Son of God (Introducing Jesus, Part 3) – January 26, 2025 Sermon Summary and Discussion Questions

We all have a need to be loved. Most of us recognize that love is essential to a full experience of life. Those who have doubts about whether they are loved often carry that lack around as a wound. And we all want to be known. We want to communicate our interests and our loves and ourselves to other people. But sometimes we worry that if people really knew us more deeply or in a fuller way, they might not want to love us. In the best relationships, love and knowledge are not in conflict with each other.

The relationship between God the Father and Jesus the Son is the perfect relationship in which both parties are fully known and fully loved. In passages like John 5, John 10, and Matthew 11, we are told about the closeness that the Father and the Son have for one another. They alone know each other fully and love each other perfectly, in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. They are like that perfect family circle that everyone who sees it would love to be part of.

Jesus extends an open invitation for us to join this family circle. When we accept this invitation, we enter into a relationship in which we are completely loved and fully known, just as the Son is known by his Father. We are invited to call his Father “our Father.” God knows everything about us—our regrets and failures of the past, our sense of inadequacy in the present—yet he loves us. And in extending his love to us, we come to learn that he has a good purpose for all of us.

But we receive in order to give. We receive an invitation so that we can extend an invitation. As we look to the Son and the Father in their relationship of perfect love and knowledge, we are challenged to watch out for shortcomings in our own practices of love and knowledge.

1.     Shortcomings of Love: Be Ready for Reconciliation: There are people in our lives whom we know well but find it hard to love because we are put off by their past failures. But if we truly appreciate what we have received from God in Jesus, we will open ourselves up to the possibility of forgiveness and will desire reconciliation.

2.     Shortcomings of Knowledge: Learn the Stories of Others: It is easy to claim that we love our neighbours and all of God’s creatures, but most of us primarily know people who share our background and experience. In an increasingly divided world, the church’s unity in diversity is a gift to the watching world. Jesus’ incarnation was a journey into the experience of others. We are summoned to learn other people’s stories and to get to know others personally, so that we can let love move us to real action and genuine compassion.

Discussion Questions

1.     How important is it to you to know that you are loved? How has love or its absence affected your life?

2.     Who are the people that know you best? How did that come to be?

3.     Read the following passages and note what you can about the relationship between the Father and the Son:

John 1:1-5

John 5:19-27

John 10:14-18, 25-30

4.     Read John 1:9-13 and Matthew 6:5-9. How are we, as followers of Jesus, to think of our relationship with the Father?

5.     Read 1 Corinthians 13:8-12. How does it make you feel to think that you are “fully known” by God? Read Psalm 139 for some sense of how complete God's knowledge of us is.

6.     Think of someone in your life who needs more love from you than you are giving. What is holding you back and how can you take steps toward being more generous in your love?

7.     Who are some people or groups of people that God might be calling you to get to know? How can you begin taking steps toward that calling?