Above All, Love Each Other Series

I have a feeling that isn’t the best approach to dealing with debt, but that could be a whole other sermon. The bottom line is this: While we would all like to be debt free we all nonetheless owe a debt of love that will never be paid off or paid in full.

“Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another…” (Romans 13:8a).

Why do we have this perpetual debt of love? We owe this love because of the lavish love, which Jesus Christ poured out for us. It is a level of love that we will never pay back and the fact of the matter is that Christ doesn’t want us to even try to pay it back. He wants us to pass it on instead. So we need to love one another because our love debt will never be paid off.

3. LOVING ONE ANOTHER IS A RESULT OF SALVATION.

One of the results of becoming a Christian is that you will love others.

“…love one another deeply, from the heart. For you have been born again … through the living and enduring word of God” (1 Peter 1:22-23).

Peter says that we should love one another deeply – from the heart. Why? We should do so because we have been born again. That fact that we have been born again or spiritually reborn means that we now have the power or ability to love others deeply, from the heart.

This raises the question: Does this mean that you can’t love others if you aren’t a Christian? Well, I don’t think I would go that far. I’m certainly not going to say that a nonchristian woman, for example, doesn’t love her children. What we have as Christians is the power of the Holy Spirit enabling us to love our enemies and to love the unlovable. Jesus once asked the question: What good does it do you if you only love those who love you? Even the Pharisees do that! Through the experience of salvation we have gained, among other things, the power to love others, even those who don’t love us.

4. LOVING ONE ANOTHER MAKES YOU RECOGNIZABLE AS A CHRISTIAN.

Opal Whetset, a Christian author, was riding on a bus one night. It was a Greyhound bus traveling from Flagstaff, Arizona to Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was a cold February night, and the bus stopped in a little Native American community. A young Native American Indian teenager got on the bus and sat down behind her. Maybe it was the warmth of the bus or the rocking motion, but she could tell that by his breathing he soon fell asleep. Sometime later he awakened and ran down the aisle and asked about a certain stop where he was supposed to get off.

The driver snapped back and said, “We passed that stop a long time ago. Why didn’t you get off then?”

The boy went back to his seat. She could tell he was anxious and upset. Immediately he walked back to the driver and said, “Will you stop the bus and let me get off and walk back to where I was supposed to get off?”

The bus driver said, “No, it’s too cold and it’s too far. You’d freeze. You’ve got to ride the bus all the way into Albuquerque, then catch another bus back to your stop.”

The boy sat down in his seat behind Opal, and she could tell he was very upset. So she turned around to this young man she had never met before and said, “Are you afraid? Is there anything I can do to help?”