The Ache To Love:
Luke 15:11-32 August 21, SDC Sunday 2005
Intro:
What is worth living your life for?
I believe that deep within each of us lies a heartache. Down in the deep places, the places we often avoid and try to hide, the places we try to avoid. The places we are afraid of. There is an ache there, which we think will unravel us if we entertain it. We think it will undo us, embarrass us, destroy us. It is like a closet buried deep in the basement, which we know is full of garbage and clutter and stuff we didn’t want to look at and so we shut it away, locked the door, and tried to forget about it. But it doesn’t work – we always know it is there, we know we will have to deal with it, and we even recognize the rotting, revolting smell is coming from deep within and needs to be cleaned out.
But in fact, the opposite is true. Confronting that ache liberates us, empowers us, puts us together, takes the meandering, purposeless, meaningless wandering of our lives and harnesses it to significance.
At the root of it, that ache is the ache to love. Note this: not the ache to be loved, but rather the ache to love. Can you imagine a world where you could love fully? Unashamably?? Without reservation???
Let me tell you an old story.
Luke 15:11-32 (NLT)
"A man had two sons. 12The younger son told his father, `I want my share of your estate now, instead of waiting until you die.’ So his father agreed to divide his wealth between his sons.
13"A few days later this younger son packed all his belongings and took a trip to a distant land, and there he wasted all his money on wild living. 14About the time his money ran out, a great famine swept over the land, and he began to starve. 15He persuaded a local farmer to hire him to feed his pigs. 16The boy became so hungry that even the pods he was feeding the pigs looked good to him. But no one gave him anything.
17"When he finally came to his senses, he said to himself, `At home even the hired men have food enough to spare, and here I am, dying of hunger! 18I will go home to my father and say, "Father, I have sinned against both heaven and you, 19and I am no longer worthy of being called your son. Please take me on as a hired man." ’
20"So he returned home to his father. And while he was still a long distance away, his father saw him coming. Filled with love and compassion, he ran to his son, embraced him, and kissed him. 21His son said to him, `Father, I have sinned against both heaven and you, and I am no longer worthy of being called your son.[b]’
22"But his father said to the servants, `Quick! Bring the finest robe in the house and put it on him. Get a ring for his finger, and sandals for his feet. 23And kill the calf we have been fattening in the pen. We must celebrate with a feast, 24for this son of mine was dead and has now returned to life. He was lost, but now he is found.’ So the party began.
25"Meanwhile, the older son was in the fields working. When he returned home, he heard music and dancing in the house, 26and he asked one of the servants what was going on. 27`Your brother is back,’ he was told, `and your father has killed the calf we were fattening and has prepared a great feast. We are celebrating because of his safe return.’
28"The older brother was angry and wouldn’t go in. His father came out and begged him, 29but he replied, `All these years I’ve worked hard for you and never once refused to do a single thing you told me to. And in all that time you never gave me even one young goat for a feast with my friends. 30Yet when this son of yours comes back after squandering your money on prostitutes, you celebrate by killing the finest calf we have.’
31"His father said to him, `Look, dear son, you and I are very close, and everything I have is yours. 32We had to celebrate this happy day. For your brother was dead and has come back to life! He was lost, but now he is found!’ "
The Call to Love:
Imagine a world where you were free to love like the father in this story. He had been betrayed, taken advantage of, rejected, and deeply deeply hurt. Think of what the son took from the father – yes he took cash, in fact he took half of everything the father had, and threw it away; but he also took the trust the father had in him and threw it away. He took the years of parenting, shaping, molding, teaching, encouraging, and he threw those away. Perhaps worst of all, he took the love that the father had for him and he threw that away. He rejected it all.
Some of you can identify. You have a far deeper understanding of what that father went through than I do, because you have experienced something similar. All of us, on some level, can identify with the rejection that the father felt because we too have loved and been rejected.
My favorite moment in the story is “And while he was still a long distance away, his father saw him coming. Filled with love and compassion, he ran to his son, embraced him, and kissed him”.
The father chose to love. The father needed to love, he ached to love, to do otherwise would have been to surrender to the hurt and be destroyed by it – to nurture the pain and cause it to grow and consume him. Have you ever known someone who held onto a hurt so strongly that it destroyed them?
What would it look like to be free to love like this father? What would your home look like if you were free to love like that? What would your work or your school look like if you were free to love like that?
I don’t know how the father walked through his hurt, but I do know he did not let it consume him. He did not bury it in the closet, he did not hide, and he did not give up hope.
Did you notice the line, “while he was still a long distance away, his father saw him.” He was waiting, watching, wondering, and wanting his son to return. And when he saw his son coming, he ran. He ran out to meet him.
Imagine with me a world where love and forgiveness triumphed over hurt and rejection. Families would be re-united, racism would be undermined, wars would cease. And, perhaps most significant of all, each of us would be changed.
Imagine a church where that kind of love prevailed. Imagine a church full of people who loved like the father in this story, who ran to meet people who had hurt them and embraced them and loved them and celebrated with them.
That, my friends, is the Kingdom of God.
