens. And I do remember coming out when I was a kid and seeing it and it's interesting how much the valley has grown and how little lake there is compared to what I remember as a child. So it's hopefully that happens and we don't lose the that incredible what is it? Best snow on earth that we need that. So anyway, prayers for that to happen. You know, it's interesting, I, I speak at churches that I'm not the pastor of with some frequency. And I think there's often a perception that when you have a guest speaker, it's kind of like a politician when they're running for office, you have your stump speech and you just give the same talk everywhere. There is some truth to it because you have a message you want to communicate. But the hard part for me is I was a pastor for a number of years. And so I always balance that message that I'm asked to give or asked to communicate.

Because we talk about mission, we talk about what it is to reach the nations. But I also balance that with, I want to speak to you. I want to speak to the room in front of me this morning. And the disadvantage is I don't know you and I'm just kind of feeling what I'm seeing and, first crowd, second crowd. There'll be a third crowd later today. So I want to try to get that right. And so as I prepared and developed the message, what I, what I've come to and what I come to again and again is that You can't really go wrong with the love of God, the love of God, because this is the thing that brings us here. This is the thing that brings us together. So with that said, I'd like you to turn, if you would, to Titus chapter two. And the you see the title behind me. Redeeming love. Redeeming love. Titus chapter two, verse 11, Titus chapter two, verse 11. And of course, in this letter we see Paul writing to Titus, his child or his son, if you will, in the faith from an older apostle to a younger man, telling him, this Is the most important thing. This is what it's all about. Titus chapter two and verse 11. So we'll read. Now the Bible says, for the grace of God has appeared.

Well, we could pause right there, couldn't we? The grace of God has appeared. What an extraordinary phrase. God's grace appeared. You can see it. Bringing salvation for all people. That's also a wonderful phrase. Training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in the present age, Waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us. Notice this to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession, who are zealous for good works. Declare these things. Exhort and rebuke with all authority. Let no one disregard you, young man. Paul is saying, this is what matters. Don't let anybody stop you from sharing this. You go back to verse 11 and you read that the grace of God has appeared, and that is like a lightning bolt out of the sky. It's here. The grace of God is here. And there's something about this grace, this transforming. Extraordinary grace that has appeared. It brings salvation for all people. Salvation for all people. And when you think about the power in that message, it means that there is something in this that we need to understand and know very well indeed. God loves the world, and I think sometimes we forget what that actually means, because we think of the world as a really big place.

God loves the world. Isn't that good? Would you know? What's even better is that God loves you. God loves you, and God loves me. And his love is very different than the kind of love that we mostly think about. God's love for you and for me understands who we are. And it is a completely different sort of love than the love we think about. We're going to talk about that this morning. In this verse, we see that this love brings God to a place that he gave His Son, Jesus Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ. The Lord Jesus Christ, King of kings and Lord of lords. The only begotten Son of God, he gave him to redeem us. So to know who Jesus is and what Jesus is and the authority of Jesus Christ. To know that Jesus was given to redeem us means that God has a redeeming love. God has a redeeming kind of love. The love of God. The songwriter wrote, is greater far than tongue or pen could ever tell. It goes beyond the highest star and it reaches to the lowest hell. The love of God is something you can't escape. It goes everywhere. It gets into everything. And it's there for you. What is redeeming love? What does it mean to have a redeeming kind of love? Well, to understand that, we need to understand the word redemption, don't we? What is to redeem something or the idea of redemption.

Now, I grew up. I'm a I'm a sixth generation Texan. I won't do the Texan thing today, I promise you. I know they all. They come up here into Colorado every year and try to take over the States with their, skiing and their hiking and all of the things that they do. I'm sorry about that. Some of us are still nice people. Most of them are transplants, but we have to claim them. But what I grew up in, the Bible Belt, we call it, you know. And I heard all of these words my whole life. Redemption was one of those words. As a song redeemed. How I love to proclaim it. Redeemed by the blood of the Lamb. Redeemed through his infinite mercy. His child. And forever I am. You know, we could have that with a guitar and a plinky plonk. Country Western style, a piano player and all that. And I think we were probably more into the tune and the toe tapping than we were the actual song, you know? But we heard these words. But it was many, many years later. I was living in London. Our family spent 19 years overseas. Half of those in London, England, and I was pastor of a church in London for nearly ten years. And I was sitting in my living room there in England with my boys, and we were watching a show that maybe some of you watched.

