 For God so loved the world that he gave his only son. That whoever believes in him should not pay much but have eternal life. Ladies and Church, how's everybody doing today? Guys doing good? Doing good? You guys wanna hear a joke? How about a joke? You guys ready for a joke? All right, a little church joke. So these two kids are going to a Christian school but they're both class clowns and just troublemakers. And they're both in class and they're talking, they're disrupting the class and the teacher says, both of you, down to the principal's office. It's like, oh no, not that. So they go down to the principal's office, one waits out in the outer office and the other one has to go in first and there is the principal, Mr. Intimidation, sitting behind his desk. And he really wants to get through to these kids that this is a sacred space. And so he looks at the first kid and he says, I wanna ask you a question, where is God? Kids just take him back. He's like, I don't know. And the principal looks at him and says, think about it, where is God? Kid just stares at him. He's like, oh, I don't wanna get this wrong. Principal asks him one more time. He says, I'm gonna ask you one last time, where is God? The kid gets up and he runs out of the office scared, runs smack into his friend. His friend looks at him and says, where are you going? He says, I don't know, but they've lost God and they're pinning in on us and I'm outta here. So, you're welcome. It's good to see everybody this morning. Hey, we wanna just make a little family announcement, especially for those of you who are over at the Portage campus. Pastor Richard and Sarah Adolph had their first little baby boy this last week. William Judah and he's a cutie. He was big, he was two weeks overdue. He did not wanna come out. He knew it was gonna snow and he wanted to stay where it was warm and toasty, but he is born and he is beautiful. And so, just continued to just encourage, lift up. Richard and Sarah, they're awesome and they're enjoying being parents, staying up till all hours of the night and all that good stuff. So, hey everybody, when you came in this morning, whether you're here at Portage, how many of you grabbed one of these Kingdom Builders books last week? Anybody grab one last week? Okay, if you did not get one last week, we have them available in the lobby and we want everyone to grab one of these and have one of these because in the month of November, we're gonna be spending some time talking about what this is. Now, everybody knows, if you've been around Radiant for more than a year, that every year, at this time of year, we do something called Big Give. So, last year, for example, we raised $257,000 in our Big Give offering that helped us do a couple things. We did a international project, a missions project, and we also adopt a school every year in which we outfit the kids in an underprivileged school in our city and community with coats, hats, gloves, and boots and all the winter gear and hundreds of volunteers flood a school. We put on a big event for the kids in these schools where they get to pick out their own coats and they've got crafts and they have music and it's a big celebration day. It's the best day of the year for those kids. And this year, you just saw the video of Woods Lake Elementary. Woods Lake is another school like that. It is our school of choice this year. It has three times the student population of any other school that we've done. So, this is like us taking on three schools all at once. And they are so excited for us to come. The first year that we did the Big Give, we tried to convince the public school system to let us come in as a church to bless their kids. And the public school obviously a little tentative said, you know you can't come in and preach Jesus to these kids, it's a public school. And our answer to them was if you'll give us a chance, we don't wanna come preach Jesus, we just wanna come be Jesus. And they said, all right, as long as you don't evangelize, so we came in and we just, we blew their minds and now we have an open door to any other schools. In fact, we have schools lining up who are asking us to do it. And Woods Lake is our school this year and we're very excited about it. What kingdom builders is, this year we've decided to do something we've never done. We're taking all of our missions. We're taking all of our outreach programs that are vast. We're taking all of our church-wide expansion, church planting, campus building expansions, all of that together. And we've decided to call it kingdom builder. That way it is one stop. It has everything that we are doing as a church in 2019 all located in here. Many of you may not know this, but the very first check that Radiant Church ever wrote. First check in our ledger, check number 1001 was not a check for payroll. It was not a check for rental of a building. It was not a check for buying equipment or advertising. It was a check to world missions. And we did that intentionally because Jane and I years ago, when we dreamed about the kind