Sermon: "The Power of Love"

Delivered July 19, 2009 (VBS Celebration) by Rev. John Schmidt.
Sermon Text: Romans 8:38-39

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We had a great time last week. I was Brutus Flavius Macro III last week, a member of the Praetorian Guard. The soldier... one of the soldiers... that was guarding Paul during his house arrest. Now I saw this picture, and this picture was taken indoors, and I don't think it was in as flattering a light, so I went outside and had 'em take another picture of me. So I want you to see that.

We had a good time... good time last week. Kids had a great time, but they learned a lot too. We focused in on the issue of God's love last week. The power of God's love. The incredible love of God, and how we experience that different ways in our life.

So early in the week, we focused on the fact that God's love is a gift. That is the first thing we came to understand... that God gives us his favor, even though we don't deserve it. We don't earn anything from God by who we are or what we do. God give us his love because of who he is. That is the first thing we focused on.

The second thing we learned is that God's love changes us. That when God forgives us, when we start a relationship with God, and once again, experience what it means to know the God who created us. That God begins a work inside of us that as we live in a fellowship with him, we start to change inside, and we start to want to be different people from the inside out.

The next thing we learned is that God's love is always with us. Nothing can separate us from God's love. It's that powerful. It's that embracing. Even death doesn't win. God's love is so powerful that even death can't separate us from it. He has good plans for plans for us that go even beyond death.

God meets us on the other side because the next thing we learned about God's love is that God's love saves us. God's love brings forgiveness. God's love restores a right relationship between us. It's wonderful news, and so that is the last thing we learned was that if this is true, then God's love is worth sharing. Because this is the best news people have ever heard. Things can be right between us and God and that can make everything else right.

It's great to have weeks like this where we get together, have a lot of fun, and learn a lot as well. I must admit that I didn't have that privilege as a child. I grew up in a different time. There weren't as many Bible schools and all. But I also grew up as a Roman Catholic, and only my mother really tried to make sure that I was engaged in things and learned about God.

My father wasn't interested. He wasn't against it. He just didn't give any support. And so it was my mother that had to pick up all the slack... make sure that we got to church. She also made sure I went to catechism every Saturday. And you can imagine how happy I was to be indoors on a Saturday morning while all my friends... my Baptist friends... were outside. Still can't forgive 'em for that...

Anyway... I had my first communion. I received, you know, my confirmation. God... you know, my mom tried to make sure all those things were in place. But the fact is, you know, I suppose the priests and nuns were really trying to get through to me. But I kind of had a lot of barriers up, and I wasn't listening real well. Because I got through all of that, and I never understood the incredible love of God. It just didn't get through to me.

And so I went into my teenage years after my confirmation, and I basically decided that I was going to be an atheist. In my conception, people had created God because we needed some kind of cosmic policeman in order to make sure other people behaved. You notice that I'm thinking of it from the position we need to make sure other people behave? Anyway, that is also true for the way I was thinking then.

And I read everything I could to support that position. Took part in debates about that where I was the one saying there is no God. I was in college before I began to understand anything at all about the love of God. Up until that point, I had understood that God was a mysterious, eternal Being. Now the first few months, I thought God was a mysterious, eternal bean... b-e-a-n... and it took a little while for them to correct that. And that was true... God is an eternal being.

I also understood that God had given us all kinds of rules about life. That was true. I understood that. But I also thought... I had come to believe in my own mind... that God was always just waiting for me to slip up so that he could punish me. And that was not true. And so it was in college that I started to see that this was something different. I knew about obligation already. I didn't know about relationship.

And so there in college I started to understand that God passionately, sacrificially loved me. He loved me enough to die for me despite the fact I had spent all my teen years denying he existed. That God loved me not because of who I was, but despite who I was, because God, in his own nature, is love.

God loved me enough to forgive me despite all the lies I told friends and girlfriends and family... despite all the ways I acted out as every teenager does. And he loved me enough to change me from the inside out. That God loved me enough to invite me into an adventure... a journey... into a life... that was actually worth living, living together with him. And all of that transformation happened as I sought God while reading the Bible.

Some people talked to me, and I read some other Christian literature, but the most profound impact was made as I opened up the Bible and read about Jesus. I had developed my entire conception of God. All those years I was growing up... all those years I was an atheist... I had never read the Bible. No substantial part of it at all.

And so my conception of God was put together from just a few Bible stories I had heard. You know stories about Jesus' miracles. Stories, you know, about the Good Samaritan. I had put together my conception of God from that. I had seen Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments, so I stirred some of that into my conception. That is not a whole lot to base your conception of God upon.

And yet I wonder how many of us go through life building our entire conception of God on not much more than that. We have a few old Christian children's stories in our minds. A few old prayers from the past. A little bit we learned in a college history course or Anthropology course. And then we sprinkle in some Touched by an Angel reruns. And out of this, we build our conception of God.

Paul... Paul, the one who wrote the words that we're going to read today... Paul, the one who we've been studying all week in Vacation Bible School... had a much more substantial base for what he said about God... for what he thought about God. Paul was a tough-minded skeptic. He was someone who was willing to punish Christians for what they said about God because he thought they were lying. And so he put himself on the line in saying, "This is wrong." And he would go, and he would actually chase them from town to town to try to stop them.

He was a scholar of what we call the Old Testament... two-thirds of the Bible. Paul knew it inside and out. And yet when I reflect on the way Paul viewed God and the way I viewed God in my ignorance, there were some similarities. Because Paul did view God as an eternal Being who gave us rules to live by, and Paul too viewed God as one who was always ready to punish us when we disobey.

