INTRO.- ILL.- A prominent lawyer's son dreamed of following in his father's footsteps. After graduating from college and law school with honors, he returned home to join his father's firm, intent on proving himself to be a skilled and worthy attorney.
At the end of his first day at work he rushed into his father's office, and said, "Father, father! The Smith case, that you always said would go on forever -- the one you have been toiling on for ten years -- in one single day, I settled that case and saved the client a fortune!"
His father frowned, and scolded his son, "I did not say that it would go on forever, son. I said that it could go on forever. When you saw me working on that case for days and weeks at a time, didn't it ever occur to you that I was billing by the hour?"
Life is a learning process. Some of it we learn from home, some from school, and some from life in general. Life is a big teacher, is it not? Actually, it seems like we really don’t start to learn anything until we get out of school. Amen?
ILL.- Willard Griffin said, “It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”
But do we ever know it all? I have discovered that the more I learn, the more I realize how little I really know. I am very impressed with my own ignorance!
James 1:5 “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.”
Do you lack wisdom? I do. And that’s the first requirement for acquiring wisdom. It’s not asking God for it, it’s recognizing your need for it. And the same is true with knowledge.
The person who seeks to learn is generally the person who realizes his need for more learning. And, of course, our greatest learning should come from God who knows it all! We may have learned good from our parents, and that’s very good if our parents taught us about God and Christ and from the Bible and took us to Sunday School and church.
Proverbs 22:6 “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.”
One way he should go is the way of the Lord. And much of that depends on parental training and parental EXAMPLE.
ILL.- Someone wrote: “Secular education can make men clever but it cannot make them good.”
11This is the message you heard from the beginning. God has given us a message and we need to get it! We need to listen to it and allow it to sink deep into our hearts and minds.
It’s a message from the beginning. Beginning of what? The creation? The gospel? Or the beginning of our Christian life? Could be any or all.
PROP.- Let’s ponder the message from the beginning, which is two-fold.
1- We should love people
2- We should loathe evil
I. WE SHOULD LOVE PEOPLE
11This is the message you heard from the beginning: We should love one another. God loves and we should love.
This is the message that we have heard ever since we started to attend Sunday School and church. We’ve heard this most of our lives and most of us can quote it. And this is the beginning of true love for us who are in Christ. This is how we have come to know what real love is. It is unconditional love.
ILL.- A young man finds the woman of his dreams and asks her to marry him. He tells his mother he wants her to meet his fiance, but he wants to make a bit of a game out of it. He says he'll bring the girl over with two other women and see if his mother can guess which is the one he wants to marry. His mother agrees to the game.
That night, he shows up at his mother's house with three beautiful young ladies. They all sit down on the couch, and everyone has a wonderful evening talking and getting to know each other.
At the end of the evening, the young man asks his mother, 'OK, Mom, which one is the woman I want to marry?' Without any hesitation at all, his mother replies, 'The one in the middle.'
The young man is astounded. 'How in the world did you figure it out?' 'Easy,' she says. 'I don't like her.'
Whether we like someone or not, we are supposed to love them. You’ve heard this before. You may not like someone, but you have to love them anyway. However, if someone is sweet and/or has a good personality it sure makes them a lot easier to love.
Why must we love others even if we don’t like them? Well, what do you think God does with us? I am pretty sure that there are things we do that He doesn’t like, but HE STILL LOVES US!
ILL.- It’s like David of the O.T. Was he perfect? No. Did he do something wrong or sinful? HE DID PLENTY. Here was a man who defeated the giant Goliath in the name of the Lord.
He said to Goliath in I Samuel 17:45-46 “You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the LORD Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied. 46 This day the LORD will hand you over to me, and I'll strike you down and cut off your head...” Whoa!
David was God’s man of the hour! He could do no wrong.
II Samuel 11:2-4 “2One evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of the palace. From the roof he saw a woman bathing. The woman was very beautiful, 3 and David sent someone to find out about her. The man said, "Isn't this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite?" 4 Then David sent messengers to get her. She came to him, and he slept with her.”
And I believe that we remember the “rest of the story.” David sinned even more. He arranged to have Bathsheba’s husband killed in battle. How could God love such a man as that? He did and He even forgave David of his sin. Don’t you think God will do the same for you? Have you arranged to have someone killed recently?
God also loves us in spite of our wrongdoing, bad attitudes, poor choices, and craziness. And He wants us to be like Him. He is trying to teach us the way of love.
ILL.- Gerard Butler is a 40 year old actor from Scotland who recently starred in a movie with the popular Jennifer Aniston, “The Bounty Hunter.” He said: “For a good part of my life, I've been a bit of a rogue — not always living the best, healthiest, most responsible life. But I feel like I've turned myself around, gotten my personal life and career together, and I love what I do. Along with this contentment has come an increasing desire to give back to others.”
Hey, I’m glad that actor is finally waking up to the fact that he should care about others and not just himself. That’s the message that God has been trying to get across to mankind for a very long time! We are to love others just like He does!
ILL.- Elaine and I have an 80 year old neighbor lady who is always working in her yard. I was outside last Saturday morning and walked over to talk to her.
While visiting with her, she said, “Someone trimmed my bushes last year and I think they should do it again.” It took me a minute to figure out she was talking about me. I said, “Oh, would you like your bushes trimmed?” I quickly got the electric trimmer and did the job.
