Sermon
Salvation in Christ
December 25, 2005
Pastor Donald Sheley

I'm going to ask you to take your sermon notes or your Bible. When you walked into the sanctuary or you walked about the building over the last couple of weeks, you've noticed a poster that is hanging about - it simply says 'Christmas begins with Christ'. And that has been our theme throughout this entire Christmas season, for Christmas does begin with Christ. So I only have one assignment today and that's to talk about Jesus.

And I've selected as our text the text that is memorized by most children when they go to Sunday school, most of us know it by heart, it's John 3:16. But just before those words in John 14 we find this: "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. He who believes in Him is not condemned, but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son."

In the Book of Acts: "There is salvation in no one else! There is no other name in all of heaven for people to call on to save them."

And Paul writes in Romans: "When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners. Now, no one is likely to die for a good person, though someone might be willing to die for a person who is especially good. But God showed His great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. And since we have been made right in God's sight by the blood of Christ, He will certainly save us from God's judgment. For since we were restored to friendship with God by the death of His Son while we were still His enemies, we will certainly be delivered from eternal punishment by His life. So now we can rejoice in our wonderful new relationship with God-all because of what our Lord Jesus Christ has done for us in making us friends of God."

And the writer to Hebrews concludes: "So we must listen very carefully to the truth we have heard, or we may drift away from it. The message of God delivered through angels has always proved true, and the people were punished for every violation of the law and every act of disobedience. What makes us think that we can escape if we are indifferent to this great salvation that was announced by the Lord Jesus Himself? It was passed on to us by those who heard Him speak, and God verified the message by signs and wonders and various miracles and by giving gifts of the Holy Spirit whenever He chose to do so."

And so our story today begins as our Scripture verse begins - with God - "For God so loved the world..." God is the Creator behind all creation. God is the Designer behind all design, and God is the supreme fact of history, of life, of time, and of death and of eternity. God is the great need of every human heart.

Only "The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God." God is, and whoever exists without the knowledge of God is a wandering star, centerless and orbitless, reserved unto blackness and darkness forever, for no wise person argues the existence of God. God is eternal, He is the great I AM. And the writer, psalmist, says: "Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever Thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God."

So our Bible presents to us the God of creation who created all things, the God of eternity, the God of all power, the God who has always been and will always be. And when David thought about God this is what he wrote: The Lord is merciful and gracious. He is slow to get angry, and full of unfailing love. He will not constantly accuse us nor remain angry forever. He has not punished us for all of our sins, nor does He deal with us as we deserve. For His unfailing love toward those who fear Him is as great as the height of the heavens above and as the earth beneath. He has removed our rebellious act as far away from us as the East is from the West. The Lord is like a father to His children, tender and compassionate to those who fear Him, for He understands how weak we are and He knows we are only dust. The love God has for us remains forever with those who fear Him. His salvation extends to the children's children, to those who are faithful to His covenant.

So David sees the God of which we are talking about now as reported to us in our text - for God so loved the world - as a God of graciousness, a God of mercy, a God of long-suffering. We were here today because we believe in God.

I recently acquired a book entitled God and the Oval Office, and it's a survey of the religious beliefs held by the 43 presidents who have occupied the White House of our great United States of America. It was written by John McCollister and he writes that it was Dwight D. Eisenhower who served as our president between the years of 1953 and 1961 who - that great president wrote these words as to his faith in God. This is what Dwight D. Eisenhower said: It takes no brains to be an atheist. Any stupid person can deny the existence of a supernatural power because man's physical senses cannot detect it, but there can not be ignored the mystery of first life or the marvelous order in which the universe moves about us. All of these evidence the handiwork of a great God, and for my part that God is the God of the Bible, and Jesus Christ His Son.

Kepler was a great astronomer, but he was troubled by one of his friends who denied the existence of God and he took the view of the universe, which prevails in even circles today, namely that it came into being of itself by mechanical methods. So Kepler decided I'm going to change my friend's opinion, and thus he constructed a model of the sun with the planets moving around it. When his friend came into his observatory and saw this beautiful model he exclaimed with delight, how beautiful it is! Who made it?

And Kepler carelessly answered, no one made it, it made itself. His friend looked at him and said, oh nonsense, tell me who made it? Kepler then replied, friend, you say that this little toy could not make itself. It is but a very weak imitation of this great universe, which I understand, you believe made itself. Thus ended the conversation.