It started, I think, in the early 2000 and went on for quite some time. Probably it's in reruns. It may still be going, but the show was called Wheeler Dealer. Some of you may have seen it. There's a few heads nodding, but Wheeler Dealer was a show about taking old cars and bringing them back to life like classics, but basically they turned into rust buckets. And the show was about these British guys who would get these old models and restore them completely. And I didn't really watch the show. I'm not really a guy who fixes up cars. That's not my thing. I grew up with my grandfather or the ranch. I, I didn't do cars, but for some reason one of my boys was into it and we watched it. And that show, they were restoring a 54 Chevy pickup that they'd found somewhere in the States. Well, that caught me because, I like a good pickup. And I watched that thing, and I watched the love and the care that they put into that. I watched how they completely renovated inside and out. And it wasn't just that you watch this old hunk of metal start coming back to life, to its original glory. It's that what we got at the end of that show, and it's amazing what they can do in 45 minutes with commercial breaks, isn't it? It was such a quick thing.

That thing was better than it was the day it came off the showroom floor in 1954. Why? Because over 6070 years, technology had come a long way. It was the same, but it was better. It was basically brand new, but in a way that it had ever, never been new before. And it was that I realized that day what it means when it says God redeems us. It's not just that he buys us back in an old, broken, ruined condition. It's that the redeeming love of God completely changes the inside and the out. And we're left a brand new creation. It might look something like the best version of the old model, but it's a completely different thing now. And the reason it's different is that the love of God gets in the inside. And when the love of God is on the inside, it absolutely changes. Everything. Everything. That's a revolution. That's a revolution. That's not religion. That's not a bunch of things that you do. You can't really. And I can't really. We can't really fix ourselves up. So the love of God comes out of time and space, and it comes to us through Jesus Christ on Calvary's cross. And in that moment, suspended between heaven and earth.

Something happens that changes everything. 2000 years ago, everything changed. You see, mankind likes to live by rules. You know, I studied world religions. It's something extraordinary. I've traveled with Pastor Nathaniel said. We have 70 countries around the world. It's really interesting when you go globally and you see one thing all mankind has in common. Humans love to create a system of rules. And we set these rules up and then we live by them. Except we don't, because we're all hypocrites. But we say we do. And at some point we decide we don't want those rules anymore. So we get new ones. And then we create a new set of rules. And then we live by those until somebody gives an invisible signal and says, these are the new rules. And then we live by those. And you can call that society, you can call that politics. You can call that religion whatever you want to call it. It's a man made thing to try to regulate ourselves in a way that makes everything work. That's not going to get us to God. But we as humans have been telling ourselves that lie from the beginning of time itself. And the problem is we're fundamentally disconnected from who God is and what God is. God has a different kind of love. God has a different kind of love. We throw the word love around a lot. And we don't really understand what God's love is all about.

So here's what we're going to do this morning. We're going to look at three three ways to think about the redeeming love of God. We're going to see how those three ways maybe change our understanding, just a little bit of who God is, what God is, and what God's love is for us. You see, you can look at that TV show that I watched, Wheeler Dealer. You can look at that 54 Chevy, and you can see a picture of humanity without the Lord Jesus Christ. Redemption is a word of love that goes back to the dawn of time itself. The first thing I want you to look at about this love of God is that this love is an unbelievable kind of love. It is unbelievable. Unbelievable. Unbelievable. You say, Andrew, that's very simple. It is. But it's more than that. Believable love. Unbelievable love. Can I say that if God's love wasn't unbelievable, it wouldn't be worthy of God? If we could make God's love make sense, then we would understand that it's made of men. But thank God, God's love is unbelievable. Look with me, if you will, at Romans chapter five. If you go over to Romans five and you look at this kind of love, we understand it immediately different. Romans five six says, for while we were still weak. While we were still weak at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.

