Pastoral Letter 195
Dear Members of St. Andrew’s Uniting Church, Friends and Adherents,
Grace, Hope, Peace Joy and Love to you all.
On the first Sunday of Advent, we lit the Candle of Hope, as we hopefully watch and wait for the Lord’s second coming to establish His Kingdom and save the world. On the second Sunday we lit the Candle of Peace to remind ourselves of the ways God brings peace into our lives, as we live in the Hope that God will use us for peace through this Advent Season. Last Sunday we lit the third Candle of Advent, the Candle of Joy during our traditional Carols Service, to celebrate the Joy of having God in our lives and hope to bring the much-needed Joy in our world. This Sunday we will light the fourth candle of Advent, the Candle of Love to celebrate the Love of God, reminding ourselves that God is Love and He loves the world and as we live in the Hope that He will use us to continue building His Love in our world this Advent and Christmas Season.
This weekend we will have three services: Sunday Morning, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day services. It will be a busy weekend, before we go into the last week of the year 2023. So, as we celebrate in this joyous season and praise our loving, caring and compassionate God, let us remember those who are less fortunate, needy, homeless, lonely, depressed, not well, going through difficult time and have serious medical issues asking for God’s care, help and presence. Let us pray and hope for peace in our restless world with wars in many areas and desperate situations for many who are suffering and facing hard times, because of those tragic wars.
Please continue to pray for those who need care, support and love. Pray for those who will be away on holidays and traveling, to go and come back safely traveling on the road. Pray for those who will spend time with their families during this Christmas holidays. But most importantly, pray for those who are not well and having serious health issues and those who are recovering.
If you are not able to join us tomorrow and on Christmas Day Monday, please light a candle, and join us following the attached Orders of Services.
Please let me know if you or anyone else has prayer points.
Here are some prayer points for this week:
- Pray that this be a blessed season for us all, as we conclude the Advent and prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.
- Pray for the Middle East, the conflict between Israel and Palestine and the suffering of the innocent people as the situation escalates again.
- Pray for the people Artsakh who are refugees in different parts of Armenia facing many challenges.
- Pray for the poor, the sick, the struggling and the stressed.
- Pray for those who have been affected from natural disasters, such as earthquakes, floods and bushfires.
- Pray for Juliana as she has been transferred to St. Peter’s Green on Mowbray Road on Thursday.
- Pray for Virginia as she has commenced receiving the needed injections.
- Pray for Adrienne, as she is recovering from a heart stent procedure, she had last Monday.
- Pray for our church and our future plans as we seek God’s guidance.
Best Regards
Krikor
MESSAGE
Love Divine!
John 3:16
Every sermon and every message delivered at any time of the year, points to the Person of Jesus Christ because He is the Cornerstone of our faith. Christ’s incarnation – was when God, the Creator of the earth and of every living creature and of the entire universe was born on the earth as a man. Christ’s death and resurrection is what made it possible for us to stand before our holy and righteous God, completely forgiven, cleansed and justified. This is possible because of the great Love of God. What can we say about this profound and mysterious Love except that no other love can compare to it.
The love that people have for each other is an expression of different levels of care and commitment. People will go to great lengths to prove just how much they love someone, but human love is limited and is only an insignificant reflection of God’s immeasurable love.
Today we are going to look at God’s Love and how He expressed this love for the world. When we reflect on the meaning behind Christmas it gives us a glimpse into God’s perfect, unconditional and Divine Love. In fact, Advent and Christmas would be meaningless without understanding the significance of His love.
John 3:16 reads: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him”.
Have we ever doubted God’s love for us?
We shouldn’t have any doubts about God’s great and compassionate love. It was demonstrated unexpectedly with a great cost. It’s not just that God gave His Son or God sent His Son to the world, but He gave and send His Son to die, with a death on the cross. That’s godly, divine and sacrificial love.
This verse reminds us of three important things:
1. The Measure of God’s Love
How do we measure love? By a person’s words or by the feeling we get around certain people? One way we can measure love is by their sacrificial actions.
