Due to technical difficulties, we do not have sermon audio this week. Here is a recap.
*Story as retold by Robert Morgan (linked below)*
Henry Moorhouse was a wild young man who, by age sixteen, was a gambler, gang-leader, and thief. But during the Revival of 1859, Henry gave his life to Jesus. He was soon heard preaching the Gospel with all his heart; and his favorite text was John 3:16. One day in Ireland in 1867, he met the far-famed world evangelist, D. L. Moody; and Henry had the nerve to invite himself to preach in Moody’s church in Chicago.
Sometime later, Moody returned home from a trip and learned that Moorhouse had shown up, started preaching, and was drawing great crowds. “He has preached two sermons from John 3:16,” Moody’s wife to him, “and I think you will like him, although he preached a little different from what you do.”
“How is that?”
“Well, he tells sinners God loves them.”
Moody wasn’t so sure about that; but that evening he went to hear Moorhouse preach. The young man stood up in the pulpit and said, “If you will turn to the third chapter of John and the sixteenth verse,” said the young man, “you will find my text.” Moody later recalled, “He preached a most extraordinary sermon from that verse…. I never knew up to that time that God loved us so much. This heart of mine began to thaw out, and I could not keep back the tears. It was like news from a far country. I just drank it in.”
Night after night, Moorhouse preached from John 3:16, and it had a life-changing effect on D. L. Moody. “I have never forgotten those nights,” Moody said later. “I have preached a different Gospel since, and I have had more power with God and man since then.”
Later, when Moorhouse fell ill and was on his deathbed, he looked up and told his friends, “If it were the Lord’s will to raise me again, I should like to preach from the text, ‘God so loved the world.’”
https://www.robertjmorgan.com/devotional/the-man-who-loved-john-316/
All the theological and doctrinal prowess in the world still has trouble answering the question, “Why did Jesus come into the world?”
The first key to understanding the Kingdom of God is to understand the love of God.
We can study the Kingdom of God and build up a scattered understanding through pieces we can explain, but we recognize the Kingdom through the power it displays in changed lives. It is like a tapestry made with small threads that, by themselves seem unrelated, but when woven together in the colors and parameters set by Almighty God, we see the whole picture – and it’s beautiful.
God has come, not to give us just a mansion in heaven when we die, but to give us a vibrant, practical, creative, powerful life here on earth.
So why did Jesus come? It all starts with, “God so loved the world.”