Love For Sinners (Romans 5:1-8)

For the last four weeks, people from our parish have been getting together to discuss Ministry with Young People. The last two Wednesday evenings we looked at a book from the Fuller Youth Institute called Growing Young. This book is based on research the Fuller Youth Institute did in the USA on churches who are doing well in ministry with younger people aged between 15 and 29 years old. Their research showed that these churches have six core commitments in common. They…

• Unlock keychain leadership
• Empathize with today’s young people
• Take Jesus’ message seriously
• Fuel a warm community
• Prioritize young people (and families) everywhere
• Be the best neighbours.

There is a lot to discuss about each of these six core commitments, what they look like, and how they could shape the culture of our congregations and parish. In time, I would like to talk more with the people of our parish about each of them because one of the findings of the Growing Young research is that ‘any congregation can grow young’ (p 48).

One of these core commitments is that churches who are growing young ‘take Jesus’ message seriously’. We could assume that we all ‘take Jesus’ message seriously’ because we identify as Christians. When we think back a couple of weeks to Jesus’ Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20, however, we see that learning to follow Jesus and his teachings is a life-long journey of growing in faith and love in the middle of all the different circumstances we face in our lives. Taking Jesus’ message seriously is a call to return to the teachings of Jesus in the Bible, following in the way Jesus taught and living faithfully to his message.

For example, in this morning’s New Testament reading we heard the amazing words of the Apostle Paul as he speaks good news to us: ‘God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners’ (Romans 5:8 NLT). We can often hear people talk about God’s love for all people, which is definitely good news. God does indeed love everyone! However, when we stop and listen carefully to what Paul is saying, the love of God for sinners can appear even greater than saying that God loves everyone.

This is because ‘sinners’ are not easy people to love. Think for a moment about someone in our lives who has sinned against us or done wrong to us in some way. In most cases, people who have wronged us or hurt us are harder to love than people who haven’t. It works the same way from God’s perspective. God doesn’t just love people who are nice to him or live ‘good’ lives. God loves people even when we don’t love him, when we are opposed to him, or even when we are openly hostile towards him. We can see this clearly when Jesus prayed on the cross that his Father would forgive the very people who were murdering him (Luke 23:34). God shows his immense love for us by sending Jesus to redeem and rescue us even when we were turned away from him, didn’t really care about him, or were in open rebellion against him!

We can take Jesus’ message of God’s love for sinners seriously in two main ways.

The first is to realise that God’s great love is for us as people who were trapped in sin and couldn’t do anything about it. Please understand that we’re not talking about sin to make anyone feel bad about ourselves. Instead, it is to acknowledge the reality of our situation and to point us towards the love of God for us in Jesus which gives us a healthy sense of who we are and what we’re worth. In so many ways in our lives, we can be aware of our sin without calling it ‘sin’. We all have flaws and weaknesses. We all make mistakes, get things wrong, or do things that hurt others, either intentionally or by accident. We can all struggle with our sense of who we are, where we belong, and why we’re here. We all suffer from the effects of sin in many different ways and at many different times in our lives. The amazing thing about God’s love for us in Jesus, though, is that God doesn’t expect anything from us before he shows love to us. We don’t have to reach a certain moral standard, or clean our lives up, or somehow be something we’re not before he displays his love for us. Instead, God sees our flaws, our failures, our weaknesses, and our wrongs, and sends Jesus to us as his ultimate act of love for us to make us right again. Taking Jesus’ message of God’s love for sinners seriously means being ready to identify as a sinner, but more importantly to find everything we need in the great and perfect love of God for us in Jesus which gives us a healthy and sustaining sense of who we are, where we belong, and why we’re here.

The second way we take the message of God’s love for sinners in Jesus seriously is to love others in the same way Jesus has loved us. Probably most of us have someone in our lives who have wronged us or sinned against us. A normal human response is to withdraw our love, break off our relationship, or even live in open hostility towards that person. Taking Jesus’ message of God’s love for sinners seriously, however, means loving that person in the same way that God loved us by giving Jesus to us and for us even when we were sinners. This love will look different at different times, depending on the circumstances, but it is a radical and challenging way to see the people who wrong us. This is where we need the discernment of God’s Holy Spirit, firstly to soften our hearts towards those who have wronged us or sinned against us, and then to guide us into ways of loving those people which will be healthy and life-giving, both for us and for them. We can’t go into what this might look like in each specific situation in this message. Instead, the goal is to point us again towards God’s perfect and infinite love for us in Jesus, a love he gives to us even when we were opposed to and in conflict with God, and ask how do we take this message of Jesus seriously in our own lives, with people we feel have sinned against us?

The message Jesus proclaims teaches us a new way to see ourselves as people God loves unconditionally, to relate to God through faith in him, and to relate to others with Christ-like love. Whether or not we are hopeful that our church can grow young, Jesus calls us to learn a new way of life from him and to take his message seriously in everything we say and do. To believe that ‘God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners’ sets us free to be real about who we are and the struggles we go through. We take this message seriously firstly when we find God’s life-changing love for us when we are at our lowest, most vulnerable, or most broken. When we experience God’s love for sinners in Jesus, we can then extend his love to others as we love them in the same way.

More to think about or discuss:

• What is the greatest display of love you have ever seen or received from a member of your family, a friend, your partner or spouse? What made it so significant to you?
• Which do you think is greater: that ‘God loves everyone’ or ‘God loves sinners’? Give reasons for your answer…
• How might you take Jesus’ message of ‘God’s love for sinners’ seriously this week? How might it help shape the way you see yourself? A relationship with someone else?