[PLAY VIDEO “LOVE IS EPISODE 4]
-and thus concludes the Dr. Aaron show. I know, I know, you’re all going to miss him. I’m sure we can put him on Youtube or something.
-anyway, this is it, our final week in I Corinthians 13, the love chapter.
-a quick recap, we started out talking about how love was the unspoken language of God, how God literally speaks through love. Likewise, the way we tell others about God best is also through love.
-which led into the next week in which we talked about how love is putting others first. That you can’t really love someone while thinking of yourself, you need to put them first.
-then last week we talked about how love is the way to know God. If you want to find out more about God, you need to find out what love is. After all, if God is love, knowing love tells us about God. We looked at how God has spoken to us in love throughout history and how for us to learn what love is we need to be loving others.
-this week we finish the chapter looking at how love is the cornerstone.
**I Cor. 13:11-13 -> 11It’s like this: when I was a child I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child does. But when I became a man my thoughts grew far beyond those of my childhood, and now I have put away the childish things. 12In the same way, we can see and understand only a little about God now, as if we were peering at His reflection in a poor mirror; but someday we are going to see Him in His completeness, face-to-face. Now all that I know is hazy and blurred, but then I will see everything clearly, just as clearly as God sees into my heart right now. 13There are three things that remain—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love. (LB)
-that’s going to be great, to understand God in all His completeness.
-I think that’s one of the reasons why:
1. LOVE IS THE FOUNDATION
-at the end of our passage Paul mentions how love is the greatest. Love is the foundation of all.
-when we were thinking of the names for the sermons in this series, the idea of a cornerstone seemed to make sense.
-when it comes to buildings, the cornerstone was the stone laid first. It is called the cornerstone because it was usually laid at the northwest corner and the rest of the building was shaped around that marker.
-it had such significance that thousands of years ago when someone built a building, they would lay the cornerstone then offer sacrifices to it praying that the building would be strong. They would give grains or oils and place them under the cornerstone. Some cultures went so far as to sacrifice animals or even people and lay their body under the cornerstone.
-it was more than simply an important rock like it is today, you put a date on it or someone important places it, this was the future of the building, both physically and spiritually.
-and this is who Jesus is to our faith as King David wrote long before He was born.
**Ps. 118:22 -> 22The stone that the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone. (NLT)
-He is our cornerstone, and He is love. So likewise, to know Him and be like Him, we need to make love our cornerstone, our point where our lives are aligned.
**Eph. 3:17-18 -> 17And I pray that Christ will make His home in your hearts through faith. I pray that you may have your roots and foundation in love, 18so that you, together with all God’s people, may have the power to understand how broad and long, how high and deep, is Christ’s love. (GNT)
-Christ’s love is our foundation. It’s needs to be at the core of all we do, all we are.
-Adolphe Monod, the famous French evangelical preacher, who died in 1856, said before dying: “I have strength for nothing more than to think about the love of God; He has loved us—that is the whole of dogmatic; let us love Him—that is the sum total of the ethics of the Gospel.”
-he’s right! That two way street of love, God loving us and us loving Him, needs to be core. But the amazing part about God is then there’s a third branch and we need to love others too.
-in our Christian faith, I don’t think the problem that people see with us is that we don’t love. I think it’s just not an adult love.
2. WE NEED ADULT LOVE
-everyone here, I hope, has in some way grown up and deals with things differently then when you were a kid. Guys, I hope you don’t tell your wife you love her by pulling her hair and running away. I hope when you have an argument at work it’s not resolved by “I know you are but what am I” [MAKE FACE]
-somewhere along the line we grew up. We learned that you can’t deal with things the same way you did in second grade.
-but ask yourself, has your faith grown up? Has your view of God grown in the last ten years? Do you still see prayer as a cry to God when something goes wrong and what you do before bed and nothing more?
**Eph. 4:14-15a -> 14Then we will no longer be like children, forever changing our minds about what we believe because someone has told us something different or has cleverly lied to us and made the lie sound like the truth. 15Instead, we will lovingly follow the truth at all times—speaking truly, dealing truly, living truly—and so become more and more in every way like Christ who is the Head of His body, the Church. (LB)
-our faith, our view of God cannot be the same as it was when we were ten. Just like we have grown up in how we deal with others, we need to grow up in how we relate with God.
-in the same way, does our love for God and love for others still reflect a childish love?
-a few years ago I was reading something that talked about the difference between being childish and child-like. And I think too often we mix the two in faith. Jesus never told us to have childish faith, he told us to be humble like a child.
-putting flaming dog-pooh at the door of someone you don’t like, that’s childish. Forgetting what the argument was about and moving on without saying anything, that’s child-like. We are supposed to be child-like when it comes to how we act, innocent, but adult when it comes to our faith.
**I Cor. 14:20 -> 20Do not be like children in your thinking, my brothers and sisters; be children so far as evil is concerned, but be grown-up in your thinking. (GNT)
-be grown-up in your thinking.
-when it comes to loving others, we need to grow up a little. When you’re a child, love is quite simple. Everyone loves you. You’re the baby, you’re the center of attention. People wipe your butt because you can’t do it yourself.
