Do Everything In Love: Despite The Pain!

Do Everything in Love: Despite the pain! Kelly Durant 2-21-10

1 Cor 16:14

14 Do everything in love.

Not often do I preach with a verse that has only 4 words, but actually this verse says it all? Recall we are continuing with what does love imply that we do? God does everything in love…do you?

Consider one of many situations where there is tough love: A parent takes his child to the clinic to get a shot so he will not catch a disease. The child in confusion feeling the needle go in thinks his parent is treating him mean.

A brother takes his friend to the rehab center even though he will be deathly sick without the drugs or alcohol he has been using. This is love with pain, sometimes as humans we only focus on the pain but do not understand the love behind the pain, right?

Here in the Corps and in all churches, some of you when you are corrected focus only on the pain and your feelings, and you do not understand the love behind it.

Love sometimes includes pain, but if it is God’s love, it comes from the sincere good intentions of the heart and the effect is good fruit & healing! But sometimes as humans we fail and to do all things “ in love”. 14 Do everything in love. It is extremely hard to do! Can you? Do you? It is sad when we see sometimes some things not done in love and that makes Regina and I, and obviously the Lord, feels pain!

Ist Type of Pain including love: A loving action that initially is painful to the recipient, but the outcome is a positive, life saving action.

So why do we as humans often not understand the pain that seems to accompany love?

You and I chose to love God as children with faith, and we have confirmed in our spirits that God gave Jesus to us in love to save as many souls as would come to Him. Initially we did not understand the pain Jesus had to endure, but accepting Jesus pain, death, and resurrection is like the child getting the immunization shot trusting that despite the pain, the Father taking him to the clinic knows what is best.

Actually, God being pure love, synonymous to holiness, does not include pain in Himself as what He overtly shares. He is a just God that does require justice for evil actions, which implies punishment, which in consequences is pain. I hate pain and you? God felt pain many times. With man’s disobedience from the beginning we see this:

Gen 6:6

The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain.

We conclude that pain is a product of man’s disobedient actions, or sin and even God gets affected by it!!

2nd Type of Pain: The response to disobedience, a correcting love.

Pain originated from disobedience. Disobedience produced the first pain of shame and sorrow when Adam and Eve were expulsed from the Garden of Eden. The first opening of the eyes was to the fact that they were ashamed to be naked, or no longer in the holiness of God, and the consequence after that was a horrible feeling of fear of God’s presence, knowing He would punish them, then the final effect was death for being contaminated with evil.

Sin brings pain in which ways? Did you see the process which repeats over and over: shame, fear, then death! These are the results of not being in obedience to God’s love! So pain we actually inherited from Adam and Eve but we ourselves keep repeating it, but the healing love we gained from Jesus love! His correcting love breaks our hearts and takes away our shame, fear, and death and replaces it with His holiness, boldness and life! Jesus is the lamb that takes away the sin and pain and puts us back into obedience and life!

1 Cor 15:21-22

21 For since by man came death, by man (Jesus) came also the resurrection of the dead.

22 For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

What is pain exactly according to the dictionary? Pain:” The condition or fact of suffering or anguish especially mental, as opposed to pleasure; torment; distress; sadness; grief; solicitude; disquietude.

Pain of all sorts comes to all of us in this life, to some younger in their life than others, to some more severe than others, and for some more physical than mental.

But God is love and love heals pain! Pain was not in God’s original plans. God created a heaven on earth, but pain as it turns out is sort of a control mechanism to keep us in state that reminds us we are weak and need Him and His Holy Spirit to bring us comfort! Pain in our body should prevent us from doing destructive things to it! Pain makes us hate the Satan who introduced it to the world!