That might chase some people out of the door.
Sometimes it's because people don't want to be held
accountable for the way they live their lives if they call
themselves Christian, and so they might walk away as soon as
someone confronts them about their sin.
There are many reasons, but I'll tell you a sad truth is that
many people walk away because they feel burned by the church.
What I mean by this is they get hurt by people carrying the name
Christian, and sometimes the hurt is because of a lack of
care. They don't feel like the church
was there for them when they were in need.
And sometimes it comes from an act of hurt by something someone
did, probably in leadership, but possibly another member of the
church, and that has caused them to walk away.
Now, I'm not out here trying to start criticizing the church as
an organization. If anyone knows me, you know I
love the church and I love this part of it in particular.
But as a community of sinners, we do need to own and repent of
those times when we are responsible for hurting people
when it comes to relationships within the body of Christ.
But what really brought this to mind as I was preparing my talk
for today is that the big reason why people often walk away from
church communities is a lack of love, whether real or perceived.
Which is probably why those who walk away from the church are
often the most vocal in saying that the mark of the true church
is love. Love for the other.
As a church, we can pride ourselves on many things.
We can pride ourselves on being committed to biblical teaching,
to good theology. We might even take particular
pride in characteristics of our local expression of the church,
like how multicultural we are, how much our kids ministry is
thriving, how many service projects we have in our
community. And these are all good things
for a church to be doing. But how many of us look at
ourselves at the end of the day and say, wow, I've been doing
well at loving today? Love is one of those things that
can feel vague and a little hard to define.
Is it a feeling? Is it affection?
Is it acceptance or tolerance? Is it romance?
Is it passion? We don't always know what to
call love, but we do seem to notice when there's an absence
of it. And yet it is one of the most
foundational marks of the Christian faith.
Even Jesus tells us that it is the mark of the true disciple in
John 1335. He puts it this way.
By this everyone will know that you are my disciples if you love
one another. This is the mark of the
Christian. It's also the duty of every
believer because Paul says we should not have any debt
outstanding. The only thing we should owe
anyone is love, for whoever loves has fulfilled the law.
As a Christian, if we were to highlight one thing you ought to
be growing in, it would be love, which is what we're going to dig
deeper into God's Word about today.
But before we do that, I just want to pray for us.
Father God, thank you for who you are and thank you for how
you love us. As we look into your word today
and we ask questions about what it means to be marked by love,
we ask that your Spirit will lead us into your truth.
We pray that our hearts would be ready to receive your word and
that we would be. We would be ready to listen as
you teach us, rebuke us, correct us, and train us in what it
looks like to be your children. In Jesus name we pray, Amen.
So today we're looking at the topic of love.
And for those who want to road map to know where I'm going, I'm
going to focus on three main ideas about love. 1st I'm going
to look at love as a fruit of the spirit.
Then I'm going to look at how our love is rooted in God's love
for us. And finally, I'm going to get a
little bit more practical and try to dig into some, dig a
little deeper into what love looks like.
So starting with love is a fruit of the Spirit.
Last Sunday, Eric spoke about what freedom in Christ looks
like. If you missed it, it's on
Spotify and Apple Music. But he showed us how we are free
from some things and free to some things.
We are free from the flesh, which wants what is contrary to
the Spirit, and we are free from the Law, which condemns us when
we fail to keep it. But we are also free too.
We are free to serve one another in love.
You see, when Israel was first given God's law, they repeatedly
made a habit of failing to keep it.
But that doesn't mean they didn't try.
In fact, some tried so hard that they added a whole system of
extra laws, very specific and detailed laws around the laws
that God had given them, kind of like a hedge, so that if you're
trying to keep these little ones, you don't have a chance of
breaking the big ones. All right?
So they're trying very hard, but in the process they got further
and further away from understanding why the laws were
given to them in the first place.
And we see evidence of this by the time Jesus comes in the way
that they keep conflicting with him over their understanding of
the law. In Matthew 22, when Jesus was
questioned by the Pharisees about which was the greatest
commandment out of all the Hebrew Scriptures, he didn't
choose a single one from the 10 commandments.