of church that we wanted to help start, we wanted to build a church that was missions focused, that we are focused on giving back, giving around the world and taking care of those that are in our community. And we do that weekend and week out. And so in this catalog, for example, is a list of every missionary and ministry in the United States and abroad that we partner with that you support on a monthly basis. It gives a description of their ministry, where they're at and how to pray for them. Also, there's a profile on Radiant Church Guadalajara that we rolled out last week and also some church expansion stuff. If you've been around for a couple months, you've heard us talking about the dream that we have of a building in downtown Kalamazoo that would be dedicated to prayer and worship around the clock and a ministry towards the mercy end of things in our own community of taking care of the poor in our own community. And we're still looking for a building. We're still praying for a building. We've looked at several of them. They haven't been the perfect fit, but how many know when we find it, we wanna be willing and able to move on it. Can you imagine a day where Radiant Church has a building downtown where we have day and night prayer and worship that is going up before the Lord from the downtown of our city, calling for a revival in Southwest Michigan, a move of God in our city and our region. So here's what we want. We want everybody to get this because it has all of those. And usually what we do is we do an anniversary offering part of the year. We do a missions offering part of the year. When we have a building project, we do a special offering. Kingdom Builders is putting all of that together and saying these are the things we wanna do in the next 12 months. And we're gonna ask everybody to do two things. Number one, in three weeks, or let's see, the 24th, 25th of November, we're gonna receive our big give offering. We do that every year. We're dreaming of raising $300,000 this year, above and beyond our tithes and offerings that is going to help us plant Radiant Church Guadalajara. It's gonna help us outfit all the kids at Woods Lake Elementary and a third global project that we are gonna roll out next weekend. So you don't wanna miss that. The second thing that we're asking everybody to do is read through the Kingdom Builders material, find a little bit more about it. And then in December, we're gonna ask everybody to above and beyond your regular tithe that helps support the local church to make a commitment, a financial commitment for the next 12 months, just towards the Kingdom Builders initiatives. So everybody, your offering envelope will be very easy. It will say tithe, Kingdom Builders. Your tithe is the first 10th that God gives you, that's for the storehouse of God. And then we're gonna ask everybody to give to missions, outreach and expansion above and beyond that. And when we all do our part, there's absolutely no reason why we can't accomplish every single one of the goals that we have. And here's what I know. When you go to a Lions game, you're going to watch a losing football team. You're gonna pay $20 for nachos, $15 for parking. And you're probably gonna buy something Honolulu blue. And we all do that and we clap and we walk away going, that was fantastic. And because we're willing to do all that, we should not be ashamed whatsoever about the fact that we give generously and extravagantly towards things that change people's lives for eternity. Amen, cannot get an amen from somebody on that. All right, so that's Kingdom Builders. Everybody get one of those catalogs. We'll be talking more about that even next week. Turn with me in your Bibles to John chapter three. If you have your Bibles, turn over there if you're watching on a video device, your phone, iPod, whatever. iPod, who has an iPod anymore? Okay, so John 316. This is part two of our series entitled 316. And we're digging deep into this most famous scripture in the Bible. I want everybody to read verse 16 out loud with me. If you don't have a Bible, it's gonna come up on the screen. Here we go. Verse number 16 says, for God so loved the world that he gave his only son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. So as we said last week, this is scripture that so many people know. I mean, we learn it from the time we're little kids but what I know to be true is that the things that we're most familiar with, we can often lose the meaning of because we're so used to it. And because we think it's so elementary and so basic. I want you to know that John 316 is deep. There is so much in this verse. And so week by week, we are parsing it out. We're almost going word for word. Last week, the sermon was for God. And this week, the sermon is the next two words. So loved. Everybody say that out loud with me. Say so loved. Come on, say it one more time. Sounds so good. It's so, so powerful to think about God's love. And that's what we're gonna be zeroing in this morning. So loved. What does it mean for God to so love