For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person, one would dare even to die. But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us, while we were still weak. So Paul the apostle is writing here and he's making a point that's really important to get. We create legends and songs and poems and stories about heroes that sacrificed themselves there for others. You see this in a war hero in battle who wins the Medal of Honor because they sacrificed themselves. For their fellow man. You might see a husband who would die for a wife or a wife for the husband or the parents for children, or a very close friend for another close friend. But it's so rare indeed that you would just die for a stranger. You know, when you see those stories and you hear about someone who just rushes into harm's way for to save a crowd of people that they don't even know. Like, wow, that person was a hero. But Paul goes further and he says, look, he says, look. It's not just that. It's that. These aren't nice people. This is saying, I'll sacrifice myself not just a righteous person or a good person, but someone I know is neither of those things. It's the godly for the ungodly, the godly for the ungodly.

It's finding the worst and the best and the best, sacrificing for the worst so that the worst can be lifted up. That's not what we do. Have you noticed that? Have you looked around society? Have you looked around our political system? Have you looked around? What's happening in our culture and in our world? What do we see? We see. You're not like me. I don't like you. That's the way humans operate. If you read the history of the world and it doesn't matter where you read it, what country, what people there is always. We're like this. Our way is better. Our way is better. And since you're not like me in whatever thing, we're probably going to go to war over each other's land. And we're going to get your land and make you like us, or you won't be around anymore. And you see it throughout history. Empire after empire. Country after country. That's why I promised you. I'm not going to get into the superiority of Texas this morning. It's obnoxious. Thankfully, I'm a Christian, so I can rise above all that stuff. Unless you're from Oklahoma, in which case we can meet out here and fight later. You see what I mean? It's what we do. We do it. We. And it even bleeds into our sports. Do you realize on Sundays in the fall. Saturdays in the fall, we break ourselves down into swag and gear.

And when our team wins, we have some weird, subtle sense of superiority. Thank God we beat those guys. We don't like them. Half my organizational leadership have some strange Thai background of Philadelphia. So pray for me. I have to deal with a bunch of Eagles fans all fall like, what's wrong with you people? We do that. We do that in the sports arena. We do that in our culture. We do that in our food. We it's just it's just a little better. It's just a little better. When you bring this into the sphere or the arena of the divine and you realize that the truly superior, the truly better, not some arbitrary human thing. Listen. Put it out. Give it to you. Recently, I had to go out of the country for a wedding, and I had to go because I was the officiant. That's kind of important to show up. It was very honored. Some very dear friends and. But it was in Mexico, and I've been to Mexico a number of times for mission work, that sort of thing. This is. Honestly, I'd never been to Mexico for nice resort Mexico in the way that worked. And. So I was with a bunch of gringos, in Mexico. And. And the interesting thing is. Being a, where I came from and grew up, I grew up with a lot of what we call.

You know, street Mexican. I learned to speak a lot of Spanish as a child, just kind of interacting with friends. And we had on the street where I lived, Mrs. Rodriguez, who came over the Rio Grande when she was a child, probably in the 20s or 30s. And I was friends with her grandchildren and we would play in the street and all the kids and she would have fresh hot tamales you know, on the, on her screen porch. And we, when we were hungry, we could play all day. That was back in the days when parents would kick their kids out, in the morning. During the summer and not let them back in till dinner time. And I was probably the last generation of people who didn't have one of these things, and we had to take it all outside. And so we could run over to her porch or her back screen porch and get hot tamales. Well, here I am down in Mexico. And, I have lost a lot of my Spanish now. And I've learned another language. Living in Russia. I learned Russian and lived in Europe for all these years. So I've lost all that. But what I haven't lost is I haven't lost my food Spanish. And so I'm talking with the taxi driver and we're kind of I'm using some Google Translate and a few words I still have.

