Does God Love the Sinner

My message this evening, friends, is entitled, Does God Love the Sinner? I believe God loves sinners a lot more than we do. We don't have much love for the ungodly. In fact, we don't have much love for anybody who's not a member of our church or denomination.

But Jesus was called a friend of sinners. He went out to sinners and reached them where they were with the good news of the gospel. He saved one sinner while he was still up a tree.

And that's how he saves most of us as well, when we were up a tree in our sins. Some of you may argue and say, Preacher, God doesn't love the sinner because it says so in Psalm 7, 11, which states, God is angry with the wicked every day. That's true, friends.

But do you know why God is angry with them? Because he loves them. Here is a father who has two sons, and one dutifully serves him by his side, and the other takes off in a life of rebellion and sin and goes and ruins himself with harlots. Does the father not still love that sin and son? Some of you are parents.

If one of your children goes in an opposite way to what you want for them, and they disobey you and lie to you, do you stop loving them? No, of course not. Your heart aches for them all the more. The father, whose son went out and sowed his wild oats with loose living and sin, decided one day to come home again.

The father sees him walking up the path to the home while he is still far off. And what does the father, that prodigal son, do? Does he go get a whip and whip him? No, he runs as fast as he can. And throws his arms around his neck and kisses him in love.

You better start changing your opinion, friend, about how God views the creation of his hands. Because if God didn't love sinners, there would have been no hope for me. And if God didn't love sinners, there wouldn't have been any hope for you either.

My Bible says in several places that God loves the sinner. All you have to do, friend, is read Romans 5, 8, and that should settle it for you. For it says, But God commanded his love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

In another place it says, We love him because he first loved us. He didn't clean us up first and then love us. But quite the contrary, friends.

Look what it says in Revelation 1, 5. Unto him that loved us and washed us from our sins in his own blood. He doesn't wash us first and then love us. No, he loved us first and then washed us in his blood.

If we could only love sinners like that, we would be red-hot evangelists. Every single one of us. Oh, why you couldn't go to bed tonight without telling some poor sinner about Jesus and how it came down here so we can go up there.

But I believe that we have used the concept of God hates the sinner as an excuse to keep us from our duty of being gospel witnesses. We don't witness because we just don't love them. If you really love sinners and didn't want them to go to hell, then you'd go out and rescue some of the perishing.

God told D.O. Moody, Moody, here's a lifeboat. Go out and fill it. And Moody did just that.

He witnessed to someone every single day of his life to such degree. He was known in Chicago as Crazy Moody. I was in a gas station recently and a down and out man in a wheelchair asked me if I will go in and buy some booze for him.

I looked at him and said, no, I don't think so. He pleaded and said, my wheelchair won't fit in the door. Here is ten dollars.

Won't you go in and buy me a bottle? I looked at him with his bent up legs and said, I'll go get it for you. And this Baptist preacher threw his reputation right out the window as he bought a bottle of booze for the first time in 40 years. I walked back outside and handed that homeless man his change and his bottle.

And I said, now I've done something for you. Will you do something for me? He said, sure. What? I handed him a gospel tract and said, this has helped me in my life.

I know it will help you, too. But you have to read it. Will you promise me that you'll read it? He gave me his word as I handed it to him.

But some of us love our reputations too much to go out into a saloon or bad part of town and witness some of the down and out sinners. We don't want to go out and bother the homosexuals with the gospel because we don't like them anyhow. And we think God likes them less.

You better believe, friend, that God loves the sinner or he wouldn't have sent his only begotten son to die on a cruel cross for sinners. One of the main things that held Jesus to that bloody cross was his love for sinners. Every stroke of that Roman hammer that pounded those nails into his quivering blessed feet and hands was an explanation point that cried, But God commended his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Let us, friends, let the love of God that he has for sinners come to us and thaw out some of our icy hearts. And then let us go out and love some sinners as well. Let us pray.