the world? Live in a world that has all kinds of false ideas, broken dysfunctional ideas about what love is. Everybody has an opinion about love and not all of those opinions are equal. Not all of those opinions are true. If anybody is going to define love, it ought to be God because the Bible describes God as love. It says God is love. Jesus is having a conversation with Nicodemus. That's the whole context of John three. Nicodemus, this religious leader, Jewish leader. He knows the Bible better than you and I will ever dream of knowing the Bible. But he hears Jesus teaching. He's giving his life to the study of the scriptures. He's memorized a big chunk of the Old Testament. He's all of his life. He's a Pharisee so he's done his best to observe 613 aspects of the law, the Mosaic law found in Leviticus. But when he hears Jesus, it's as if he's never heard the Bible ever at all. So he goes to Jesus at night and Jesus, you gotta help me. Because I know that you're from God. I know that no false teacher, no false prophet could do the signs and the wonders that you do. But yet everything you're saying seems so foreign to me and I've given my life to study who God is and how to please him. See the issue with Nicodemus is he was very familiar with the law of God but he didn't really understand the love of God. The law of God is distinct from the love of God. The law of God was never given as a checklist of things for you and I to do in order to earn the love of God. The law of God was perfect but it was given by God to be a mirror so that when we hold it up and we read it, we don't look at it as a way or a means in order to convince God that we've done good enough or done enough for him to love us. The law of God was God's consolation to give to a broken race of Adam so that when we try to keep the law, it would be a constant reminder to us of how broken and sinful that we really are and how much we need a savior. I don't know about you but when I read the Bible, it reads me back. I read the Bible, I'm more and more convinced of how sinful a human being is. How broken we really are. How much we need God's grace. Does anybody need God's grace in this room this morning? I mean, we are so often convinced of our own goodness but the reality is we probably need to be more convinced of our own need. You see, Nicodemus, like the Pharisees thought, oh, God gave us a list of laws and said if you do these things, you can wear it like a badge that shows the world of how much better you are than they are because you're righteous and God loves you and he hears your prayers and he listens to you but Jesus came and kind of thwarted all that. Jesus went to the very people that the religious leaders thought they were better than and he healed them, he touched them, he taught them, he related to them and that threw Nicodemus off. Nicodemus came to Jesus and said, help me understand. And that's where we get John 3.16. There's a whole lot more in that entire chapter. I love verse 17, God did not send us in into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved. Nicodemus is having a paradigm change because he was seeing the love of God through his broken lens. Here's what I believe. I believe that when it comes to love especially the love of God, I think all of us like Nicodemus see God's love through our own filters. We have cultural filters, especially when it comes to love. In our world, we think of love in all kinds of crazy ways. It's reflected in our music, right? I mean, love is written about more in music, pop music, country music, hip hop music, I think, then almost anything else we talk about love. I'm a child of the 80s so if you're under 30 years old, I apologize but my frame of reference for most music was when I was growing up and it really was the best era of music if we're just being honest. If we're just being honest, think about the music of the 80s and its references to love. Tina Turner. What's love got to do, got to do with it? What's love but a secondhand emotion? That's some good stuff right there, man. In the 80s, we were asking the same questions we're asking today, it's, I wanna know what love is. I want you to show me, let's talk about love. Come on, foreigner, nailed it. And if you don't believe in the power of love, there's something wrong with you because in the 80s, we really believe that love stinks, love stinks, yeah. And there was this pseudo crossover Christian band called Nazareth that, it's not really a crossover band but they had a cool Bible name, Nazareth. They said, love hurts, love wounds, nobody knows it. Okay, good, there you go, so. Or you could, you know, modern version is I love you like a love song, baby, or something like that. I don't even know, modern songs just aren't as good. Our music reflects what we think about love. And in American culture, seriously in 21st century, we use love for everything. I love you, I love ice cream, I love football. I love dogs, I love walks on the beach, I love sunsets. Whatever it is, we use love for like. We use love for lust. We