God’s vision for Laurier Heights Baptist Church is that we love like that. That we would be free to love like the father who stood at the gate with his broken heart but his unbroken hope, that we would choose to love and forgive with that strength and freedom and power.
We ache to love; that is what it is about.
The Vision:
When I think about God’s vision for Laurier, this vision of love manifests itself in three ways:
1. Loving God deeply. The son returns, and the father throws a party. That party is about celebrating the reconciliation, the forgiveness, the restored relationship. It is about celebrating the fact that the dead has been raised to life.
This is the heart of the Christian message – God loves you just like the father in the story loved both his sons. God’s desire is to bring life to death, bring healing to hurt, and to bring forgiveness instead of condemnation, mercy instead of judgment. Our part is to return. And then enjoy restoration, forgiveness, and a second chance.
What happens next, to me, is the vision of worship. The father threw a party. Every single person in the world worships – that is part of the ache to love, we ache to love something or someone and that love gets expressed in worship. The party exists to celebrate the re-adoption of the undeserving, once rebellious child. This vision of worship is of a party, I like the word “festival” because of the joy and variety.
How do you think that lost son felt at the party? A little overwhelmed? Surprised? Unworthy? Probably, for the first little while. But then what? Deep love. Deep joy. Deep acceptance and forgiveness. And, undoubtedly, deep deep gratitude and a deep deep desire to love his father. That gratitude becomes the motivation for action and change.
2. Loving one another deeply. The restoration of that father/child relationship paves the way for the next restoration, that of brother to brother. Jesus doesn’t finish this part of the story, he ends the story with the older brother missing out, missing the big picture, missing the chance to love. The father loves him too, though, and invites him in, tries to help him understand, reinforces his relationship and his love for him as he says, “Look, dear son, you and I are very close, and everything I have is yours”.
Maybe Jesus didn’t write the end of that story because he left it for us to finish. God’s vision is for the brothers to be restored as well. Imagine the two endings – if the older brother chooses not to forgive, the pain will continue, the strife will continue, the house will continue to be divided and the initial joy of reunion will be incomplete. The family will not be restored, and the older brother will be miserable on the outside. But imagine the second ending – the older brother chooses to forgive, chooses to let go of his self-centeredness, chooses to love, chooses to be restored. Imagine the joy in the house then!
God’s vision for us is that we love one another deeply. That also is part of the ache we have to love. That we nurture, care, that we help one another grow. Here I picture a greenhouse, where plants are cared for and nurtured with tenderness so that they might grow strong and might bear much fruit.
3. Loving others into the Kingdom of God.
If loving God deeply is like a festival or a party where restoration is celebrated, and loving one another deeply is like a greenhouse where we nurture one another to fruitfulness, then one thing remains – what about all the rest of the people in the world who are lonely, isolated from love, sitting in the mud with the pigs? What about all the people whose ache is deep, whose wound is gaping, who are desperate to know the kind of love I’ve been talking about? Who are, literally, dying and in need of help?
God needs us to love those people. This is God’s vision of His church being like a hospital. A place of healing, of restoration, of taking broken and hurting people and mending wounds, ministering to broken hearts, and seeing the transforming power of love as we choose to love.
The Call
Those of you who have been a part of Laurier have heard me talk about these things before. We have together heard God’s desire for us to love Him deeply through worship like a festival, to love one another deeply through discipleship like a greenhouse, and to love others deeply and into the Kingdom of God like a hospital.
Let me first paint the bleak picture, just so we are reminded of how high the stakes are. If we do not love God deeply through worship, we wither and die and miss the main thing for which we were created. We dull the ache, we medicate it in the hope that it won’t bother us, but it will eat us away from the inside until there is nothing good left. Instead of a party, we will find ourselves sitting alone in the pig sty in misery. If we do not love one another deeply then others will wither and die. The tender plants, who have been bruised or scorched or dehydrated will be crushed, and they will not bear fruit. With a plant that might not be too big of a deal, but we are talking here about people. And if we do not love others who are lost then we are condemning people to eternal death.
But if we do… If we love God deeply through worship then we will join the party for the lost son who had returned. We will be able to look into the eyes of the Father and see and know and feel the depth of His love, and we will return it. We will be set free in that love, and we will be unstoppable in living a life of gratitude and of joy.
If we love one another deeply then there will be a harvest of much fruit. Broken and hurting people will be loved back to life, people that had been written off or who had written themselves off will be energized and engaged, and new life will grow. And that will be multiplied as their lives bear fruit which then brings life to others.
And if we will love others, by building relationships and friendships, by being open and vulnerable and by sharing ourselves and our lives with them, then they will see what true life can be like. We go, lift their heads up from the muck and the mire and pig slop, and point the way home. Then, God changes eternities. And He does so through us.
Wouldn’t you like to be a part of all that? To find meaning, significance, and purpose? To be used by the God of the Universe in the incredible business of loving? You can be, by using the gifts He has given you. God will change the world, through your ache to love.
Conclusion:
I like things simple, so let me conclude with this: “36"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" 37Jesus replied: " ’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’[b] 38This is the first and greatest commandment. 39And the second is like it: ’Love your neighbor as yourself.’[c] 40All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments." (Matt 22:36-40).