Thomas Edison said no one can study chemistry and see the wonderful way in which certain elements combine with the nicesity of the most delicate machine ever invented and not come to the inevitable conclusion that there is a big engineer who is running this universe, and He is none other than the God of the Bible.

God - our Scripture verse says for God so loved the world.

Now in Jesus' day He was about and with people who had this concept that God only loved Jewish people. All the Gentiles were only created to fire hell with, and when these words came across in the gospel - God loves the entire world - that was dramatic. And it's true; God doesn't love a specific people or a specific nation or a kind of people. God loves all of us. God loves you and me, the world, all humanity; that's what our Scripture text tells us. And there's a little word that's dropped in there, so.

God 'so' loved the world. It's a little two-letter word, but it magnifies its object or intensifies it. We often use it in our vocabulary, we say, it's so beautiful, or it's so delicious. It's a word that intensifies the object and our text says God really does love the world. For God so loved the world that He gave.

Now Paul uses another phrase. In Galatians chapter 4 verses 4 through 7, he says, in the fullness of time God sent His Son, born of a woman, made under the law. So Paul uses the word sent, and in our text it's the word gave. It's the same. And what it implies and what it teaches us is that God because of His tremendous love did something that has marked history forever; He sent His Son.

I think one of the great aspects of our Christian faith, ladies and gentlemen, is that it's a faith built upon the facts of history, not upon a myth, not upon a philosophy created by some man, but your faith and mine is established and has its credentials foundationed intensely in the events of history. 2000 years ago Jesus Christ came to this world. His birth is unquestionable. How He came and what we claim as Christians they might reject, but history books tell us 2000 years ago Jesus came.

My background years ago was that of skepticism, agnosticism, and what I wanted to do is I wanted a faith that was concretely fixed in history. And thus, oft times in my ministry I'll take a truth of the Scriptures and set it in the context of history and then it makes that truth just blossom, but to me it establishes even more deeply my faith because it's not based upon imagination or experience, it's based upon a fact, and 2000 years ago Paul says in the fullness of time. It's an interesting phrase.

What he does, he places the birth of Christ in the context of history. Let me do that for you. If we were sitting today and we had a history book in our hand we would find some very interesting things existed, situations existed, when Jesus came to this world 2000 years ago. First of all, it was a world of peace. You see the Romans had conquered all the way from Great Britain cleared down to the Euphrates River. It was known as the Roman Empire, and as it spread its wings across that vast piece of real estate, barriers fell, boundaries disappeared, and all the little chiefdoms, and all the little kingdoms, and all the little nations became one. It was now the Roman Empire, and because of that, little nations were not fighting each other across the borders. There was what was known as the Pax Romana or the Roman peace. It was the fact that Rome now ruled that vast piece of land.

Not only was it a world of peace, but it was a world that was tied together very interestingly. The Roman Empire decided, if we're going to keep this empire together, we've got to have communication lines so that we can march our chariots and our armies from one section to another should there be a disturbance, and so one of the great feats of history is the Roman roads. They literally crisscross that empire all the way from Great Britain down to the Euphrates with tens of hundreds of thousands of miles of what is known as the Roman roads, marvelously built.

In fact, you can visit some parts of that part of the world today. You can go to Great Britain and you can walk on roads that were built by the Romans 2400 years ago. But what it did, the barriers were down, the world was one, and now you could travel from border to border of the empire. You didn't have to have a passport to cross from one little country to another. You now had a way of travel, a very rapid way of moving from one part of the world to another. Never before was that so in history, because you'd only go a certain distance and you would run into the borders of another little nation, oft times fight one another.

Something else existed, and that is when Rome set up its empire it decided we've all got to speak the same language so the Roman Empire was bilingual. You might speak your native language, but you all must speak Greek, for Greek was the language of the Roman Empire. Now see with this setting: you have a world where the barriers are down, the borders have ceased, you can travel anywhere you want to as rapidly as you want to move, and any country that you move into you're going to speak their language, Greek. Now what a marvelous setting! Never before in the history of the world had such a condition existed.

So when Paul and the evangelists and the preachers of the early moments of the church sent out they had roads to travel on, they could move from one nation to another, they could preach the gospel in great Britain and they could preach the gospel in Turkey, any place they wanted to because it would be understood. It was an ideal, ideal world setting for Christianity to explode across the world.