use love for sometimes the right things. We've got all kinds of messed up mindsets and listen, here's why that's important, is if we project our world view or we project what we've learned about love or what we've experienced about love onto God when we hear those words that God so loved us or the world, it maybe will steal or strip or change or twist the meaning of that so it doesn't have the power that the gospel has. The power of the gospel is salvation, it changes us. But if we look at it through the wrong lens, we'll miss it. In our culture, when we say that God is love, a lot of times what we mean is that love is God. Love is God, cause we worship love. I was talking to somebody last night who's a psychology major and they said, are you aware that in American Psychiatric Association, they now have a classification for love addiction. People that are addicted to being loved, they start new relationships and then break them up just because they like the feeling of somebody telling them for the first time that they love them. They like the emotion, the rush of being loved and as soon as they get it, they break up. It's a whole classification. In ancient Greek or Roman culture, they actually worshiped love. They had gods for everything. They had a God of war, which was Mars. They had the God of victory, which is Nike. It's not just a brand, it was actually a Greek God. They had the goddess of love, which was Eros. It was sexual in its nature and so they would actually worship, go to the temple. We still worship love in our culture. You know why we worship love? It's because if we say that God is love, then all of a sudden God becomes the yardstick, the measuring device by which we determine what love is, right? But when we invert that and we actually make love, God, then we project on to God how we think love should be and we expect God to react or God to affirm the way that we love, which is the second part, is that sometimes we treat God and God's love as by saying to him, God, you need to love like I love. You need to love me and you need to love the way I like to be loved and that's really based out of self-centeredness and then there's probably the most prevalent form of seeing God's love in the wrong way is in our culture today. One of the big things is, well, if God loves me, then he affirms me. He affirms my sin. He loves me just the way I am. He's not trying to change me and what we, the mistake that we make is we confuse God's unconditional love. God, listen, every single human being on the face of the earth, John 3.16 says, God so loved the world. Doesn't say he so loved the church. It says he so loved the world. God so loved the world that he gave. God's unconditional love is not the same as God's unconditional approval, but it should lead to our unconditional surrender. See, because I love my kids unconditionally, at least I think I do, but that doesn't mean I approve everything that my kids do. How many know what I'm talking about? Anybody raise some kids up in here? Oh, you just punched your sister in the eye. Oh, so cute, I love that. Do that again, I just love you. No, it's like I love you, but don't do that. I love you, but stop stealing my stuff. Come on, any parents in this room? Raise teenagers, that's my shirt. Huh? Oh, I didn't know that. How would you not know that? Number one, you didn't buy it. Number two, you've never worn it. Number three, it was in my closet. I'm just preaching my pain. Unconditional love is not the same as unconditional approval, but listen, in our culture, whenever we have a conversation about God or His love, it always comes back to, how can you say that God doesn't approve of me? He says He loves me. Yes, He loves you, but if you love somebody and something that they're doing is damaging or is affecting others or destroying them from the inside out, you're not gonna stand back and let them continue to go on with it. You're gonna do whatever it takes. How many of you know everybody in this room? We need at least three friends who are willing to tell you what you don't wanna hear. We need somebody who will look at you and say, mm, that's not a good look. That's not a good look. No, no. You know what, that guy's not good for you. I know he's hunky. I know he's got veins popping out of his shoulders, but he worships the devil and he lives in his mom's basement. You probably should not be dating him. Come on, he loves me. No, no. Okay, so we make a mess when it comes to love. And in the midst of that, and by the way, we're not the first generation to make a mess out of love, human beings have messed up love. It's part of our brokenness. But in the middle of a broken, messed up world, God so loved us by sending His Son. See, if we look at our generation right now with social media and technology, it's astounding to me how much of our approval and our affirmation we get from likes instead of love. Think about these statistics, Facebook. How many has a Facebook account still? Anybody? Okay. A few of us? Do you know that like, Facebook, like book, Facebook