Instead he highlighted the two that were framed around love.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your
soul and with all your mind. Now this is a a very well known
verse in Jewish culture because every child from an early age is
taught the scripture from Deuteronomy 6 called the Shema.
Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is 1 And
immediately after the Shema with just a little pause in between,
they would say what they call the Ahavta, which is this verse
and stresses the command to love this Lord your God with all your
heart and soul and strength. So it would have been a very
familiar commandment to all the fun is when Jesus comes and adds
a second that he says is like it or equal to it.
Love your neighbor as yourself. Now this one comes from
Leviticus. Now if any who's trying to read
Leviticus, just out of curiosity, it it can get a
little bogged down in it kind of because it's it's a lot.
It's a lot of little details and and laws that are given and the
chat, the verse that Jesus pulls out, at first glance, it seems
to be randomly sandwiched between commands about not
endangering your neighbour's life and rebuking your neighbor
instead of holding a grudge against them and silently,
secretly resenting them. And then other laws about
keeping God's decrees like don't mate two different kinds of
animals together and don't sow two different kinds of seeds in
the same field. All right.
So at first glance you might just skim over it, but it seems
to act as a kind of a summary or a conclusion because all the
verses that come before it are talking about how to be around
the people around you, how to be with your neighbor.
But look at how Jesus ties these two commandments that He
selected together in Matthew 22. In verse 40, He says all the law
and the prophets hang on these two commandments.
Now in Jewish thinking they they, they talked about the
sections of the Bible as the law, the prophets, the writings.
But the law and the prophets became a kind of shorthand to
refer to the entire Old Testament Scriptures.
And he's saying that all of the scriptures they have hang on
these two commandments. In other words, if you keep
these two by default, you should keep all the others.
But the laws were intended to be more than just a long list of
arbitrary rules for a people to be bound under.
They were meant to point to the character of God and to give
direction on His will for how to live best under Him.
By the time we get to the letter of Galatians, we see how God's
plan has reached its fulfilment in Christ.
And Christ now gives the gives the freedom from the law because
he has kept it perfectly where people fail.
But if Christ has set us free from the law, and we have the
Holy Spirit living in us, the heart of God, the same heart
that shaped those laws, should be shaping us, what we value and
how we live. And so while Paul is able to say
we are set free from the law, he also tells us to live according
to the Spirit. And he lists what this life and
according to the Spirit looks like.
In Galatians 522 to 23, the fruit of the Spirit is Lovejoy,
peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,
gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no
law. So when you have the Spirit
increasing to grow, increasingly growing these characteristics
within you, there's no need for a law to bind you.
So it's a little surprise then, that the first fruit of the
Spirit listed is love, because love covers it all.
It covers the way we should relate to God and it covers the
way we should interact with each other, which is why Paul is able
to say we are free to serve one another in love.
In that text in Romans 13 about leaving no debt outstanding
except the debt to love, he explains, Paul explains how how
this works. You see the commandments, you
shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not
covet, and whatever other command they may be are all
summed up in this one command. Love your neighbor as yourself,
because love does no harm to a neighbor.
Therefore, love is the fulfillment of the law.
Though, I warn you. In fact, you may find that
trying to live by love is harder than trying to live by the law.
Have you ever read the Sermon on the Mount?
It is one thing to not murder someone.
I don't know if anyone in this room can say they've ever
murdered someone. Hope not, but it is a completely
other thing to not call your brother fool in anger.
It is quite another thing to love the person who has just
riled you up, or to not look down on someone and treat them
as though they are less worthy than you.
It is much easier not to commit adultery than it is to not
objectify another person and look at them with lust.
It is much easier to stay in your own lame and not actively
harm someone else than it is to do good to a person who sets
themselves against you to love even your enemy.
Now, if you're feeling just a smidge discouraged at this
point, it's probably a good place for me to remind you that
love isn't something you should be able to do out of the
goodness of your heart. We will fail.
The standard that Jesus sets is impossibly high, impossible for
us, not for Him. Which is why at its heart, we
need to recognize that love is a fruit of the Spirit.
It is the work of the Spirit in our lives.
