Love: The Reason It's Most Important

Love: The Reason It’s Most Important

Scripture: I Cor. 13; Mark 12:30-31; 1 Peter 4:8; 1 John 4:16-19

Introduction

Do you know that the heart is the first functional organ to develop in a fetus and beats spontaneously by week 4 of development? Do you also know that the heart is more than just the vessel that sends oxygenated blood throughout the body? We serve a God of love and our God of love created us to love and to receive love. In doing so He gave us an organ which not only is necessary for us to live, it is essential to our ability to give and experience love in this world.

“Psychologists once maintained that emotions were purely mental expressions generated by the brain alone. It is now known that this is not true. Emotions have as much to do with the heart and body as they do with the brain. The heart plays a particularly important role in our emotional experience. The Institute of HeartMath, a research center dedicated to the study of the heart and physiology of emotions, has found that the heart sends more information to the brain than the brain sends to the heart as it relates to our emotions. When we experience feelings like anger, frustration, anxiety and insecurity our heart rhythm patterns become more erratic. These erratic patterns are sent to the emotional centers in the brain which recognizes it as negative or stressful feelings and thus creates the actual feelings we experience in the heart area and the body. Likewise, research has shown that when we experience heart-felt emotions like love, care, appreciation and compassion, the heart produces a very different rhythm. In this case, it is a smooth pattern that looks like gently rolling hills. This lets the brain know that the heart feels good and often creates a gentle warm feeling in the area of the heart.” (Adapted from the article “Does your heart sense your emotional state?”) So what am I saying? The heart (our physical organ) does have a role in our emotions, our feelings and ability to give and experience love. I want you to keep this in mind as you listen to this message.

Last week I shared with you why love was the reason for Christmas. As I shared with you on last Sunday, the title of my message this morning is “Love: The Reason It’s Most Important.” As you recall from last week, Paul told the Church at Corinth, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profits me nothing.…….And now abides faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:1-3, 13) Faith, hope and love, these three abides but the greatest of them is love. Why did Paul say that love was greater than faith and hope? We will take a closer look at this question in this message.

We celebrated Christmas last week and many of you received gifts that you were longing for and maybe a few that you weren’t. As I shared on last Sunday, Christmas exists because of love. Jesus came to earth to save mankind because of love. When we celebrate Christmas, the birth of Christ, we celebrate love. Several years ago I watched a talk show where the host had three guests, an atheist, a Jewish rabbi and a Catholic priest. The host was also Catholic. The focus of the conversation was why “religious” people believe in God and why the atheist do not. They also discussed the obvious fact that there is a division among those who believed in God but reject the belief in Christ. Both the rabbi and the priest could not believe that the atheist could teach her children that all that they were existed within them now and that there was no higher power than them. Her response to them was that the so-called “religious” people cannot agree with one another. The first place she went was Christ. She said to the priest and the rabbi that one of them must be wrong since one believed in Christ and the other did not. The rabbi responded by saying that both believed in God and that was more important. He took it a step further and said that he believed that Christ was truly the Messiah for the Gentiles, but he did not think that Christ was God’s Son. I did not hear all of the conversation, but the prevailing thought of the atheist was that if the religious people could not agree then how could she agree with and/or believe either group. While it was easy to see the differences between Christians and Jews, it is much harder to explain the differences between Christians, which is a point that the atheist quickly pointed out.