What changed him? What made Paul the person that begins to talk so much about the love of God? What changed him? Paul met the resurrected Jesus. He was on the road. He was going to another town, and in that town, he planned again to punish these people for what they said about Jesus. And on that road, he has a vision, and the vision is of the resurrected Jesus. And at that moment, Paul realized that Jesus loved him enough to forgive him even though he was hurting and persecuting God's own people. He meets Jesus, and he is never the same again. Jesus loved him. Jesus died for him, even though he was an enemy of Christians.

And it's from this actual experience of Jesus that he starts to write about God, building upon all he understood from the Old Testament. And at the heart of his whole understanding of God is this concept of the incredible, powerful love of God.

I want to read to you a few verses from chapter 8 of the book of Romans. I'm going to begin at the 38th verse. "For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."

God, help us to understand your Word here together.

"I am convinced that neither death nor life... " Paul writes this in a section of this letter where he is talking about the fact that anybody who responds to the love of God comes into a relationship with God where the love is so strong that there is absolutely nothing then that can happen to you in life or in death that can ever shake you loose from that love.

That even the very events of creation itself... even if they're hard on us... even if we don't understand it... ultimately can be bent to God's use for us so that in the long run, God can bring a blessing from it. It's not that the event is good, but that God is in control of even those things that are hurtful. And he controls it in love.

And so he says that death nor life can get in the way of that. Death itself can't stand in the way. God's control is so powerful... his love is so immense... that even when we die, God is on the other side there to greet us, there to bring good, there to bless us if we've responded to the love he has offered. Anything we face in life... all the things that are in the present... can't get in the way. All of these things that are piling up right now can't get in the way of the fact that God can show love to us, a love that brings wholeness to us.

Spiritual powers can't stand in the way. The future... anything that comes there... can't eliminate the fact that God in love is in control. Now it doesn't mean that we don't face difficulty because Paul faced all kinds of difficulty. But in the midst of it, he experienced the presence of God and the strength of God and didn't disintegrate under it.

Now, we sing a lot about love. You know, we sing about love that will climb mountains. We have love songs that talk about swimming every ocean out of our great love for each other. Here is a love from someone powerful enough to make it work. And here is God saying, "Nothing will separate you from my love if you respond to it." Now Paul wasn't just speaking theory here. Paul had experienced what that love can do.

Last week, I was Brutus Flavius Macro III, okay? And all week I'm in a set, and most of the parts of the set are pretend. You know, it's cardboard and paint. But one of the real things was the chain with real locks. And some poor church member had the wonderful joy of being chained to the pastor all week. It's not something I would recommend to you at all.

Paul was chained to a real soldier. We don't know whether his name was Brutus Flavius. We have no idea what his name was. But we do know that some of the soldiers who were chained to Paul, chained to Paul at what should be at one of the lowest points in his life when he can't move around freely, when he is facing the possibility of death. Paul can hardly see his friends... only the ones that can get there and visit him. Paul shared his experience of the love of God. And he shared the love of God and the message about Jesus to these soldiers, and some of them became Christians.

Paul, when he should be falling apart under the pressure, instead experiences under that pressure a wholeness and an integrity and a peace. That this man who is used to abusing people comes to the point where he realizes there is a God that I have never known, and he is love, and he will forgive even me. And so, the chains fall off, and that soldier is free.

That is the message that Paul was sharing. A God whose love is so big that he is willing to die for us. A God who wants to see us whole, who wants to see us integrated, who wants to see us at peace as we were created to be no matter what happens in life. A God whose love nevertheless doesn't protect us from the hard things we face.

But instead, he enters into those hard things with us and will deliver us through them. Even death doesn't win. That is the love of God we share today. Love that can forgive anything. Love that wants you to be whole. Love that will be with you in life and in death, no matter what you have to face. That is the message that God has given the Church to bear.

Now is that your picture of God? Powerful love. A love that can see you in your selfishness... can see all the ways you've hurt people... and still want to have a relationship with you and want to remake you into what you were created to be. Is that your conception of God? If not, I want to challenge you that maybe your conception of God is too small, and it's got to expand some. Let me give you a few ways you could do that if you're interested.

The first I'd like to suggest to you is to begin by just reading the Bible. If you haven't read the Bible, please do so. Pick the Gospel of Luke, the Gospel of John. Pick one of the letters of Paul and just begin to read what they say about God. This is so important that if you don't have a Bible and there is a Bible in one of the seats in front of you, go ahead and pick it up and take it or go out in the concourse. We have some stacks of Bibles out there. Take a Bible. It's that important. If you haven't read, please do. For me, as a seeking person, it wasn't what people said that was as important as much as what I read.

Second thing you could do is you could always come back here on another Sunday. We talk about Jesus all the time. But in particular, in September... September 13th... we're beginning a series where we're going to focus for four weeks in the Gospel of Luke specifically on how Jesus revealed himself to the people around him. So if you've got some interest, come in September. Take a look. Listen. Worship together with us.

The other thing we do is we always offer times to study together outside of Sundays. We have special small groups...we call grow groups... that meet together for about 12 weeks or so and study a particular topic. In particular, there is one kind of group called Alpha. The Alpha course, which is an opportunity to come every week for about 10 weeks. You eat dinner together. You watch a video, and then you get together in groups, and you can just ask any question you desire. Very relaxed. Nobody is going to get shocked. It's for you to explore what your questions are. If you have a question about Jesus, maybe that is what will meet your need.

One thing I want to encourage you is don't make the mistake of walking around in life with an idea about God that is put together from TV reruns. Don't do it. Life is too important for that. Love is too important for that. God is way too important for that.

Let's pray: So, Lord, wherever we are in our journey... whatever our questions are... we pray that you meet us there. Open our eyes. Help us to understand. Give us a desire to search and to seek. For we ask it in Jesus' name, Amen.

© 2009, Rev. John Schmidt
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org