Almost 400 years ago, the Emperor of India, Shah Jahan, lost his beautiful wife. As a memorial to her, he poured his entire fortune into building a tomb for her. Twenty thousand workers laboured for more than 20 years, building beautifully in marble and inlaid precious stone, and in the end, the Shah had erected one of the most breathtaking buildings in the world called the Taj Mahal. It still stands today, in India, as a testimony to the magnitude of his love.
But as we said earlier, people go to great lengths to prove their love. Yet it can’t even come close to God’s boundless, perfect love. God’s love is infinite, eternal, unchanging, holy, sacrificial, and personal. God is love.
Psalm 103:16-18 tells us that our days on earth are like grass, like wildflowers because we bloom for a short time and then die. The wind blows, and we are gone—as though we had never been here.
But the love of the Lord remains forever with those who fear Him. His salvation extends to the children’s children of those who are faithful to His covenant, of those who obey his commandments!
In Eph 3:18-19 Paul talked about the love of Christ, which is higher, deeper, wider, and longer than any other love we could imagine. It is an amazing and endless love which far surpasses our understanding.
It will never be possible to measure fully God’s Love. We can just have glimpse of its measure. We don’t have any scales to weigh and fully understand God’s Love. His Love is immeasurable.
2. The Manifestation of God’s love
God went to extreme to manifest His great love to us. He did something we couldn’t ever imagined as human beings and our minds will never be able to comprehend and understand its full meaning. Can we understand after much thought the most powerful Being in the universe, loving us by coming to the earth to be with us not only making sacrifices for us but becoming the ultimate Sacrifice for us so we could have a relationship with Him?
The Apostle Paul said about Christ: “Who being in very nature Go, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death – even death on the cross” (Phil 2:6-7).
Our holy and righteous God lives in heaven, where the angels continually worship Him, in a place of splendour, perfect peace, and holiness, but He decided to step into time. He came into the very world He created but the Bible says we didn’t know or recognize Him and even rejected Him. The world, the people, didn’t see its need to be saved from their sin and be reconciled back to God and because His light exposed our darkness, we hated Him.
But He knew this would be our response and came anyway because of His immeasurable love for us. Regardless of our sins and faults, God still loves us and delivers His best to save us and make us a new creation.
This is how God showed His love among us: He sent His one and only Son into the world that we might live through Him. The scripture says: This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Jesus’ love wasn’t empty words or claims about how great His love is for us or what others said about His love. Nor was it some sentimental to make the disciples feel warm and hazy inside. He was born to die. His love was manifested by the times He stood silent before His mockers and accusers and didn’t retaliate. He was ready to be beaten, tortured, ridiculed for us and by the suffering and shame He endured on the cross until His last breath. His love was manifested in the fact that it should have been us paying for our own sins but since there was no way to redeem ourselves, Jesus redeemed us with His own blood. His sacrificial Divine Love satisfied God’s perfect justice.
3. The meaning of God’s love for us
1 John 3:1 says: “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!”
John says “see” which means to examine carefully, look at it, think about it, and receive this incredible love.
For those of us who believe in Jesus and have received His gift of love, it means that every day we have a clean slate with God because His mercies are new every morning. The incredible, boundless, infinite love we have received means that we have a new identity as children of God and as a member of His royal family. His perfect love drives out fear, the fear or expectation of divine judgment and punishment. It means we are no longer an object of God’s wrath but an object of God’s Divine Love.
As Christians, this is who we are and it should become evident in the way we live, in the way we love each other and walk in the light and in truth. God’s Love is now the source of our love. God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and His love is brought to full expression in us.
Are we keeping ourselves in God’s measureless love?
Are we manifesting His love to our family, our friends, our neighbours, and even our enemies?
Are we telling others about what God’s Love means to us today?
This message is not just for us Christians to treasure and keep to ourselves, it is the good news of God’s Love that we are to receive and share with others.
My prayer is that we not only receive and experience the measureless Love of God, but that God’s Love is manifested to others throughout each day. There is no greater love that anyone could be able to imagine.
God came to us with His great and abundant love, His Divine Love. Thanks be to God.
Amen!