This kind of love comes from a heart that is committed to
Christ Jesus as Lord and is devoted to Him and to knowing
Him better. It is only as we keep in step
with the Spirit and we get to know God's heart more and more
in His Word and submit ourselves to that Word through prayer and
obedience, that we begin to see more fruit, more love in our
lives. God will grow the love in us if
we are depending on Him to do it.
Our part is to align our hearts and our desires with God's
through pursuing that relationship with Him.
Because .2 our love is rooted in God's love for us.
Now, if you want to talk about love, we can't ignore that
lovely letter that John writes. You'll find it right near the
end of your Bibles, just almost before Revelation.
I want to read from 1 John chapter 4, verse 7 to 21.
If you have already zoned out this early in the talk, I highly
recommend shaking yourself awake.
Because when we let God's words speak directly to us, that's the
best part, Dear friends, Let us love one another, for love comes
from God. Everyone who loves has been born
of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not
know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love
among us. He sent his one and only Son
into the world that we might live through him.
This is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and
sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one
another. No one has ever seen God, but if
we love one another, God lives in US and His love is made
complete in US. This is how we know that we live
in Him and He in US. He has given us His Spirit and
we have seen and testified that the Father has sent His Son to
be Saviour of the world. If anyone acknowledges that
Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God.
And so we know and rely on the love that God has for us.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in
God and God in them. This is how love is made
complete among us so that we will have confidence on the Day
of judgment in this world. We are like Jesus.
There is No Fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear
because fear has to do with punishment.
The one who fears is not made perfect in love.
We love because He first loved us.
Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a
liar. Whoever does not love their
brother and sister whom they have seen cannot love God, whom
they have not seen. And he has given us this
command. Anyone who loves God must also
love their brother and sister. Wow.
My daughter saw me preparing this and she actually stopped
and counted how many times the word love appears in there.
I think it was something like 26.
And there is just so much in here that I imagine if we went
home right now and we just committed ourselves to reading
this text again and again for the next few days, we could
still get something different out of it every single day.
But I'm just going to pull a few things out from it for you.
First thing, the source of love is God and His love.
Verse 7 makes that connection directly between love and its
source. Love comes from God.
But then John goes a step further and adds in verse 8,
whoever does not love does not know God because God is love.
Love is so central to God's very identity that John is saying if
you know God, you will know how to love.
And if you don't know how to love, perhaps there's grounds
for questioning if you really know God.
And just in case you question the statement, John goes on to
give the greatest example of God's love.
This is how God showed his love among us.
He sent his only Son into the world that we might live through
him. And another example, this is
love. Not that we love God, but that
he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our
sins. So he's getting more and more
specific. John 316 says For God so loved
the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever
believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life
For God. So loved God showed his love
among us. This is love God sent Jesus.
We sang about Jesus so, so many times today.
This isn't is God's love. God gave his Son to die for us,
for you and me to die as that sacrifice needed to atone for
our sins. And all the times we have failed
to love God and failed to love our neighbors, He paid the price
for your sins and mine to give eternal life as a gift to
everyone who believes This is love.
Which is why I think the heroes in the stories we enjoy, whether
in books or on screens, or the heroes we admire in real life,
are often those who give of themselves sacrificially, who
risk it all to save others. Because I believe on some level
it resonates with us as an echo of the truth.
The truth about what love is. The kind of love that God
demonstrates for us. This is the kind of love our
hearts seem to intuitively long for.
We're craving for that love that gives itself up for us.
And that's exactly the kind of love that God himself shows in
sending Jesus as the sacrifice for our sins .2 Our love flows
from his love for us. So John goes on to explain that
because we experienced this love of God, the natural result
should be that we love each other.
He says since God so lived loved us, we ought to love one
another. Because God loved us this much.
Because God loved us in this way, we also should love one
another. And he goes on to say that if we
love one another, God lives in US and his love is made complete
in US. So our love for one another is
evidence of God living in us. Our love is evidence of the
Spirit at work in US. And now we're back at .1.
That love is the fruit of the Spirit.
Of course some would say that. Anyone can love.
You don't need to be a Christian.
We don't have exclusive rights on the word.
You will hear that out there. But perhaps the real test is,
can we love the people who are hard to love?
