Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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*HE LOVES*
*3:16*
*Sermon #2*
Pluto got bumped, cut from the first team, demoted from the top nine.
According to
a committee of scientists meeting in Prague, this outpost planet fails to meet solar-
system standards.
They downgraded the globe to asteroid #134340.1 How do you
supposed that decision made Pluto feel?
A bunch of planet-pickers from Prague,
kicked him out.
Mars didn’t get cut, and it looks as red as a tanning bed addict.
Saturn is still a planet even though it has rings around the collar.
But Pluto? /Too small.
Wrong size moon.
Not enough /
/impact./
I’m thinking that Pluto didn’t appreciate such news.
He’s always getting pushed around.
Walt Disney named a dog after the planet.
Teachers always put him last on the science quiz.
Can’t fault Pluto for being ticked.
One day he’s in, the next he’s out; one day on the squad, the next off.
We can understand his frustration.
Some of us understand it all too well.
We know what it’s like to be voted out.
Wrong size.
Wrong crowd.
Wrong address.
/Plutoed./
John 3:16 has a lot to say to Plutoed people: “For God so loved the world he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
God loves.
God gave.
We believe.
We live.
To the demoted and demeaned, Jesus directs his leadoff verb.
“For God so /loved/ the world . . .
” /Love./
We’ve all but worn out the word.
This morning I used /love/ to describe my feelings toward my wife and toward peanut butter.
Far from identical emotions.
I’ve never proposed to a jar of peanut butter (though I have let one sit on my lap during a television show).
Overuse has defused the word, leaving it with the punch of a butterfly wing.
Biblical options still retain their starch.
Scripture employs an artillery of terms for love, each one calibrated to make a different point.
Look at the message of an Old Testament word for love.
I. God’s Love: You Can’t Win It.
Consider what Moses said to his followers: “The Lord chose your ancestors as the objects of his love” (Deut.
10:15 nlt).
This passage warms our hearts.
But it shook the Hebrews’ world.
They heard this: “The Lord binds [/hasaq/] himself to his people.”
/Hasaq/ speaks of a tethered love, a love attached to something or someone.2
I’m picturing a mom connected by a child harness to her rambunctious five-year-old as the two of them walk through the market.
(I once thought the leashes were cruel; then I became a dad.)
The strap serves two functions, yanking and claiming.
You yank your kid out of trouble and in doing so proclaim, “Yes, he is as wild as a banshee.
But he’s mine.”
In this case, God chained himself to Israel.
Because the people were lovable?
No. “God wasn’t attracted to you and didn’t choose you because you were big and important—the fact is, there was almost nothing to you.
He did it out of sheer love, keeping the promise he made to your ancestors” (Deut.
7:7–8 msg).
God loves Israel and the rest of us Plutos because he chooses to.
“This is the love that won’t let go of the object of love.”3
George Matheson learned to depend on this love.
He was only a teenager when doctors told him he was going blind.
Not to be denied, he pursued his studies, graduating from the University of Glasgow in 1861 at the age of nineteen.
By the time he finished graduate seminary studies, he was sightless.
His fiancée returned his engagement ring with a note: “I cannot see my way clear to go through life bound by the chains of marriage to a blind man.”
Matheson never married.
He adapted to his sightless world but never recovered from his broken heart.
He became a powerful and poetic pastor, led a full and inspiring life.
Yet occasionally the pain of his unrequited affection flared up, as it did decades later at his sister’s wedding.
The ceremony brought back memories of the love he had lost.
In response, he turned to the unending love of God for comfort and penned these words on June 6, 1882:
O love that wilt not let me go, I rest my weary soul in thee; I give thee back the life I owe, that in thine ocean depths its flow may richer, fuller be.4
God will not let you go.
He has handcuffed himself to you in love.
And he owns the only key.
You need not win his love.
You already have it.
And since you can’t win it, you can’t lose it.
II.
God’s Love: You Can’t Lose it
As evidence, consider exhibit A: the stubborn love of Hosea for Gomer.
Contrary to the name, Gomer was a female, an irascible woman married to a remarkable Hosea.
She had the fidelity code of a prairie jackrabbit, flirting and hopping from one lover to another.
She ruined her life and shattered Hosea’s heart.
Destitute, she was placed for sale in a slave market.
Guess who stepped forward to buy her? Hosea, who’d never removed his wedding band.
The way he treated her you would have thought she’d never loved another man.
God uses this story, indeed orchestrated this drama, to illustrate his steadfast love for his fickle people.
Then God ordered [Hosea], “Start all over: Love your wife again,
your wife who’s in bed with her latest boyfriend, your cheating wife.
Love her the way I, God, love the Israelite people,
even as they flirt and party with every god that takes their fancy.”
\\ (Hosea 3:1 msg)
This is the love described in John 3:16.
/Hasaq/ is replaced with the Greek term /agape,/ but the meaning is equally powerful.
“God so [/agapao/] the world . . .
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