-but as you grow up, that love should be changing. When you’re older, you should be serving others, you should be giving love rather than just taking it.
-a few years ago I was at a youth training event where the speaker showed a clip from some documentary I’d never heard of. In it there was a father and his thirteen year old son talking. The son was trying to figure out why they didn’t do things as a family as they used to and the father’s response: You’re not as much fun as you were when you were little. It’s not fun for me anymore. And I remember the clip ending and the speaker saying “and that’s the problem with parents right now. It’s not supposed to be about you anymore. This is a child.”
-as a follower of Christ, it’s not about you anymore. It’s not about sitting back and being loved. It’s not about coming to church so everyone can serve you and you can have a good Sunday morning. We are supposed to be lov-ing. We are supposed to have the grown up love that the world doesn’t have because they don’t know God, they don’t know the source of love so how can their love be mature? We’re supposed to be the adults here and loving anyway to show them that love.
-when talking about religion one day, Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels said, “We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.”
-that’s our problem, we need to have a more mature sense of Christian love. So:
3. HOW DO WE LIVE OUT LOVE?
-I think there’s three steps to living out love as we should.
LOOK FOR IT
-if you want to love someone, you have to look for opportunities to show that love.
-the problem is, many of us have not actually taught ourselves to be aware for when that happens.
-it’s like me with cleaning. Because I love Lorie I am trying to be neater. I am failing, but I am trying. When I was single I knew it was time to do the dishes when I was out of forks. I didn’t see the pile in the sink, I saw my need for the fork, that’s it. Now, I try to see if there are dishes that need to be cleaned. Progress.
-on the flip side, my system of organization is making piles. Even Cindy Reynolds one day came in to my office and said my desk drawers are probably empty because I have to have it out and see it. And that’s how I think. I don’t see it as a mess. Others, like Lorie, maybe a little.
-what I’m trying to do it teach myself to look, the be aware of mess to help out. And that overflows now because my thinking has changed. If I see something on the floor at Kroger, I pick it up and put it in the trash. What’s amazing is how many people walk by and never notice it because they have taught themselves it’s someone else’s job to pick it up, don’t bother looking.
-we need to train ourselves to be looking for ways to show love to others. To see the opportunity to help someone and serve them.
-but we need to do more than just see it. We need to:
ACT ON IT
-that trash on the floor in Kroger, some people never see it. Some people see it, and purposely walk on by. It’s someone else’s job.
-when it comes to loving people, it’s all our jobs and we’re always working.
-I can look at the dirty dishes all day at home. I can even point them out to Lorie so she knows I saw them (word of advice, don’t do that), but nothing happens until I actually wash the dishes.
-we need to be acting on the impulses we feel to love others, to talk, to listen, to serve, whatever it may be. But it doesn’t end there.
ENCOURAGE IT
-it can’t end with us.
-we should be multiplying ourselves when it comes to love. One person cannot do it all.
-this is something that has been in my head a lot lately. There is no such thing as big, there’s only piles of lots of little. The biggest building is nothing more than a whole lot of little bricks.
-if we want to be a church that is so full of love that we do huge amazing things, we don’t need a handful of people doing everything, we need everyone doing a little.
-and for everyone to help out, we need to be encouraging that.
-it’s like when the church leaders here ask how we can grow as a church. There are two ways we can tell four hundred people about God’s love. We can have a big event at the church, spend money on promotion, get a few volunteers to help for six weeks and have a big to do about God’s love.
-or, we could have every single person here on Sunday morning tell one person God loves them.
-we not only need to be doing our part, we need to be encouraging others to do their part too. We not only need to be loving, we need to be encouraging others to love as well.
-and one more thing:
4. NEVER FORGET WHO LOVED US FIRST
-we need to be constantly remembering how God loves us first.
-remember when we start I told the story of Teresa of Avila, the nun who one day just opened her eyes to who Jesus really is and His love for us? That’s what we need to be doing. Continually looking at how God loved us.
-in our verses this morning Paul talked about us looking at God like looking at a cloudy mirror. See, the reason he used a mirror is probably because in Corinth, they were famous for their mirrors. You’re heard of Corinthian furniture or a Corinthian style mirror? It comes from the city that this church lived in. Corinth was famous for having these huge bronze mirrors they would export all over the world. There are even stories or streets that would have mirrors on them so every day citizens, not just the uber rich, could go and see themselves in a mirror. The problem is these mirrors were not like ours, they were basically shiny bronze and after being outside and getting dirty they would start to fade and get cloudy.
-and Paul is saying sometimes, the best we can get is a cloudy mirror, that right now we can’t fully see God’s love and understand it. But one day, it will be a crystal clear mirror, we will see God as He was meant to be seen.
-but until then, we need to be doing what we can to clean the mirror and see God as best we can. We need to be looking to Christ and learning about Him and His love so that love can live and grow in us.
-out of the entire Bible, there is one verse that is the most quoted simply because it reminds us of He who first loved us.
**John 3:16 -> 16“This is how much God loved the world: He gave His Son, His one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in Him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life.” (MSG)