You see, Jesus tells us to love our enemies.
Let me give you a beautiful example of this love for enemy.
Corrie, 10 Boom, is a girl who survived being sent to a
concentration camp with her family after they had hidden the
Jews from the Nazis in World War 2.
And when she got out of the concentration camp, she created
a kind of retreat center where people who had been in
concentration camps could come and recover and recuperate.
And she travelled around telling about God's love as well, and
she tells the story about her experience of this love that
comes from God. She had been speaking on
forgiveness in a church in Munich when a man approached her
after the service, and she recognized him instantly as one
of the s s jailers, A cruel man who had tormented her and her
sister Betsy in the concentration camp.
And here he was, standing in front of her, asking her if she
could forgive him His hand. I'll put it in her words, what
she says about that moment. His hand was thrust out to shake
mine. And I, who had preached so often
to the people in Blumenthal about the need to forgive, kept
my hand at my side. Even as the angry, vengeful
thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin in them.
Jesus Christ had died for this man.
Was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me
and help me to forgive him. I tried to smile and I I
struggled to raise my hand, but I could not.
I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or
charity. And so again I breathed a silent
prayer and I prayed, Jesus forgive me, I cannot forgive
him. Give me your forgiveness.
As I took his hand, the most incredible thing happened.
From my shoulder, along my arm, and through my hand a current
seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a
love for the stranger that almost overwhelmed me.
And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more
than on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on
His. When he tells us to love our
enemies, he gives us along with the command, the love itself.
So in this moment, Corey experienced the kind of love
that comes only from knowing God.
On her own, she couldn't do it. And we'd say she's justified,
completely justified when you've been through that.
But I think she's a great example of someone who did know
and rely on that love that God has for us.
And as a result, she experienced the love that was beyond her own
ability. And so we too should make every
effort to know and rely on that love that God has for us.
And in doing this, we'll begin to see it becoming complete in
US. The 17th.
This is how love is made complete among us so that we
will have confidence on the day of judgment in this world.
We are like Jesus. The goal of God's love being
completed in US is we become more and more like Christ.
God's love begins to be seen in US and through us as we begin
more and more to resemble Him. And thirdly, I want to prove our
point out that love for God is proved by your love for others.
OK, so the source of our love is God.
Our love flows from His love. The last thing I want to draw
from the passage is that our love proves our love for Him.
So I started this morning talking about people who've been
hurt by the church. The reality is that what often
hurts them is the hypocrisy of people who claim to love God,
but their actions don't seem to line up with it.
Now, I'm not saying that all of us will love perfectly on every
occasion and that we'll never hurt someone that way, because
we're all works in progress and God doesn't mature us instantly
on the day that we choose to follow Him.
Growing in faith and obedience takes time, but I don't want to
let us off the hook too quickly because these are pretty strong
words. Here in verse 20, whoever claims
to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar.
For whoever does not love their brother and sister whom they
have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.
So if you claim to love God and you don't love someone in the
church, you are a liar. He's calling you on that.
He's calling me on that. That's a big statement.
Now, brother and sister sounds like it's talking within the
church in particular. But let's remember that you
might have brothers and sisters outside of this particular body
of the church that we don't recognize because we don't know
the hearts of every person we meet.
And if we want to go to picking and choosing and limiting who we
should love, we are sounding dangerously like that expert in
the law who stood up to test Jesus and asked who is my
neighbor and was answered with the story of the Good Samaritan.
He was asking relating to this command of love, your neighbor
as yourself who he should love. And Jesus answer, given the
cultural context was shocking. Not who you should love, but be
the one who loves the person that everyone else avoids.
Be the one who is willing to be inconvenienced in order to help
someone in need. Be the one who is willing to
invest your resources in the well-being of a perfect
stranger. This is what loving the other
should look like. As John points out in his
letter, if you can't even love a person you can see right in
front of you, how can you love God who you can't see?
And let's not forget that love is not just a feeling, because
we won't always feel good feelings and desires for
everyone we can see. It's a choice, it's an action.
