Advent 2022 – Week 2
Welcome Home: Inviting Jesus to Make My Heart His Home!
A Home of Love
Kevin Stonerock to share about and play special song: Black Diamonds.
This song speaks to a situation that has been playing out for generations, in many shapes and sizes. There are the lost stories of the Civil War and World War I veterans who came home. There are the whispered stories of the World War II & Korea War veterans who came home. There are the loud stories that I grew up with of the Vietnam veterans who were homeless and struggling with substance abuse. There are the sensational stories of the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans coming home lost to themselves and their families, with devastating suicide rates.
These stories of veterans coming home from war and struggling to transition back into their families and communities have a theme – the soldier may have left the war to come home, but the war didn’t leave them just because they came home. We’ve said, “Welcome home!” Now let’s welcome soldiers home from war in a way that invites them to experience the qualities of a home of faith that will be healing to them and to all our families. A home characterized by the four virtues of the Advent season – hope, love, joy, and peace.
There is a lot of preparation that goes into a homecoming, for both those at home and the soldier who is returning. The home itself must be actively prepared to be a home of hope, love, joy, and peace, just as the soldier must intentionally work on transforming his mind and heart from a posture of hyper-vigilance (called “Battle Mind”) to being in a posture of rest. Jesus wants to make His home in each of our hearts and in all our homes, and it is His presence in our hearts and homes that transforms us.
This Christmas, I am inviting you to surrender your heart to be Christ’s home so that your home may become a home of hope, love, joy, and peace – a place where the weary of mind and body, a place where the heavy-burdened of heart and soul, can come and find rest (Matthew 11:28-30). If you want to transform your home, you must start with your own heart – you must become a person of hope, love, joy, and peace.
Last week we focused on transforming our hearts into homes of hope, today, the message will focus how our faith invites Jesus Christ to transform our hearts into homes of love. Our Scripture for this message is Ephesians 3:14-19:
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.
Let us pray and ask the Holy Spirit to fill us to all the fullness of God so that we may know the love of Christ and be transformed by it, so that we, and our homes, may be homes of love.
The love of God is transformational. When Jesus Christ makes your heart His home through faith, then you become rooted and grounded in love. In other words, the love of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, transforms your story – God changes you and begins the process of changing your life, your marriage, your parenting style, your motivations for work, and your inspirations for living. Our entire life becomes a dialogue about the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s love because we are supposed to bring the love of God into every area of our life.
Here’s the secret to all of this, you don’t know something until you put it into practice. Teachers know that you haven’t learned the material until you can teach it. By the same principle, you can’t know the love of God until you express it, share it, give it in each circumstance of your life. The transformative quality of God’s love is a positive feedback loop. As you grow in spiritual maturity and learn more about God’s character and His love, you can ‘teach’ or demonstrate His love more and more through your actions. God transforms your understanding of His love as you grow in Christ, and that doesn’t mean that God or His love has changed because He is constant. Rather, it demonstrates the importance of our progressive sanctification. We must pursue the relationship to experience the fullness of the transformation so that we “may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge.”
You are transformed by the love of Christ because the Holy Spirit fills you to the fullness of God. This is when your home becomes a space of grace for returning soldiers, when you are a person in an ongoing conversation with God about His life and what His love looks like in every situation of your life. You are transformed by love by practicing the love you were first given, and, in doing so, you become a loving person. It’s kind of like this, if you are looking for friends, be one. If you are looking for good people, be one. Love transforms you through the giving and receiving of love. It’s not a theory, it’s an action that is constantly explored, a way that is walked, a life that is lived. If you don’t know how to react to a situation or person – love! It’s the golden rule at work, as Jesus taught us in Matthew 7:12, “In everything, therefore, treat people the same way you want them to treat you, for this is the Law and the Prophets.”
The love of God is not transactional – it is freely given! The motivation for the Christmas gift of Jesus Christ is explained in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” Our salvation is an action of love. You could not be saved today, if God had not taken His essence of love and expressed it in action. You are transformed because God first acted toward you, as Paul explained in Ephesians 2:1-10:
And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. Among them we too all formerly lived in the lusts of our flesh, indulging the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest. But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.
Therefore, because of God’s love, you are to walk in the good works of love – the activity of our salvation should be an expression of that same love He first gave you. Just like we give gifts at Christmas because God for gave to us on that first Christmas, our lives become love because we are transformed by His first love! The beloved of Jesus said in 1 John 4:7-5:4:
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit. We have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this, love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment; because as He is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love. We love, because He first loved us. If someone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also. Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and whoever loves the Father loves the child born of Him. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and observe His commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not burdensome. For whatever is born of God overcomes the world; and this is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith.
The love we are to fill our homes with is the love that overcomes the world; it is the love of God that comes through faith, not the love of the world that comes through the flesh; it is a fruit of the Spirit’s work in you, bringing God’s fullness into your life (Galatians 5:22-23). If you want to make your home a safe place for the soldiers to come and find rest for their heavy hearts and weary minds, then don’t give them a counterfeit love for which they must perform. Rather, give them the love that flows from the throne of grace.
When we give this to one another, then we proclaim the gospel of peace for all the world to see, as Jesus taught in John 13:34-35, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Welcome home our soldiers by giving them a soft place to land, a space for grace to experience the security of love that will help them transform from being in a hyper-vigilant battle mind, always looking for the worst in other people, watchful for attacks and ambushes. Help them be restful at home, always looking to be their very best for other people, as they experience the peace and rest of a love that cannot be earned, and one that will never end because of that first Christmas gift. As the song O Holy Night teaches us, “Truly He taught us to love one another / His law is love and His gospel is peace / Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother / And in His name all oppression shall cease / Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we, / Let all within us praise His holy name.”
Never forget, we can’t love with God’s love until we experience God’s love personally. I pray that you will accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and begin to experience the love of God for yourself personally; that’s where it all begins for each of us. For those who have already experienced God’s love, I pray that your home may become a great laboratory of learning to love as God first loved you. May you be transformed as you put into practice God’s Christmas gift to you and to me, and to all of humanity.