Love Is The Mission

Love is the mission - a sermon by Adrian Warnock

Audio available at :-

http://www.adrian.warnock.info/2005/08/love-is-our-mission-sermon-by-adrian.htm

Its such a priviledge standing up here being overwhelmed by your love, by Gods love.

Many people will never know the love we all feel in this place.

Many of us know what it is to be unloved

Many go thru life only knowing hate

Some of us, like me, didn’t have too many friends at school.

Some of us, like me were bullied.

Some of us wept into our pillows and cried out in desperation "Somebody love me"

Even some of you who would never let it show outside are living lives of quiet desperation as you feel unloved.

We need acceptance. We need care We need love. But the thing is we dont know what love is. We dont always realise love is right here reaching out to us.

Love is here Love is in this place.

This morning, if youre looking for love you came to the right place.

But will you know it when it hits you in the face?

Did you realise you walked thru a wall of love as you walked into this cinema today.

Did you feel the love? Did somebody hug you? Did somebody greet you?

Did somebody ask you how you are?

Did some of you live all week for this?

Did some of you guests go your whole life to feel so much love in one place?

Love is in this place because God loves jubilee

VISITORS SAY-

“Feel like I’m coming home"

"Its a family"

Sometimes we dont recognise it when people are trying to love us- most parents love their kids. They just dont always FEEL love, and because they think love is feeling they dont know how to show their love to their kids.

Love can still be there when you are angry with someone. Love is the choice you make to forgive. Love is the faithfulness. Love is what we give.

What is love?

One of the biggest errors of our time is the belief that love is primarily

an emotion- reflected in dictionary

Love is about so much more than that- it is a choice that values something or someone other than ourselves at least as highly as ourselves or preferably more so.

It is a decision to care for and be kind to another come what may.

"love impels the one loving to deny self for the benefit of the one loved"

People would die for the love of their country, because they believe their country was more important than them. Every time we make a choice to put ourselves out for another we demonstrate love.

Where does it come from?

1 Jn 3.16 By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we

ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.

1 Jn 4:7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves

has been born of God and knows God. 8Anyone who does not love does not

know God, because God is love. 9In this the love of God was made manifest

among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live

through him. 10In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he

loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11Beloved,

if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12No one has ever

seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is

perfected in us.13By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. 14And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent

his Son to be the Savior of the world. 15Whoever confesses that Jesus is

the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. 16So we have come to

know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever

abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. 17By this is love

perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment,

because as he is so also are we in this world. 18There is no fear in love,

but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and

whoever fears has not been perfected in love. 19We love because he first

loved us. (1 Jn 4)

True love is seen in Jesus death- it is the definition- laying down our lives- makes cooking a meal for a new family seem small doesn’t it? Is it so hart to call up someone? To visit them? To spend some of our precious time on them.