[PLAY VIDEO “LOVE IS EPISODE 1]
-for many people, the month of June can mean many different things. For some of you it means the start of summer vacation, time to either do nothing, or to get a job. For some it means completely reworking your schedule because your kids are on vacation. When I grew up it meant going to the beach every day (I know, hard life). But now, being a staff member at a church, it means something different. It’s the start of wedding season.
-that’s right, this is the time when weddings start pouring into the sanctuary every weekend. And almost every single one of them will read the “Love Chapter”, I Corinthians 13. Hey, it was at my wedding. It’s just the good Christian thing to do.
-but this chapter, it was never intended for weddings. It was intended for everyone. It was written so all Christians would know how to share the love of God.
-too often we’ve equated love with a romantic feeling and that’s it. If I was to say I’m in a loving mood, first most people would say that’s not like me. Then most of you would right away think I’m talking about Lorie. We jump to that conclusion.
-the simple fact is though, we as Christians are supposed to love everyone.
-Mother Teresa said this: “Spread love everywhere you go: first of all in your own house. Give love to your children, to your wife or husband, to a next door neighbor . . . Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness; kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile, kindness in your warm greeting.”
-that’s a pretty strong expectation for us to live out, let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Wow. Can you say that everyone who has spent time with you left better and happier? I know I can’t. The amazing thing is though, from what I know of Mother Teresa, she can. She was an amazing beacon of what love is really like.
-somehow over the course of time we have almost removed I Corinthians 13 from the Bible and turned it not from a section about us as everyday Christians but into a chapter as an instruction for marriage. Yes, it’s good advice, but that’s not it.
-we are supposed to be living this chapter out in our every day lives as lights that shine for Jesus. It is how we’re supposed to treat others, and not just those that we think should be treated well, it’s for everyone.
-so today we’re starting with the first section of this chapter.
**I Cor. 13:1-3 -> 1If I had the gift of being able to speak in other languages without learning them and could speak in every language there is in all of heaven and earth, but didn’t love others, I would only be making noise. 2If I had the gift of prophecy and knew all about what is going to happen in the future, knew everything about everything, but didn’t love others, what good would it do? Even if I had the gift of faith so that I could speak to a mountain and make it move, I would still be worth nothing at all without love. 3If I gave everything I have to poor people, and if I were burned alive for preaching the Gospel but didn’t love others, it would be of no value whatever. (LB)
-kind of puts a focus on the importance of love. Anything we do, if it doesn’t have love, it’s useless.
-but it’s true. In a few weeks we’re taking three different mission trips from this church, almost 100 people going out and serving from this congregation. That’s amazing. But before we go with the Sr. High we have meetings about the importance of what we’re doing and there’s something we mention almost every year. How you act, your attitude, the love you show speaks volumes more than any specific act or acts you do. You can have an incredible kids klub with two hours of solid Bible teaching, the kids loving it, the kids wanting to follow Christ, but if at the end you get upset and tell a child to shut up, you have just ruined the last two hours.
-the old saying is true, it’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it. Are we as Christians speaking with the love of God?
-showing love is a very tell-tale sign of how close we are to God.
1. TO HAVE GOD IN US, WE NEED LOVE IN US
-it’s like we’ve said here before, you can tell what kind of a tree you are by the fruit you produce, and what is the first Fruit of the Spirit? Love…
-because here’s a simple fact. If God is love, and we have God in us, then we should be exuding love. There should be love in us.
**I John 4:7-8, 20-21 -> 7My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. 8The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can’t know Him if you don’t love. 20If anyone boasts, “I love God,” and goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a liar. If he won’t love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can’t see? 21The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving people. You’ve got to love both. (MSG)
-it’s pretty straightforward, God is love. If we have God inside of us, we have love inside of us. But for that to happen, we need to let God live in us.
