Title: Taking One for the Team
Text: John 15:9-17
Thesis: The greatest love is to love others sacrificially.
Introduction
Colorado is a hotbed for interesting and sometimes “off-the-wall” news articles. Last September 30th Trevor Wikre, an offensive guard for the Mesa State Mavericks. Mesa State College is a Division II school in Grand Junction, Colorado. Anyway, Trevor broke his pinkie finger so severely that repairing the finger meant surgery to insert three pins and then a lengthy recovery that would sideline him for the season.
Trevor would have none of that. He reasoned, “If they put pins in there, my career is finished. I told them to just take it off. Some said I was being dramatic. I said, yeah, well, losing my season is dramatic too.”
So surgeons amputated his pinkie finger and he played the following week in a 26 – 3 win over Colorado State-Pueblo.
Apparently a couple of weeks before the accident he had expressed his love and devotion for his teammates telling them he would take a bullet for them. After the surgery he reflected on his comments to his teammates saying, “I said, ‘I’d take a bullet for you.’ Well, “This was my chance to put my words into action. This was my bullet.” (http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/football/2008-10-13-wikre-pinky_N.htm)
His teammates will always equate “taking one for the team” with Trevor Wikre having his pinkie finger amputated so he could support his team.
Our understanding of nearly everything is shaped by our experience… including our understanding of love.
I wish to begin by stating that our understanding of what it means to be loved is shaped by our having been loved.
I. Our understanding of what it means to be loved is shaped by having been loved.
“I have loved you even as my Father has loved me.” John 15:9
Jesus told his disciples that he loved them in the same way that God the Father had loved him.
We sometimes hear sad stories of people who have been in an abusive relationship with their mother or father or other person entrusted with their care that tarnishes their ability to understand the love of God. Their experience has shaped their understanding of love. Fortunately, we have learned that abused children do not necessarily grow up to be abusers and that cycles of abuse and hurt can be broken as those who have been hurt by others come to understand and experience healthy and loving relationships with others and with God.
Jesus told his disciples that his love for them was shaped by his Father’s love for him. I wonder how Jesus was loved. Did God the Father give him warm milk and cookies every night before tucking him into bed? Did God the Father golf with his son on some far away cosmic fairway?
The motto printed of Sunflower Markets shopping bags says, “Serious Food - - Silly Prices!” Such imaginative speculation about the ways God loves Jesus is pretty much an exercise in silliness. But seriously, Jesus did make a statement about God’s love for him. In a prayer to God for his disciples Jesus said, “Father, I want these whom you’ve given me to be with me, so they can see my glory. You gave me the glory because you loved me even before the world began.” John 17:24
When Jesus thought of God’s love for him he looked back over the millennia marking a love that existed long before the world began and persisted to the present. Jesus experienced the love of God as a very long, enduring and unwavering love.
If you are a proponent of a “young earth” you understand Jesus’ comment to mean that God had loved him at least 6,000 years. If you are a proponent of an “old earth” you understand Jesus’ comment to mean that God had loved him for 4.5 billion years (in a universe that is 14 billion years old). (www.anseringgenesis.org/articles/208/05/30/how-old-is-earth)
I don’t care to debate or defend either theory. The difference between 6,000 and 4.5 billion years is immense and to imagine a love that endures 6,000 years is a large enough, but it is dwarfed by a love that bridges 4.5 billion years.
Either way, Jesus’ understanding of love was to be deeply loved for a long, long time. Jesus understood love to be an enduring commitment.
A few weeks ago I was sitting in the lobby of Standley Shores Dental Group when I noticed an elderly man maneuvering a wheel chair through the double doors. I assumed the woman in the chair was his wife. The receptionist rushed to his assistance but he managed it all quite well. (I later learned they were in their 90s and were the parents of one of the dentists in the group… which explained the receptionists haste to assist.)
He immediately situated her chair next to the chair where he planned to sit, rifled through the magazines on the table, selected two, handed one to his wife and sat down. Before he began to thumb through his magazine, I asked him how long they had been married and before the gentleman could even think of responding, his wife said, “Sixty-seven years!”
I was thinking Bonnie and I were doing pretty well at thirty-nine… but here was a commitment to love that had seen a couple through sixty-seven years together. We think of sixty-seven years as a lengthy love. But God’s love for Jesus was from before the creation of the world.