It's the Samaritan stopping binding up the wounds of the
injured man, carrying him on his donkey, and paying the innkeeper
to care for his needs. It's Corrie 10 Boom, making a
choice to forgive someone that she had good reason to hate.
It is stopping to talk to a person in the street that
everyone is rushing past. It is staying late to help
someone fix the car. It is budgeting extra to buy
food for people who might be struggling.
There are so many ways to love others, but it's always a
choice. It's that costly love for others
that proves that we love God. And on that note, I want to move
into my final point. We've looked at how love is a
fruit of the Spirit, how our love is rooted in God's love.
And finally, we're going to try and get a little bit more
practical and look more closely at what love looks like.
Now, obviously there is no exhaustive list.
God's Word is full of examples of what love looks like.
But Paul did put together a rather beautiful and I think
challenging text in his first letter to the Corinthian church
that lists some of the characteristics of love.
I don't want to spend too much time here, but I might.
But I'm going to 1st read directly from God's words.
So if you've dozed off yet, now's another good time to focus
so that you can see if God brings in to your mind and your
heart any of the qualities in this list that maybe he wants to
work on in you. I'm reading from 1 Corinthians
13 from verse 4 if you want to follow in your Bibles.
Love is patient. Love is kind.
It does not envy, it does not boast.
It is not proud. It does not dishonour others.
It is not self seeking. It is not easily angered.
It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil,
but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always
trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails. So Paul is talking here in the
context of the various spiritual gifts in the church, and his
conclusion there is that without love, all those gifts are
meaningless. Love is the foundation.
It gives meaning and purpose to everything else we do.
But let's look more closely at the part where he tells us what
love looks like. Love is patient.
Love is kind. I'm sure we can all say we have
moments where we're we're patient, we're kind.
How patient and kind are you when your child is asking you
for the 20th time that day for the thing you've already said no
to every time before? Is it still there?
Or how easy is it to act in love when you're driving home after a
long day and someone carelessly cuts in front of you on the
highway? Yes, they won't hear what you're
going, what you say to them, but everyone else sitting in the car
will. Or how easy is it to act in love
when you're finished, you're rushing to finish your shopping
and get home, and someone stops you on your way across the
parking lot to ask for some money.
I'm not saying we should always have money on hand every time
someone asks, but do we answer with patience?
With kindness in our words? What do we act with impatience
and frustration? Do we recognize in every person
who interrupts our day that there is someone made in the
image of God? Love handles interruptions with
patience and treats the people we come across kindly.
Love does not envy. It does not boast.
It is not proud. Now these would easily fall
under what our day and time might call acceptable sins
because we live in a culture where envy is manufactured for
the purpose of marketing and pride and boasting are glorified
as part of finding and celebrating our true selves.
Now I'm not saying we should all go around hating ourselves.
I know how hard a low self esteem can break you down.
But what Paul says in Galatians 64 helps.
It says that each one of us should test their own actions.
They can take pride in themselves alone without
comparing themselves to someone else.
The comparison game is where the where the problems start, when
we start looking down on someone else to make ourselves feel
good. There's a story that Jesus tells
about a man, a Pharisee I think, who was standing in the in the
courts of the temple praying Lord, thank you that I am not a
Sinner like that man over there. That's the kind of pride that we
are warned against, seeing ourselves as better than others.
But also, when the focus is all on me, I can find it hard to
care about you, to celebrate your achievements.
Or here's a challenge. How easy is it to sacrifice for
someone else when it means that my goals might suffer?
I might not be able to keep up with the Jones, as if I can't
get this thing for myself. But here's someone God has put
in my path who needs what I have, right?
How easy is it to focus on the concerns of others rather than
to talk about yourself and your own perspective all the time?
It's hard. There's that famous saying
though about humility. And since love is not proud, I
think it's fair to say it about love too.
It's not about thinking less of yourself, but thinking of
yourself less. Love does not dishonor others.
It doesn't treat anyone like they are a lower class of person
than yourself. Instead, love treats everyone.
Whatever age, whatever race, whatever social status, whether
it's your boss or whether it's the person behind the till, when
you've been waiting for hours in the queue at Home Affairs or
whether it's some stranger on the street.
We have to treat them all with the same level of respect and
honour that we would like to receive.
