Love The Right Things

Loving the Right Things

I Cor. 13:1-13

Introduction:

There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and risks of love is Hell”-C.S. Lewis (Four Loves)

Love can hurt, especially when the wrong things are loved or counted on to provide peace, comfort and happiness. When we count on the wrong things to love and meet certain requirements in our lives we can count on getting hurt. Many love and invest in things like: money, toxic relationships, popularity, health, selfish motives, even things like weather and food. However, when we love and invest in “things” like these, we realize, usually sooner than later, that these “things” always change and dissipate. And if we have loved and invested in these “things”, when they change or dissipate, so do we.

What we need is to love things that are based on the Word of God and the God of the Word. And while “things” may come and go, our Lord and His Word “endureth forever”, hence we can find power, assurance, safety and security in loving the right things.

Things like:

Our Life-

If anyone ought to enjoy their life and the place that God has given for them, it should be the born-again, blood bought, redeemed believer! Tragic that so many “Christians” are running around this world miserable, defeated, going from paycheck to paycheck and simply “surviving”. King Solomon wrote, “There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour. This also I saw, that it was from the hand of God.” –Ecc. 2:24 and “Behold that which I have seen: it is good and comely for one to eat and to drink, and to enjoy the good of all his labour that he taketh under the sun all the days of his life, which God giveth him: for it is his portion.” –Ecc. 5:18

What is Solomon talking about loving and enjoying?

How about our:

• Country: I love America! I make no apologies for my love for this country and believe still, even with all of her faults, America is still the greatest nation in the world. I love America for the Christian principles on which she was founded. Never buy into the liberal, toxic, anti-Christian propaganda spread by ungodly organizations such as the ACLU that our founders were deists, atheists and agnostics. Oh no! America was indeed founded by bible-believing Christians and based on Christian principles.

When they founded this country, the Founding Fathers envisioned a government that would promote and encourage Christianity. All but two of the first 108 universities founded in America were Christian. This includes the first, Harvard, where the student handbook listed this as Rule #1: “Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, John 17:3; and therefore to lay Jesus Christ as the only foundation for our children to follow the moral principles of the Ten Commandments."

In 1777. Continental Congress voted to spend $300,000 to purchase bibles which were to be distributed throughout the 13 colonies! And in 1782, the United States Congress declared, “The Congress of the United States recommends and approves the Holy Bible for use in ALL schools.”

And while we have come quite far from this direction, we still have many freedoms that other countries do not have. We are able to worship our Lord, on His day, in public. We are able to purchase and own as many Bibles as we desire. We are able to stand on the street corner and preach the gospel of Jesus Christ without fear of government intervention and physical persecution. Oh we may be looked at in a funny way when we bow our heads at Olive Garden. We may be laughed at when we bring our Bible out for lunch time devotions. We may even be ridiculed, like Tim Tebow, for our outward love for our Lord. But, we have religious freedoms in America that are found nowhere else in the world. And we are still the largest missionary sending country in the world. And because of these things, I LOVE MY COUNTRY!