users give 3.2 billion likes a day. Think about that. You post something? Wait about 30 minutes, go back to your website, or go back to your, whatever, your Facebook page. Oh, look at the likes. Click, click, click, click, I got 50 likes. Makes you feel good, doesn't it? And then you get that one, mm. And now they got the spectrum or whatever, you can do angry face, sad face, confused face, whatever. Do you look at that? Instagram. Do you know that Instagram had to put a limit of 350 likes per user per hour? It's recent. You can only like up to 350 pictures in an hour. So how many of you knew that? Raise your hand if you knew that. The reason why those of you who raised your hands knew that is because you have an issue. If you're liking 350 things in an hour, you got problems going on. Instagram last year made $10 billion in advertising money, which is all based on algorithms around likes. So think about, we are a like generation. How much of our approval on a given day is determined by the amount of likes? How many of our opinions are being shaped by what we know people do like and don't like? How much are we afraid to say that we really have an opinion about because we know that we're gonna get less likes or we're gonna get somebody pushed back on the social media platform? We're being changed. We're being shaped as a generation. Social scientists say that literally there's a new phenomenon now where we have dopamine and serotonin releases in our brain to feel good drugs every time that we see likes on our posts, which is becoming a physiological addiction to being liked. In a generation that's being addicted to like, we have overlooked the fact that for 2,000 years, God has not just liked us, he has loved us and demonstrated it by giving the life of his son, Jesus, who came for us to bear our sins, to pursue us before we ever pursued him, to take on him the penalty for the things that were wrong in us, die our deaths so that we could live his life, be reconciled back to our Heavenly Father and experience eternal life. God has so loved us, but yet we're consumed with like. Jesus actually said if they hated me, they're gonna hate you. Somebody asked me one time, they said, as a pastor, aren't you concerned that there are a lot of people that don't like you because of the message you preach? And my answer to that is, you know, I don't enjoy that, but I knew it getting into this because they didn't like my leader. And if they didn't like my leader, they're not gonna like me. It's great when people do like you, it's normal when people don't. If I'm living my life for the approval and the opinions of other people, I can't experience the love of God. If I'm getting my affirmation of my acceptance of my identity, my love, from what the world thinks of me, then I am the most insecure person in the world. But I want you to know today, I can be secure today, whether anybody likes me, whether anybody likes anything I post, whether I get pushed back, whether I'm hated in this world, because I know that I am loved by an audience of one, and his love will live forever and ever, and it is eternal in its nature, and it is unconditional in its extent. Isn't that good news? I can be secure in the love of God. See, in our world, we use the word love for all kinds of things. I love ice cream. Anybody love ice cream in this place? Anybody love cookie dough in this place? Anybody love cookie dough ice cream in this place? I like it, but I don't love it. Now we use the word love, I love football. Yeah, then why don't you marry it? Remember that from school? Well, I don't mean I love it like that. See, we got all kinds of, we use love, that's part of the confusion. We use it for all kinds of things. Again, God doesn't like us. God loves us. And from a biblical standpoint, there's multiple different words even in the Greek language that are used for love. C.S. Lewis wrote a phenomenal book called The Four Kinds of Love, and in there, he talks about the four Greek words that are used for love in the time of the Bible. Three of them are used actually in the Bible. All four concepts are actually found there. The first kind of love is the Greek word eros. It's connected to the goddess of love, and it means sexual lust. It's a strong, driving passion. And in our culture, we call sex love. I ought to be able to love whoever I want to. What we really mean in our culture is I ought to be able to have sex with whoever I want to. But that's not biblical definition of God's love. God doesn't love us with some emotional impulse and some heated feeling or lust or strong desire that one minute is high and the next minute drops out. The second word that is used is the word storge, or storgy. And it is the kind of love that we have for people that are within our family bloodline. You know the crazy cousins that you see once a year that you'll actually be nice to but only because they have the same last name or they're related. Somehow they're in your family tree. It may not fork very often, but at least your family, they're in there