And not only that, but it was a world that was in dire straits economically. As a kingdom it looked on the outside that it had all the fineries that Rome could provide, but underneath was a seething poverty that walked the streets in rags. In the Roman Empire, if I remember the statistics correctly, three out of every four persons who walked the streets of Rome were slaves. But in that time of the Roman Empire, the economic situation had reached a point of crisis across the Roman Empire when Jesus came. So it was in Palestine - the disastrous aftermath of the war, the wild colossal extravagance of Herod the Great, and the burden of taxation, both civil and religious, and the overgrowing population made it impossible for the land to provide food, and now you've got this vast empire drowning in bankruptcy and poverty.

What an ideal moment for a message of hope and peace to be listened to. Not only that, it was a situation where morals were at their very lowest. Morality swam in the sewers of the cities of the Roman Empire. I mean it was godless to the very core. You know when you read the writings of the historians of that time they paint Rome as having glorious days, but not so, Paul probably penned the clearest history that existed when Jesus came of the Roman Empire.

This is what he writes in Romans chapter 1: "But God shows his anger from heaven against all sinful, wicked people who push the truth away from themselves. For the truth about God is known to them instinctively. God has put this knowledge in their hearts. From the time the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky and all that God made. They can clearly see his invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse whatsoever for not knowing God.

Yes, they knew God," Paul writes, "but they wouldn't worship him as God or even give him thanks. And they began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like. The result was that their minds became dark and confused. Claiming to be wise, they became utter fools instead. And instead of worshiping the glorious, ever-living God, they worshiped idols made to look like mere people, or birds and animals and snakes.

So God let them go ahead and do whatever shameful things their hearts desired. As a result, they did vile and degrading things with each other's bodies. Instead of believing what they knew was the truth about God, they deliberately chose to believe lies. So they worshiped the things God made but not the Creator himself, who is to be praised forever." "That is why God abandoned them to their shameful desires."

Paul said it was an empire morally abandoned to anything that was right. And what an ideal moment for the truth of a gospel that had the power to transform lives and forgive sins and change a person into a child of God. So Paul puts the context of the coming of Jesus Christ in that historical setting, and he said in the fullness of time, in just the right time, Paul writes, God sent Jesus to this world.

For God so loved the world that He gave, that He sent, His only begotten Son. What does that phrase mean? Well, the Bible presents to us God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, God as one, but what happened 2000 years ago, God the Son came to this world and took upon Himself the form of a human being, He became man. Now we have to be very clear here - the theologians are very stressful as this point - when God became man in the person of Jesus you have perfect God, perfect man in one person. Not fused. Perfect God and perfect man.

You say pastor how can I understand that? Here's one of the great problems of theology, and one of the great challenges of Scripture, we can only move so far in these great concepts of God until we come to the end of our own mental abilities and the rest of it becomes divine mystery. But this we do know, Jesus Christ was God in human form. Not only perfect God, perfect man, in one.

You can understand that to a degree to some extent if you follow the footsteps of Jesus. In His perfect humanity He sleeps; He's tired. So when they're crossing the lake He lays His head on a pillow and goes to sleep. That's His humanity. His disciples note that a storm has arisen and the boat is filling with water and they run to Jesus and say, Jesus, wake up. We're going to sink! I never can imagine a boat going down with Jesus in it.

What does He do? Awakes that of His sleep, says to the waves be still. Perfect humanity-Jesus asleep; perfect deity-He commands the waves. Jesus Christ was God in human flesh, miracle of miracles.

He hears that Lazarus His friend has died, so He goes to his grave and He weeps. John 11:35 says Jesus wept. That's His humanity. He loved Lazarus. He's weeping. When He dries His tears, tells them to move the stone, He walks up to that mouth of that old cave known as a tomb and He said, Lazarus, come forth. Crying in His humanity, but bringing life out of death in His deity. You see that all the way through the life of Christ; perfect man, perfect God in the person of Jesus Christ - of the same nature, of the same essence, begotten. Back to our text.

For the God who created the universe, a God of mercy and grace and love, so loved mankind that He sent in the ideal moment in history His Son who became God in human flesh. Our text goes on to say that whosoever. Now when we come to that word some theologians have to swallow twice because they hold to a Calvinistic position that Jesus' death was only for the elect, and I've often wondered how they read that verse. When the Bible says whosoever, it means whosoever.