It doesn't matter if the person is rude to you.
It doesn't matter if you're convinced that you are right and
they are wrong. Love still honors that person
standing in front of you. Love is not self seeking.
When we are shaped by love, we are not looking to put ourselves
and our desires first. A self seeking person isn't
concerned about who gets trampled along the way as long
as they get what they want. But love says, wait, who's
around me that I can serve, Who's here today that I can
encourage, Who is around me that I can show love to?
Love is not easily angered. I'm sure some people struggle
with this one too, especially if you have young kids.
But love holds its temper in check.
Love does not burst out in anger, burning everything in its
path. Love is not ruled by fiery
emotions, but couples its feelings with wisdom and
self-control. But it's also more than that.
It's about how we see offence. If we're looking at the world
and other people as if they are here to serve us and our
desires, it's easy to see anything that gets in the way as
an offence to us. The driver cut me off.
It makes me angry the restaurant won't give me what I asked for.
I'm getting angry that person didn't do what I asked them to
do. I am angry.
But love would rather get curious instead, recognizing we
don't have the full picture of what's going on in the lives of
people around us. And love fills the gaps with
grace. That driver who cut me off?
Maybe they were in a hurry or distracted because of pressures
that someone else is putting on them.
That restaurant that wouldn't give me what I ordered.
Maybe there was a problem with the supplier, but I'm sure
they're doing the best they can. The person who didn't do the
thing I asked them to do, is it possible that maybe they have a
good reason why they couldn't get around to it?
Anger jumps in when we feel wronged, but love recognizes
that the world is not black and white like that and so it
doesn't jump straight to offence, but waits For more
information and fills the gaps with grace.
Love keeps no record of wrongs. I think most of us would agree
that making a list of all the bad things another person has
done to you in the past is not a helpful way of building a
relationship. Jesus tells us to forgive. 70 *
7. Don't put a limit on your mercy
towards others. Love doesn't judge your present
actions in light of your past failures.
Love understands the power of God's grace because it's
experienced it. Love continues to hope for the
best in another. Love does not delight in evil,
but rejoices in truth. So here we have one that some
people might not like to hear. But love is discerning.
It isn't blind acceptance. It doesn't ignore sin.
It doesn't pretend everything is OK as long as you're sincere.
Love really wants what is best for others.
This is why parents put boundaries in place even if the
children don't understand or appreciate them.
So the child in their immaturity may lash out and say you don't
love me, but the parent continues to do what they
believe is in the best interests of their child, even when it
hurts. When a friend chooses a path
that leads to destruction, Love rebukes.
Love calls that person back to the truth.
Paul says in Galatians 6. When someone is caught in a sin,
you who live by the Spirit should restore that person
gently. Love says I care about you too
much to let you continue down that path.
Love doesn't give approval to sin.
Love always protects. It doesn't look down on weakness
or vulnerability. Instead, love actively works
towards the safety of others. Love guards against the harm of
the people around you. Love cares about the weak.
Love always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Now I'm just going to say up front, I don't think love always
trusts is a blanket statement that you should always trust
your partner, for instance, because coming into a
relationship like that, it opens the door to the possibility of
being manipulated and abused, hurt by someone else's sin.
Even Jesus didn't entrust himself to people because he
knew people. He understood our hearts.
He understood our nature. But I think the trust here is
directed very specifically towards God.
We can trust God. We can trust God for the good of
the person we are loving. We can trust God to help that
person, but we shouldn't put our trust in that person
necessarily. You see, we've already seen that
our love is rooted in God's love to us, and our love flows out of
his love. So it's not a stretch to believe
that the object of our trust, which is another word for faith
or belief, is God. God is the one who is
trustworthy, and love is rooted in faith.
Back in the context of Galatians when we see Paul was talking
about the false teachers insisting on circumcision.
He says in chapter 6, verse 6. For in Christ neither
circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value.
But here's the important thing. The only thing that counts is
faith expressing itself in love. So the trusting is trusting God.
