“He Endures” John 8:48-59

I’ve shared often that one of my favorite things about God is that He never asks us to do anything for Him that He has not already done for us. When He calls us to love Him it is because He has first loved us. When He commands us to love our enemies it is because, when we were His enemies, Christ died for us. When He tells us to deny ourselves, take the cross and follow Him, it is because He thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but humbled Himself to take the form of a man, become obedient to death and follow the will of the Father. There is nothing God asks from us that He has not already done for us. Over and over again, the Scriptures call us to learn patience, to choose perseverance, to build endurance. Hebrews 10:36 says, “you need to persevere”; Romans 5:3 says that suffering is building endurance, James 1:4 commands us to let patience have its perfect work. I know I mention it often, but please stop warning people against praying for patience when God calls us to it—without patience we are easily deceived and easily defeated, without patience we miss out on seeing God’s promises fulfilled, without patience we end up like Esau, trading what God is going to do for us for what we can do for ourselves right now. The thing that might be most important about endurance is that it’s yet another part of God’s character and what God has done and is doing for us. Psalm 136 says over and over again, “His mercy endures forever!” This morning, I want to talk to you about the incredible endurance of God, not how He puts up with us, or loves us in spite of us, but how He endures for us, how we are a part of the joy that was set before Him, giving Jesus the strength and the desire to endure the cross and despise it’s shame, how Jesus is the embodiment of the loved defined in I Corinthians 13 and how He always protects, always trusts, always hopes and always endures. My prayer is that we will see, through this passage in John, that Jesus is the love that never fails because He is the lover that has chosen to endure.