-a few years ago on the missions trip to Mexico the Sr. High had a quote on the back from a woman named Teresa of Avila. She is a nun who was later canonized to be a saint by the Catholic Church for her work in starting monasteries and bringing the gospel to people who need to hear about God when she was actually not allowed to build monasteries. She went all the way to King Philip II of Spain to plead her case and as a result started monasteries to preach the gospel all over Spain. She’s even written books on prayer that are still used today and she is even quoted as saying “It is love alone that gives worth to all things.” She understood love and lived it out every single day. But she wasn’t always like that.
-a little piece of her story:
Teresa of Avila was an ordinary nun who went about her daily offices routinely. She recalls that it was with empty formality and in a coldly familiar way, that she passed the crucifix on hundreds of occasions to enter the chapel every few hours for scheduled prayers. Then one day she saw with clear eyes the crucifix and through it the cross of Christ. She really saw her Lord’s passion. The selfless surrender, the awful loneliness, the agony, the bloody sweat, the uncalculating love that pays any price - the sacrifice of heaven’s very best. Falling to her knees, she dedicated herself then and there, holding nothing back, to the service of this crucified King.
-and it’s from there the acts of her faith that we still remember five hundred years later started.
-that is what we are called to do when we start to follow God. We are called to be like God, have God’s essence, His Spirit, His love in us.
**Col. 2:12-14 -> 12Since God chose you to be the holy people He loves, you must clothe yourselves with tenderhearted mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. 13Make allowance for each other’s faults, and forgive anyone who offends you. Remember, the Lord forgave you, so you must forgive others. 14Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds us all together in perfect harmony. (NLT)
-above all, clothe yourselves with love. It is to be so visible, such a part of us that it is like clothing. It is seen. It’s even how we identify people (you in the green shirt, or you in the blue hat). We should be identified by our love.
-but to have God in us, we need love in us. Love is crucial. After all:
2. LOVE IS HOW GOD SPEAKS TO US
-that was the turning point in Teresa of Avila’s faith. She no longer saw Christ’s death on the cross as something of compulsion, something He had to do. Instead she saw it as His act of love. She saw how Christ spoke God’s love to her through that act.
-George Truitt put it this way in his work “Follow Thou Me”. “He dies, He lives, He reigns, He pleads, There’s love in all His words and deeds; All, all a guilty sinner needs Is Jesus.”
**Tit. 3:4-7 -> 4But when the kindness and love of God our Savior was shown, 5He saved us because of His mercy. It was not because of good deeds we did to be right with Him. He saved us through the washing that made us new people through the Holy Spirit. 6God poured out richly upon us that Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ our Savior. 7Being made right with God by His grace, we could have the hope of receiving the life that never ends. (NCV)
-this is the greatest example of love in the history of mankind, that God Himself would choose to die for us and make us right with Him.
-it’s amazing to look at the Bible and read it with the point of view that in everything God is doing, He’s doing it because He loves us.
-I have been reading recently through the major prophet books. Not the books most people turn to first, but it’s an amazing story of God’s love that is lost on so many.
-it’s during their time that Judah and Israel are taken captive to Babylon and their kingdom’s reduced to nothing. And from a purely human view you think how can a loving God do that?
-but the reality is that Israel was living far from God, they had turned their backs on Him, they were worshipping other gods, they were doing things they knew was wrong and like a loving parent God had to stop them and turn them back to Him, this time in a way they would not enjoy. But God’s last message to Israel through Jeremiah is this:
**Jer. 46:27-28 -> 27“But you, dear Jacob my servant, you have nothing to fear. Israel, there’s no need to worry. Look up! I’ll save you from that far country, I’ll get your children out of the land of exile. Things are going to be normal again for Jacob, safe and secure, smooth sailing. 28Yes, dear Jacob my servant, you have nothing to fear. Depend on it, I’m on your side. I’ll finish off all the godless nations among which I’ve scattered you, But I won’t finish you off. I have more work left to do on you. I’ll punish you, but fairly. No, I’m not finished with you yet.” (MSG)
-when you look at how God took Israel from their home without looking at love, He seems mean and vengeful. But when you look at it in love, when you see he needed to course-correct His people, and that they did come home and they did turn back to God in such a way that when Jesus came the people were ready and searching for a Messiah, it makes so much more sense.
