A Startling Essence Series

A Taste of Love

A Bold Flavor – November 6

The Supremacy of Love

Words – Love = Noise

Knowledge – Love = Nothing

Sacrifice – Love = Loss

Last week we spoke of the “Supremacy of love”. Without love words are noise, wisdom and knowledge are nothing and sacrifice is loss.

It is Love that fills the void in life and makes us whole for one simple and powerful reason – God is love and we are made in his image.

A Taste of Love

A Startling Essence – November 13

The Nature of Love

Did you enjoy your jelly bellies? Did some of the flavors catch you by surprise? Did you pick out one expecting one flavor and getting another?

Today we speak of the nature of love which is the startling essence of humanity.

This is what happens when you first discover love. You are trundling along through life looking in all the bright corridors, checking al the dark corners, and popping open the closed doors searching for what ever it is that gives you the warmth, peace, and satisfaction in your soul – kind of like a hot bowl of soup on a cold snowy day. And when you find it – it catches you by surprise.

Why? Because so few people really understand the nature of love. We fall in love like we fall into a ditch, or we fall out of love like we fall out of a tree.

Tragically for many, love is a throwaway word. It has become cheap and tawdry. For some it is a euphemism for sex. It is used by many to describe their affinity for ice cream. For others it is simply a way to say that they really, really, really like someone – a lot.

You can go to the movies every day of the week and see chick flicks – one right after another and they’ll teach you that love is accidental, instantaneous, everlasting, and never changes diapers.

You can go to the big box store and buy stacks of CD’s with singers of every type of music recording what love had done to them, in them and for them.

You can download music of every variety into your ipod and be surrounded 24/7 with songs about love.

Some are Big Band musicians, some are mellow crooners, some are rock and roll, some are acid rock, some are rap and some are country - far too many are country…

Watch this and you’ll see what I mean… (Video Burl Chesnut – “Picking on Love” – 1:04, SermonSpice.com

Love…

All of this illustrates the message of 1 Corinthians 13. Love doesn’t just happen to people. Love comes from God and changes people.

Love is none of these things that our books, movies, and music describe because love is not a noun. Love is a verb. It involves the practice of a decision and a way of living – and when you experience love – it is startling.

1 Corinthians 13:4-7 contains the best description of the nature of love found anywhere in literature. Let’s read it…

Love…

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

1 Corinthians 13:4-7

The Nature of Love

Love is patient

Patient means “someone who is able to avenge himself yet refrains from doing so.” It also carries with it the idea of long suffering. Patience puts up with someone else’s shortcomings.

Some people are “EGR’s” (Extra Grace Required). They just demand more grace from us. This is patience.

Let me tell you about a man named Jack. He was a believer in the Lake Superior Christian Church where I ministered in Marquette. Jack had “Turrets’ Syndrome” and often couldn’t control his speech. He was unable to stop himself from blurting out curse words, rude language, and language that would make a pirate blush – and sometimes he would do it in church.

Jack got a job delivering birthday balloons and singing Happy Birthday. Like stutterers, victims of turret’s can sing fine because it is a different part of the brain. Anyway, I made an appointment to meet him for lunch at the Marquette Big Boy at noon when it was filled with construction workers, lumberjacks and steel miners. In walks Jack wearing a black tuxedo trimmed out in pink. He sits down opposite from me and for the next hour blurts out loudly and repeatedly – sometimes 8 or ten times in a minute – one word. The word for the day was “homosexual.” This was 25 years ago and in Marquette, in the Big Boy, with enough flannel shirts to circle the globe, if you tied the sleeves together, an hour with a guy in a pink trimmed tuxedo calling you a homosexual in a loud voice makes for a long, long lunch.