Now, let me let you in on another mind-bender. The bible says, “Long ago, even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his own eyes.” Ephesians 2:4
Jesus’ experience and our experience is that God loves long.
God’s love is so immense that we describe it spatially.
• God’s love is WIDE!
• God’s love is LONG!
• God’s love is HIGH!
• God’s love is DEEP!
The love of God is not the paper thin love stories of high profile politicians and Hollywood stars. It is a love that defies our imaginations. Paul wrote of it in Ephesians where he wished for his readers, “the power to understand, as all of God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high and how deep his love really is.” He went on to wish that we may experience the love of Christ, though it is so great we will never fully understand it. Ephesians 3:18-19
If the way we are loved shapes the way we love, we will love with a love that is wide and long and high and deep. We will love in ways that the ones we love cannot fully understand.
The first truth from this text is that our understanding of what it means to be loved is shaped by having been loved.
The second is this, knowing we are loved give us great joy.
II. Knowing we are loved gives us great joy.
“I have told you this so that your will be filled with my joy. Yes, your joy will overflow!” John 15:11
I have an acquaintance who does not want to be loved or to love. He would not say that is no many words, but his demeanor says, “I don’t want to be close to anyone because if I am close to someone it means I have to be involved in their lives.” He denies relationships both familial and personal because he does not want to be responsible for either family or friend.
My acquaintance/friend does not connect experiencing joy with being loved by others and loving others.
Jesus wants us to know that being enveloped in the long love of God is cause for overflowing joy.
Speaking of marriage, Mary Ann Mayo writing in Marriage Partnership said, “When we look at the Song of Songs, we see the joy we’re supposed to find in one another. That’s the model we have to go by--not one of drudgery, but pleasure, joy and anticipation.” (Mary Ann Mayo, Marriage Partnership, Vol. 7, no. 3.)
While watching a sitcom one evening I was amused by one of the characters. He had in an emotional moment blurted, “I love you!” to a woman he had been dating. In the scene following he was confiding his dilemma with a friend. He did not know what to do… he had said, “I love you!” to his girlfriend, but she had not said, “I love you!” back.
What does it mean when you don’t get an “I love you!” back? He had already put his “I love you!” out there and there was no retrieving it. He had professed his love for her but she had not professed her love for him back. Everyone knows you can’t just leave an “I love you!” dangling out there… an “I love you!” of necessity elicits an “I love you back!”
Do you remember when you got your “I love you!” back? Do you remember the joy that filled your heart? Do you remember how you felt like you could walk on air? Do you remember how you thought your heart might literally explode with joy?
Being loved and loving is not an onerous thing. Being loved and loving is not intended to stir up images of dreadful responsibilities and visions of having to push your 93 year old spouse’s wheel chair.
When we are loved we love out of hearts that overflow with joy.
James Dobson included the following letter from a father to his daughter in his book, When God Doesn’t Make Sense:
My Dear Bristol,
Before you were born, I prayed for you. In my heart I knew you would be a little angel, and so you were. When you were born on my birthday, April 7, it was evident that you were a special gift from the Lord. But how profound a gift you turned out to be! More than the gurgles and rosy cheeks, more than the firstborn of my flesh—a joy unspeakable. You showed me God’s love more than anything else in all creation. Bristol, you taught me how to love. I certainly loved you when you were cuddly and cute, when you jabbered your first words.
I loved you when the searing pain of realization took hold that something was wrong—that maybe you weren’t developing as quickly as your peers, and even when we understood it was more serious than that. I loved you when we went from hospital to clinic to doctor, looking for a medical diagnosis that would bring us some hope. And of course, we always prayed for you. We prayed and prayed.
I loved you when you moaned and cried; your mom and I and your sisters would drive for hours late at night to help you fall asleep. I loved you when you were confused—when, with tears in your eyes, you would bite your fingers or your lip by accident. I loved you when your eyes crossed, and then when you went blind. I most certainly loved you when you could no longer speak, but how profoundly I missed your voice!
I loved you when scoliosis began to wrench your body like a pretzel, and when we put a tube in your stomach so you could eat. We fed you one spoonful at a time—even up to two hours per meal. I managed to love you when your contorted limbs made changing ten years of diapers difficult. Bristol, I even loved you when you could not say the one thing in life that I longed to hear back: "Daddy, I love you."