That whosoever believeth. What does it mean to believe? Go with me to page 5 and I've written a definition for us in our notes. What does it mean to believe? The word "believeth" does not mean merely a mental assent to certain propositions. In other words, believing just doesn't mean saying, yes, that's true, that's true, that's an acceptance. But believe refers to an act and an attitude of the heart, which moves the will and affects the whole man. To believe on the Lord Jesus Christ means to put your confidence in Him as what He claims to be. It is to put confidence in Him as your Sinbearer; as your Deliverer from the power of sin; as your Divinely infallible Teacher; as your Master who has the right to the entire control of your life; as your Guide, whom you will follow wherever He leads; as your Divine Lord. To believe means to thoroughly trust your life to Jesus Christ, believe what He says and who He is, and seek His forgiveness and then seek to follow Him.

So our Scripture says: for God so loved mankind, that's me, that He went to the extent of coming to this earth and taking on the form of a man. You say why did He do that? Well if He sent an angel that wouldn't be a human dying for a human, and we are human beings. So the writer of Hebrews says that He took upon Him the seed of Abraham, that's us, human flesh, so that in His human flesh He could die there on that cross and carry the burden of your sin and mine sin. The Bible says that on that cross, your sin and my sin, He became sin for us who knew no sin; that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish.

Go with me to page 8 in our notes. Halfway down through the page, or a little more, I tell you what it means to perish. It signifies the final condition of the soul. It means the destruction of all those qualities within the soul which constitute its true life and well-being with the consequent expulsion of the soul in the beyond from that environment in which alone it can enjoy no joy. It means eternity spent in hell, forever separated from God.

Now you say, Pastor, this is Christmas. Why did you have to bring up that subject? I didn't - God did. And when we see the marvelous blessings of what Christ has brought, we need not fear death nor that place of destruction. That fear is gone when we put our trust in Jesus Christ. When you walk out of this place today as a Christian, you know that you have life eternal with God and we have no fear of God's judgment. Jesus Christ came to take care of the problem of sin, for if sin had not been cared for we'd all go to hell. But He paid the penalty for your transgressions and mine so that relieves us of God's judgment, and He says if we put our trust in Him, He will not only save us from perishing, but He gives to us eternal life.

What's eternal life? Eternal life is the very life of God implanted within us. That's amazing. Trusting in Christ, I open my life to a brand new dimension. I say Spirit of the living God come live in my heart, and I have that knowledge that when life is finished here because I possess eternal life as a believer in Jesus Christ, I'm going to spend eternity with God in heaven.

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes, puts their trust in, relies upon Christ doesn't need to worry about going to hell or perishing, but has the gift of life eternal. That's real Christmas.

I've often wondered...I've moved along in life now and three quarters of a century have gone by and I often stand down at the marketplace. I was down with my wife just for a few moments, I don't like your shopping on Christmas, but I stood there and almost with a tear in my heart I said, Jesus, most of them don't know what this is all about.

Christmas is knowing Christ and enjoying that wonderful gift of His life in us - not only here and now, but for all of eternity, and only Christians can celebrate Christmas - really - because Christmas begins with Christ. Amen.

Let's stand together, shall we? Every head is bowed. Maybe you are here today a celebrant with us. You're here because it's the right thing to do - go to church on Christmas. But maybe deep within your heart there is a longing, there are some unresolved issues, spiritual issues that you're dealing with. Maybe you wrestle with unbelief trying to figure out all of the theology behind Christmas, and Christ, and God. Maybe you have walked away from your faith, but maybe today you're just here looking for a solution so that you can have a peace of heart and peace of mind with God.

You know what I would do? While our heads are bowed and our eyes are closed, I would just simply say, God, I came to church today, but I have a deep spiritual need inside me. I need to know, I need to know You dear God and I need to know that this problem of sin has been taking care of in my life, so I'm putting my trust in Jesus Christ because I believe the text that I've listened to today. I believe that. And Jesus, I'm turning my life over to You. From this day forward I want to be a Christian. I want to serve You as best I can, and today I receive You as my Savior.

Lord Jesus, it's such a glorious truth, so profound and yet so simple, just believe, trust in, to rely on, to turn our lives over to You and You give us the gift of life eternal. We do that today. I thank you Lord Jesus for this beautiful time of being together, and I pray that Your rich and marvelous blessing will rest upon each person and each family represented here today. May the rest of this day be a glorious celebration of our faith and the gift of life that comes from You dear Christ. I pray in Jesus' name. Amen.