And he finally says, and I understood. He says, it's funny. He says, you don't you don't know Spanish, but you do know all about the food words. And I said, yes, I have all the food words. So I'm with some folks and we had a, we had a meal after the, after the wedding the next night with just some of the friends and the family who stayed around. And I, I I asked for, I asked the waiter and I said, look, I, he says, well, you don't want this. He said, that's really spicy. He said, I'm going to warn you about this pepper sauce. He said, it's probably I said, look, I told him where I came from and I said, I said, we're the same in Spanish. I said, he said, bring me, bring it to me. And he brought, he brought it to me and I loved it. It was great. And we, gave him a big hug. He gave me a big hug and then he comped me some extra food just because he was so proud that I had eaten it and done well and not passed out, and it was one of those things. And it's interesting how when you, when you cross over one of those human divides, even down to something like a pepper sauce, it like brings people together.

You like my stuff and I like your stuff. We want to feel that when you get over to God's world and you look and see who and what God is, and you see that he's fundamentally different than we are, and his stuff, his things are totally different than ours. And yet, God loves us. We have nothing to offer God, and yet God offers us everything. It's an unbelievable kind of love. Quickly. Number two, it's an undeniable kind of love. Romans five eight says that we are still sinners. Christ died for us. How can you deny the love of someone who was killed on Calvary's cross. For you and for me. The word love is often used casually to gain something. We even use it so casually. We'll say something like, I love mint chocolate ice cream. That's not love. That's something else that we do in our quest to express something in ourselves. But this is different. This is an unbelievable love. This is an undeniable love. But it's also an unlimited love. In John chapter three, in verse 16, we read the verse that is probably the first verse that most people memorize are here the most recognized verse in all the Bible. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. This love reaches down to the lowest sinner. Let me say something about this to you. When does this love begin? It begins in the first page of the Bible, when a dark and watery and formless planet is touched by the Spirit of God. There are only Two words that we see repeatedly again and again in different ways in the Bible about what God is in sense of substance. We see that God is love and that God is light. And in the darkness of time God spoke. God's spirit moved on the water and said, let there be light, and there was light. And in that light the God that is love. Spread all across this world, and all people have the very image of God in them. We call it the Imago day, a fancy phrase that means God's image. So when John says that we are condemned because we have not believed in the name of the Son of God, I'd put it to you like this. If God is love itself, that means anyone who does not have God does not have love. And so the condemnation, the judgment comes from not having love.

God is the source of love. There is no love apart from God. That thing that binds us together, that light, that energy from God that flows through all humanity, is a redeeming love. Because God is love. How could God love me? God cannot not love you because God is love. God so loved the world. He loved the world in this way that he gave Jesus because God is love. You say, well, I'm the most wretched person, but God loves you. Well, I'm the most hypocritical, righteous Pharisee in the room. God loves you. God loves because God is love. To reunite with God is to be immediately redeemed and restored, because that is the business that God is in. Because that is who and what God is. God cannot be apart from who God is. God must love because God is love. God is love. So of course God loves you. Of course God loves me. Of course God loves the world. So the more you know God, the more you love God and the more you love the people that God loves. And here's where it gets really hard for us. You remember the little Sunday School song, Jesus loves the little children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white. They are precious in his sight. Do you realize how much in history red and yellow, black and white have been hating on each other in various ways? Do you realize there's no God in that? You realize that God is love, and the love that saves you from your darkest moments is the love that loves everybody in this world.

This theme flows through the entire Bible. We see a picture in revelation of people who are loved by God called from every nation, every tribe, every tongue, everywhere. We sing about it too, don't we? When I lived in England one day I was able to go to the home of a man named William Cooper. It looks like Cowper. But they said Cooper. He wrote one of the great hymns of the faith. There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins. He struggled with Great Depression, great fear, torture, stress, pain in his life. But in his weakness, God was made strong again and again as William Cooper wrote great hymns. But I think his greatest words were penned in the fourth verse of there is a fountain, And in that fourth verse is my challenge for you this morning. What is the theme of your life? Is your life in tune with the theme of God? You see, the fourth verse goes like this. Ever since, by faith I saw the stream. Thy flowing wounds supply. Redeeming love has been my theme. And shall be till I die. If God is all about love for you, for everyone, what are you about? What is the theme of your life?