somewhere. The third kind of love, I had to wake you up. The third kind of love is philaeo, which is where we get the word philadelphia, brotherly love. It's the kind of love that we have for people because they're a close friend. It's a deep affection, brotherly kind of love. It's the kind of love the New Testament talks about, love one another, forgive one another. But then there's a fourth kind of love and this is the love of God. It's a Greek word agape. And it's what John uses in John chapter three, agape love. It's different than all other kinds of love because here's what it means. Are you ready? It means this, it means God's unconditional, incomprehensible, immeasurable covenant love for you. God's unconditional, which means God loved you before you ever thought of loving God. It means God's incomprehensible. God's love is greater than our ability to comprehend, to fathom, to measure because we don't have anything in our horizontal existence that comes anywhere close to the way that God loves us. It's immeasurable and it's covenantal. Covenantal, we live in a contract society but God is a covenant God. Contracts are based out of mistrust. I don't trust you to keep the terms of an agreement and so I want you to sign and I want there to be repercussions if you break the bond. But a covenant is not based out of mistrust. It's based out of sacrifice. A covenant is two people coming together and saying we're coming into an agreement and it's a blood agreement. Blood is going to be shed and I am swearing to you to the exhaustion of personal resources even to the exhaustion and the loss of my life that I will keep my word, protect you, provide for you. No matter what, I'm taking that responsibility and I'm sealing it in my own blood. That's God's love. God said to you and I at the cross and sending Jesus, I'm gonna love you whether you love me or not. I want you to think about that for a second. Gregory Boyd, great theologian, his pastor in Minnesota said this. He said that God loves, God loves even those that others have rejected. God even loves those who reject him. You think about it, everything that God created, he created out of love. Genesis chapter one, verse one, it says in the beginning God created the heavens and earth. We know that right. Do you know why God created? Why God created? He created because of love. He wanted a family. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit have for eternity been dwelling in perfect unity. And out of that perfect community of love, they decided let's create and have a family of sons and daughters. Let's create them in our image and according to our likeness. Let's give them a home called earth in which we can walk with them and let's reveal ourselves to them. The question is always asked, if God is good and if God is all powerful and God's all knowing, why did he create human beings with free will knowing that they would blow it? Does anybody ever ask that question? You wanna know why? It's because of love. If God's end goal is love, then he had to create a being that could choose not to because otherwise it's not love. You can program Siri to say I love you but it doesn't have any choice. But when God created mankind, he gave them the ability to accept or to reject, to trust or to rebel. Love requires risk. And when God sent his son Jesus to the earth to die for you and for me, because of our own folly, because of our own sin, because of our own brokenness, he loved us before we ever loved him. He died for us before we had anything to offer him. See, God's love, if I could sum it up in three phrases. And by the way, when I'm talking about the love of God this morning, I want you to understand something. This is holy ground. Talking about the love of God is holy ground. It's not just some theme, some theology. This is life. This is the most sacred thing that I could ever attempt to communicate because it goes so contrary to the world that we live in the self-centeredness, the what's in it for me. We treat love like it's something that you fall into and climb out of. But God's love is, this agape love is just so vastly different. If I could describe it in three phrases, I would say this. What does it mean? It means number one, that God's love is sacrificial. 1 John 4-9 says, in this love of God has been made manifest among us, God sent his only son of the world so that we might live through him. God's love cost him everything. And today I want you to hear me. If you've ever felt worthless, if you've ever been told that you have no value, if anybody's ever intonated at the fact that you are a mistake and that you are unlovable, all you have to do is look at the cross because on the cross, Jesus paid the highest price for you. He didn't go to the sale rack, he didn't ask for a discount. He didn't take an easy way. He said, what's the worst price? What's the highest price? What's the price that they will have to pay that they deserve to pay that nobody's willing to pay for them? And if that's what it'll take to redeem them back to me, I will do it. And you listen to me, if it was you and you alone on the face of the earth, Jesus would have come and died on the cross just for you. It's sacrificial, it costs him everything. Number two is God's love is transformational. It's transformational. 