Bristol, I loved you when I was close to God and when he seemed far away—when I was full of faith and also when I was angry at him. And the reason I loved you, my Bristol, in spite of these difficulties, is that God put this love in my heart. This is the wondrous nature of God’s love: He loves us when we are blind, or deaf, or twisted in body or in spirit. God loves us even when we can’t tell him that we love him back.
My dear Bristol, now you are free. I look forward to that day when, according to God’s promises, we will be joined together—completely whole and full of joy. I’m so happy that you have your crown first! We will follow you some day in his time. Before you were born, I prayed for you. In my heart, I knew you would be a little angel. And so you were.
Love, Daddy (www.oneplace.com; submitted by Eugene Maddox, Palatka, Florida to PreachingToday.com)
The idea is simply this: Joy is rooted in being loved and is the well-spring from which we love.
God’s Word informs us:
• That our understanding of what it means to be loved is shaped by having been loved.
• And that knowing we are loved gives us great joy.
The third truth is that the greatest love is a sacrificial love.
III. The greatest love is sacrificial love.
“I command you to love each other in the same way I have loved you. And here is how to measure it – the greatest love is shown when people lay down their lives for their friends.” John 15:12-13
This is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. Our loving relationship with Christ is about more than our being loved. Our relationship with a loving God and a loving Christ translates into a corresponding loving lifestyle.
In our text Jesus gives his disciples a pattern to follow or model in their own lives. They are to love others as they have been loved and they have been loved sacrificially.
We may either marvel or we may roll our eyes at the idea of a college football player who takes one for his team by having his pinkie finger amputated so he can play in the next big game. But Jesus ups the ante considerably in saying to us, “I command you to love each other in the same way I have loved you. And here is how to measure it – the greatest love is shown when people lay down their lives for their friends.”
We tend to place sacrificial love in the category of heroic gestures wherein a comrade in arms throws himself on a grenade or someone throws himself in front of a train in order to push a child to safety.
When George and Kathy Schultz were here a few weeks ago, George showed us a clip from The Guardian. The Guardian is set in Kodiak, Alaska but was actually filmed in North Carolina. In the clip you saw, the cable lifting the two rescue swimmers begins to unravel. A legendary Coast Guard rescue swimmer played by Kevin Costner, cut his safety line in order to save his young student, played by Ashton Kutcher. If you recall, the younger man grabbed his mentor’s hand and said, “I won’t let you go!” And in the story they were both lifted to the safety of the helicopter hovering in a storm over a raging sea.
The scene George did not show you was later in the film and in that scene, the teacher cuts his own safety line again and in so doing, saves the life of his student. Kevin Costner in that scene free-falls to his death and in so doing, gives his life for his friend. (www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2006-03-15-costner-kutcher-movie_x.htm)
Such is the model of the love of God who in Christ loved us sacrificially. “When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners. Now no one is likely to die for a good person, though someone might be willing to die for a person who is especially good. But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.”
The big idea may indeed be a willingness to take one for the team. But the idea is simply, to be a friend of Jesus is to be loved in a sacrificial way and then to love others sacrificially in ways large and small.
Bonnie and I were blessed to host two little girls who were members of the World Help Children of the World Choir singing at Covenant Village on Thursday afternoon. They were with us for two nights… long enough to capture our hearts. We were asked to pack them a lunch to take with them on Friday as they moved on to their next gig. Bonnie asked them what they would like and they each wanted white rice, two boiled eggs, an avocado, a mango, some salt, and some catsup. The only thing we had was salt so that meant a shopping trip for Monty. Do you know how hard it is to find two ripe avocados and two ripe mangos? Don’t tell me that you know a grocer who has them because I was there and they didn’t.
I so wanted them to have ripe avocados and mangos that I would have visited every grocer in the Denver metro area if necessary… these were little girls who had put their arms around me when we tucked them into bed the night before and said, “I love you Uncle.” I had to love them back.
Any effort on my part to find the ever ellusive ripe avocados and mangos was not an onerous duty… it was my joy to do what little I could to love them back. Loving is loving, be it in ways large or small.
Conclusion
So as we go this morning, go having learned something of the love of God that reaches do to us in Christ and then reaches through us to others.
God’s Word informs and instructs us that:
• Our understanding of what it means to be loved is shaped by having been loved.
• Knowing we are loved give us great joy.
• The greatest love is sacrificial love.