Love flows from faith in what Christ has done for us, and it
is faith that allows us to trust God for the needs of the people
we care about. It is this faith that fuels our
hope for the best for those people around us, and it is this
faith that enables us to persevere even when it is
hardest to keep loving. It is this love that is able to
endure the hardships and do the hard work that it takes to serve
one another in love. And it is this kind of love,
this patient, kind, humble, self controlled, self giving,
hopeful, persevering kind of love that shines brightest in a
world where passion and romance and tolerance are confused as
the meaning of love. So what does love look like for
us? Now, I've said a lot of things
about love, and in some ways I feel like I've barely scratched
the surface because God is love and His Word is all about Him
and full of truth about His love and how He wants us to live.
But I want to draw, try to draw just a few practical ideas for
us moving forward. First, I think we need to make a
point of continuously returning to the source.
Maybe you've heard it said that you can't love from an empty
cup. Well, today we've spoken a lot
about how our love comes from the Holy Spirit living in US and
from God, and that God and His love is the source of our love.
So we know where to go to get our cups filled up to
overflowing, right? We need to keep going back to
God. Also, if you happen to be
sitting here today and you realize that maybe you haven't
personally experienced or accepted that gift of God's love
for you, that's where you need to start.
You can't go out there and try to love better than that without
Him. You need to come to Him, ask Him
to forgive you and put your trust in Jesus and what He did
for you on that cross in Calvary.
And if you have any questions about a relationship with Him
and what does that look like, talk to someone and start that
journey towards Him because He promises to be found by any that
seek Him. But if we want to get better at
loving and as people who have experienced God's love in our
lives, we should want that. We need to keep going back to
Him in faith, living our daily lives in dependence on Him,
keeping in step with the Spirit, pursuing the relationship that
God called us into, walking daily by faith.
Because as we learn to walk in dependence on Him, knowing and
relying on His love, we will grow in that love and find
ourselves able to love more the people around us and maybe even
maybe especially those that God has placed around you that are
hard to love. Second, to quote Paul in
Galatians 610, he says, therefore, as we have
opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially those who
belong to the family of believers.
We need to live according to the Spirit.
And that looks like loving our neighbors.
We, we kind of should have that part by now looks like doing
good to all people, not just those who are like us, but all
people. But Paul adds here, especially
to those who belong to the family of believers, when we
accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we're brought into a
family. And within this family, we need
to be making that effort to love each other, to bear one
another's burdens, to forgive one another, to be patient with
one another. All the one another's that you
find in God's Word, you need to practice here.
This is where we get to learn and practice love.
See, love is a key trait in our family.
It shows the resemblance to God. It's something we inherit from
our Father. But like children in any family,
it's also learned. It's here in the household of
God that we first get to practice what we are learning
before we live it out in the world outside.
But just in case you were still feeling discouraged because of
how hard it is to love like Jesus does, I want to conclude
with two quotes from Mother Teresa who is a person that is
recognized by both Christians and non believers alike as
someone who embodied love. Do not think that love, in order
to be genuine, has to be extraordinary.
What we need is love without getting tired.
Be faithful in the small things because it is in them that your
strength lies. The small things.
Step out in faith and obedience to the Spirit's prompting, and
God will grow the love. And the second quote I want to
share because it beautifully captures the nature of a loving
community. Also, Mother Teresa, I can do
things you cannot. You can do things I cannot.
Together we can do great things. So let us try to be a space
where love is shared in common ground.
Weinberg let U.S. Open up enough to the people
around us that we actually can share our needs and carry each
other's burdens. A good place where this can
happen is community groups or talking with someone in the
eldership team. But we should all be striving to
be a safe space where people know they can be protected and
not hurt if they are vulnerable with us.
Let us strive to be a community where no one is missed and no
one walks away feeling uncared for.
Let us ask the questions of ourselves and prayerfully
consider the ways that we personally are being called to
serve one another in love. Let us each find a place where
we can love as God has loved us, and together God will do great
things through US. Let us pray.
Father God, thank you that you are love.
We praise you for who you are and we are humbled by the way
that you loved us even when we were unworthy of your love.
Please help us to truly know and rely on your love and grow in us
by your spirit, the kind of love that will show others what you
were like. Help us to love each other well.
In Jesus name we pray, Amen.