1 John 3-16 says, by this we know that the love of God that he laid down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for others. But if anyone has the world's goods and see his brother in need, yet closes his eyes against him, how does God's love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or in talk, but indeed and in truth. See, God's love is sacrificial and it should cause transformation to take place on the inside of us. Just like God created the first creation out of love, the new creation, the being born again is also born out of love. And it should change us. Man, when you are loved by someone, it changes you. When you are loved by God, it should transform you radically. Oftentimes we talk about God or us finding Jesus. You ever heard that, oh, I found religion or I found Jesus? I'm actually more true to say that he found us. Because you know what I can't fathom is on the cross. The writer of Hebrews says it was for the joy that was set before him that he endured the cross. There's nothing joyful about the suffering on the cross. It's the most excruciating way for a human being to die. Jesus was stripped of his clothes, his dignity. He was beaten within an inch of his life. He was stabbed, he was spit on. And that's just in the physical realm and the spiritual realm. He was surrounded by every demon of hell, mocking, laughing at him, declaring his demise. We finally destroy you, you son of God, you love of God. Look at us, we've defeated you. But what they didn't understand was on that cross, Jesus was changing the world. He was opening a door. For us to be changed. For us to be born again. For us to not just be on the receiving end of God's love, but to become a conduit of God's love freely, you've received freely their forgive. Which leads me to the third phrase that I'll use to describe God's love. God's love is reckless. And I almost didn't use that word. And I'll tell you why. All week long I was jotting down notes. I used the word relentless. God's love is relentless. I wrote down God's love is extravagant. I love words so I was trying to find the right word. Looked upon a thesaurus, I thought about catalytic. I intentionally didn't want to use the word reckless because I didn't want this to just be a play on Cori and Caleb's song. They're like, oh, we're the cheesy church that tags everything into that song. I was like, no, I'm not gonna do that. So I kept looking, going, I need to find a word that means the same thing as reckless. And God says, why don't you just use the word reckless? Okay, I don't know if you know that or not, but that phrase reckless love is very controversial. There's blogs and people that have been writing and talking about it, God's not reckless. God doesn't do anything. And here's what I know, is if the way that we describe God's love doesn't produce controversy, then we're not talking about it right. If the way that we understand and convey and are left in awe of God's love, if it doesn't leave religious people squirming, then we're doing it wrong. You wanna know why I like reckless over relentless and extravagant and all those other? Because reckless paints a picture of a father or a mother who doesn't think about the implications, who doesn't stop to logically parse out what is the best course of action. It's not a premeditated. Even though I would say that the cross was definitely premeditated, there are just some things that God chooses to use phrases that are human in nature and experienced. They're the only way to convey how we receive God's love. And reckless is just one of them. It's this image of a dad who doesn't stop to think he sees his kid running into the street and he, against his own wellbeing, against what he's doing, he drops everything and he rushes headlong, not thinking to himself, there's no way I can get to them before the car hits. This is gonna hurt me. He doesn't think about it, he just reacts and he moves at top speed in order to scoop up his child and to rescue them and save them. That's the word reckless. It's the same way that Paul describes God's wisdom. He says that the foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of men. We all know that God's not foolish, but if God were, he's still smarter than the smartest man on the planet. And we know that God isn't reckless, but I'll tell you what, the way that he came running to the rescue, the way that he threw off the glories of heaven, the way that he willingly laid down his role as the second member of the Trinity, the way that he set his face like flint towards the cross, the way that he allowed the hands that he created to drive nails through his, the way that he laid his body on the crossbeam and allowed Roman soldiers to erect him, the way that he took the spit on his face and the mocking of hell with