Love Reversed

PH Bible Teaching

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Homefront Family Services, here is this week’s Bible teaching clip, “Love Reversed.” We often ask how a loving God could demand something as brutal as the cross, but what if the cross is actually the clearest picture of God’s love? Real love requires sacrifice, and in Jesus, God does something astonishing: He puts Himself where we deserved to be, taking our place so that we could have life.

Check out the clip below, or view the full message below the transcript!

Audio version only…

Clip transcript…

In every example that you and I can come up with, all life-changing love towards people who have a real need—all of it— requires a substitutionary sacrifice. Every example of real love you can come up with.

That’s why at weddings, what do we say— [I] just did a wedding—what do you say? Real love is what we’re told in Scripture: Love each other as Christ loved you. And how did He love you? He gave Himself up to give you life. Real love requires substitutionary sacrifice.

That’s why I’m saying, human experience is witnessing to us—if we pay attention.

We ask this question: How could God demand the cross? How could the cross fit into God’s plan? A loving God wouldn’t demand that His Son go and die on a cross. Look at this. This is what John Stott says: “

The essence of sin is we human beings substituting ourselves for God—” We believe that we are God. That’s what sin becomes, or is— “While the essence of [love]—” or, salvation— “is God substituting Himself for us. We put ourselves where only God [belongs and] deserves to be, and God put[s] Himself where we deserve to be.”

Love is an exchange, me for them. That’s what love is.

So here’s my question: Since you are incapable of coming up of [sic] any example of real love that doesn’t involve that kind of personal exchange, can we all believe that this is true? Because if it is—I’m getting ready to blow your mind—if it is, if love, real love, is a personal exchange, then I have a question, a legitimate question.

We sit here and ask, how could a God of love demand something like the cross? I’m going to reverse that, and I’m going to say we have established that real love demands a personal sacrifice.

How can God be a God of love if He does not become personally involved in suffering the same grief and the same violence and the same oppression and the same pain that we experience?

You ask the question, “How could a God do that?”

I ask the question, you say, “God is love. How could He be a God of love if He simply saw us in this condition and said, ‘Well, you made the mess. You deal with it.’?”

You don’t do that for your friend on the interstate. You don’t do that for your emotionally wounded friend. You don’t do that for your children. You don’t do that for anybody that you truly love. So, if God is a God of love, how could He not do those very things?

Everything we know about love tells us He cannot be a loving God if He doesn’t substitute Himself for us. And I’m going to tell you that there is only one faith in the entire world that describes a God that does that very thing. If you believe in a God of love, you have no choice. You have Christianity and nothing else. That is the only faith that has a God that does that.

In every other man-made faith, god—and I use a small “g”—god is god because he is strong and he is powerful and he can do what he wants to do, and Jesus reverses all of that. He stands it on its head.

It’s the most countercultural, unexpected, shocking reality when you read it: The God of ultimate power reverses places with the weak and the condemned. Why? Because that’s what a loving God would do.

He invites glory through submission? Don’t believe me? Listen to these words. [They] take on all new meaning:

Philippians 2:7-11:

“That He 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 a cross. Therefore—” what was the consequence of him doing that?— “God exalted Him to the highest place and gave Him the name that is above every name. That at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.”

Amen!

Full message, “Cross”