**Neh. 9:17b -> 17But You are a God of forgiveness, gracious and merciful, slow to become angry, and rich in unfailing love. (NLT)
-everything God does for us is in love, it’s how He speaks to us.
-so then, it stands to reason that if that’s how God speaks to us, through love, then the way we should be talking to others as children of God is also in love.
3. LOVE IS HOW WE SPEAK TO OTHERS
-we just finished talking about how our vision for this church is to be a place of healing and serving others and how we need to go out and tell others about God’s love, we need to be living this out and speaking to the people that need this message in love. Because love makes all the difference.
-a college professor had his sociology class go into the Baltimore slums to get case histories of 200 young boys. They were asked to write an evaluation of each boy’s future. In every case the students wrote, "He hasn’t got a chance." 25 years later another sociology professor came across the earlier study. He had his students follow up on the project to see what had happened to these boys. With the exception of 20 boys who had moved away or died, the students learned that 176 of the remaining 180 had achieved more than ordinary success as lawyers, doctors and businessmen. The professor was astounded and decided to pursue the matter further. Fortunately, all the men were in the area and he was able to ask each one, "How do you account for your success?" In each case the reply came with feeling, "There was a teacher." The teacher was still alive, so he sought her out and asked the old but still alert lady what magic formula she had used to pull these boys out of the slums into successful achievement. The teacher’s eyes sparkled and her lips broke into a gentle smile. "It’s really very simple," she said. "I loved those boys." (Eric Butterworth)
-love moves mountains. Love changes worlds.
-that’s what I love about our opening Scripture. We like to focus so much on the actual act but God is saying it’s not what we do, it’s what’s behind what we are doing. Speaking all languages, prophecy, faith that can move mountains, giving all you have to the poor, being burned alive for preaching the gospel, all nothing without love. It’s nothing but a hollow message.
**Eph. 5:2 -> 2Mostly what God does is love you. Keep company with Him and learn a life of love. Observe how Christ loved us. His love was not cautious but extravagant. He didn’t love in order to get something from us but to give everything of Himself to us. Love like that. (MSG)
-I want you all to stop and think for a second. There’s no right answer to this, but think for a second. What do you think our church would look like if we knew that we were truly loved by all here and we truly loved all here? What would it look like to know that you can completely trust anyone here? To know that if you were to lose your job people here would support you, and you them? To know if you needed to talk to someone at 2:30 in the morning, you could call anyone of them, and they you? What would our church look like? And why doesn’t it look like that?
-when the Gospel message first started moving around the world in the book of Acts, it wasn’t dynamic preaching that converted people, it wasn’t arguments for God’s existence, it wasn’t because Paul built the best church in town with a great Children’s Wing
-there was a Greek writer named Lucian who lived in the second century, just a few years after the last apostle John died. He was not a Christian, but he wrote this. "It is incredible to see the fervor with which the people of that religion help each other in their wants. They spare nothing. Their first legislator (Jesus) has put it into their heads that they are brothren."
-what spread the gospel was the love that the first Christians had for each other. Love that we need to have for each other. It is the way God speaks, it is how He speaks to us and how he speaks to others through us.
-I don’t know where you are with God or what you think of Him, but I know this, everyone can have an experience like Teresa of Avila. Everyone can hear the stories and lead a hollow life of just doing the religious routine. But they can also have that moment where they realize what the stories really mean, how everything in history that God has done has been in love for us and the single greatest act of that love was on a cross two thousand years ago.
-and once we recognize that, once we see how valuable God’s love is we want nothing more than to chase it and get as much of Him as possible. And once that happens, it will be impossible to contain Him inside you and his love will just spill out to everyone around us, and the cycle begins again with them.
-so as we close in prayer today, take time to think and pray about God’s love. What does it really mean. How can we get more of God and how can we give more of God?