his eyes looking through the course of time and seeing you and I and billions of other people on this planet. And it was love that kept Jesus on the cross. There's no other word than reckless to describe that. There's no other word. It's that kind of love, that kind of love. When's the last time you were loved like that? When's the last time the chains of insecurity fell off because your eyes were opened up to see that God loved you like that. You see Nicodemus lived his whole life thinking if I just do a better job of keeping these, God's gonna love me more. The volume of his love is gonna be turned up. Oh, he's keeping 579 now out of 613. It's climbing 591. Now I really love him. That's my boy. Keep going, keep going, keep going. When we live with legalism as the bridge to God's love, it will leave us exiled and stranded and starving and thirsty. But when we let the cross be the bridge that takes us to the heart of God, it will satisfy the longings of our soul. Let me just end with this Brennan Manning who wrote the ragamuffin gospel. This is a quote from him. We should be astonished at the goodness of God. Stunned that he would bother to call us by name. Our mouth wide open at his love. Bewildered that at this very moment we are standing on holy ground. Do you stand up with me? Holy ground. I want you to hear me. I know that there's a few people leaving. I'm just gonna ask everybody to stay still and I want everybody to hear this. Jesus was on the cross. He was fulfilling the Father's mission but he was looking at you. You wanna know how much I love you? This much. This much. This much. You know the enemy will whisper in your ear, you've gone too far. You're not good enough. You're not cut out for religion. This isn't for you. It's gonna cost you too much. You're gonna have to give up a whole lot of things. What does a prophet of man, if he gains the whole world and yet loses his own soul? You've never lost anything until you've lost the opportunity for God's love to set you free. Today's the day for freedom. Today we are standing on holy ground. Today the love of God, like a jet stream that shot out from the cross is moving in this room. It's moving wherever you're standing. I want you to just buy your heads with me in this place. Today the Father who loved you so much is here. There's many of us in this room where we're not talking about religion, I'm talking about you receiving a free gift of God's salvation. Confessing that Jesus Christ is indeed the Son of God. Believing that he died on the cross for you, for the world but for you. That when you see Jesus on the cross that should have been you. When you see Jesus on the cross that was your sin and Jesus paid it all. And all he asks us is will you open your heart? Will you open your life and let me come in and be the Lord and the Savior? Let me forgive you. Let me give you eternal life. Your dead, your soul is dead, your spirit is dead but Jesus comes and breathes life into it. It's a life that will never end. Heaven will be your home but on this earth God will be your father. Right now you can have a brand new beginning. Where it's not up to you, it's up to him. You've got to receive the gift of salvation. If anyone will open the door, I will come into them. Today, will you open the door? Jesus is knocking on the door of your life today. Many of us in this room, we've never opened the door and asked Jesus to be our Lord and our Savior personally and become a Christian. Place our faith and our trust in Jesus. And today I want to give you an opportunity to respond to the love of God. We're no one looking around. If you're here and you sat today I want to receive that gift today. I want to become a child of God. I want to be saved, my sins forgiven. I want to be born again just like Nicodemus was. You say pray for me, I'm not right with God but today I need God's love, God's grace to come and set me free. I want you to raise your hand right where you're at. All over the room, come on and don't hesitate. Not even for a second. Yes, yes, yes. All over the room. I see your hand all the way in the back. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Down here in the front. Yes, sir, I see you over there. Come on, he came for all of us. He came for sinners and saints. I see you in the back. Yep, several hands all over the room. He's here for you. You can put your hands down. I want all of us to pray this prayer of confession out loud. This is our invitation to Jesus. I want you to say it to everybody. Say heavenly father, I come in Jesus' name and I believe that Jesus came because you so loved me. And I believe he died on the cross to pay my sin's price. And I believe he rose from the dead to give me eternal life. Father, forgive me, cleanse me and let your love set me free from this day forward. I am born again. I am a child of God. Heaven is my home and I am loved and accepted. I will never be the same. God, have your way in me to tell others of your great love in Jesus' name. Amen. You just prayed that prayer. Welcome to the family of God.