[0:00] This is the evening service at Holy Trinity on the 9th of January 2000. The preacher is Paul Barker.
[0:12] His sermon is entitled, Why Jesus Came, and is from John chapter 3, verses 17 to 36.
[0:24] Well, people fall into one of those two categories, spiritually. Either those who are attracted to light or those who prefer and love darkness.
[0:36] And this passage addresses those two groups of people, describing them, but also helping us to make sure that we make the right choice about whether we're a moth or a possum.
[0:51] One of the best known verses in the Bible is John 3, 16. They're great words, aren't they?
[1:04] Everybody loves those sorts of words because they sound so warm and inviting. Who would not want to respond to the love of God willingly and eagerly?
[1:16] Who would not warm to God's love expressed in his Son who died for us to save us so that we should not perish? Who wouldn't be attracted to that love of God in Jesus Christ?
[1:30] That's the verse that precedes the verses that were read for us tonight. In the first verse, verse 17, and you may like to have these verses open, page 8, 6, 4 in front of you, that carries on the theme.
[1:44] Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Surely that would be something that people would flock to respond to willingly and eagerly, to warm to God's love, to accept the offer of salvation.
[2:05] We'd jump at the chance, surely, without exception. It's such good news. Why would anybody not respond? Sometimes it's hard to work out why anybody in the world is not Christian.
[2:23] Why would somebody not respond to these words of invitation and salvation and love and offer and gift? Often when we're in the business of trying to convince people to become Christians, we work on the premise that it's about weight of evidence and conviction of truth and argument and logic and reason.
[2:49] And so if somebody, after being told the gospel doesn't respond with faith, we want to go through it again and set out the steps very logically about who God is and what Jesus has done and why we should respond.
[3:02] And we often can't understand why anybody, having gone through it and seemingly understood it, refuses to respond with faith in this God and to accept his love and his gift of salvation.
[3:14] Sometimes our efforts at convincing people who aren't Christians to become Christians presume that the Christian faith is so logical and so good that anybody who understands it must accept it.
[3:30] And where they don't, that it reveals some lack of understanding. But the truth is, of course, that not everybody does respond to the Christian faith willingly and eagerly.
[3:45] Not everybody warms to the love of God.