Then she said, “I would like to get that old tree/bush cut down. I don’t know why I didn’t think to ask my son to do it when he was here.” I said, “I can do that for you.” I ran across the street and got my handy dandy electric chain saw and went to work. I cut down that tree and cut up the limbs and piled it up for her.
My back was killing me but so what? I’ll get a new back in heaven! She thanked me and I never thought much about it after that. A few hours later, however, she came walking across the street with a freshly baked coconut cream pie. Oh boy!
I went back to thank her for the pie and asked, “Do you have anything else you want cut down?” Some people like to do good for others, realizing they’ll get a star in their crown. But I’m more interested in cream pies!
We love others by doing good to them and for them. And God wants us to love others just because they are human, they are His creation: the good, the bad, the ugly, the young, and the old.
As hard as it may be, we must work at loving others, because this is God’s message. This is His will. This is His way.
14We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. Anyone who does not love remains in death.
II. WE SHOULD LOATHE EVIL
12Do not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him?
Because his own actions were evil and his brother's were righteous. 13Do not be surprised, my brothers, if the world hates you. Don’t be like Cain, who belonged to the evil ONE and murdered his brother.
Cain killed his brother, because, as God said, “he belonged to the evil one.” How did that happen? Does a person automatically belong to the evil one, who is Satan? No, generally, I think that may happen gradually, although we all have our evil desires.
I Peter 5:8 “Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”
Satan is out to devour or destroy us anyway he can. He is a murderer and he is behind all murders. Make no mistake about it, he is not the figment of someone’s imagination. He is not some imaginary person like an evil Superman. He is very real and very evil and is behind all evil in the world. DON’T BE SURPRISED BY THE EVIL ONE WHO IS AT WORK IN THE WORLD!
ILL.- Dec 10, 2009 BOUTTE, La. - A 44-year-old woman was booked with second-degree battery after allegedly pouring a pot of boiling grits onto her sleeping boyfriend. St. Charles Parish sheriff's deputies said Carolyn Brown caused second-degree burns on the man's face and arms. The man told deputies that he came home from work on Nov. 7, got into an argument with Brown, told her that he was breaking up with her, then went to bed. And that’s when she did her dirty deed by pouring boiling grits on him.
- Man Assaults wife. Dec 10, 2009 COUNCIL BLUFFS, Iowa (AP) - Police arrested a man who allegedly assaulted his wife when she refused to help him shovel snow. Officers said they went to the residence early Wednesday afternoon after the 44-year-old woman said her husband struck her in the head and attempted to pull her out of the house.
The woman complained of pain in her head and leg, but refused medical treatment. She said she had been quarreling with her 45-year-old husband because he had accused her of being lazy around the house.
While these stories are either strange or funny or both, THERE ARE FAR WORSE THINGS HAPPENING IN OUR WORLD AND THERE IS NOTHING FUNNY ABOUT THEM! What am I talking about? Murder, rape, abuse, wicked crimes, child rape and abuse, on and on these horrors go.
Don’t these horrible crimes do something to you? Don’t they make you mad or angry? THEY SHOULD. In fact, I think we should loathe evil. We should hate the evil in the world.
Romans 12:9 “Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good.” We should hate what is evil. We should be abhorred by evil. We should loathe evil.
I’ve heard it said and believe it that if we don’t have any hatred for evil than we won’t have any passion or zeal for that which is good! If you don’t hate evil you won’t do anything good to counter it!
ILL.- Do you remember the O.T. story of Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis 19? The men of Sodom wanted to have sex with God’s angels and Lot protected them. Those angels, however, struck those evil men with blindness.
Gen. 19:12-13 “The two men (angels) said to Lot, "Do you have anyone else here—sons-in-law, sons or daughters, or anyone else in the city who belongs to you? Get them out of here, 13 because we are going to destroy this place. The outcry to the LORD against its people is so great that he has sent us to destroy it."
And boy, did God ever destroy it! The Lord rained down fire and brimstone on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and wiped them out! GET ‘EM GOD!
Doesn’t this story tell you something about how God hates evil? And yet in our world and in America we glorify sodomy or homosexuality! We call it a different lifestyle and God calls it perverted.
Of course, it should be obvious that even though we are to hate evil we are to love the sinner. Hate the sin but love the sinner. Otherwise, how can we do any good? God is not willing that any should perish but all come to repentance.
ILL.- One time Theodore Rossevelt said, “The times are evil; that is, there is much that evil in them. It would be to our shame and discredit if we failed to recognize that evil; if we wrapped ourselves in a foolish optimism and failed to war with heart and strength against the evil. It would be equally to our discredit if we declined to strive for good because we feared the strength of evil.” We must love the good, love the sinner and hate the sin.
CONCLUSION--------------------
ILL.- A foreigner came upon an African who was reading the Bible. The man, “That book is out of date in my country.” The African native replied, “If it had been out of date here you’d have been eaten a long time ago.”
Brothers and sisters, the Word of God is never out of date for us! It is in some countries and with some people, but it should never be with us.
The Word of God is what gives us the message of salvation that Jesus saves! The Word of God teaches us how to live rightly and righteously in this world. God’s Word has said from the beginning that we must love people and loathe evil.
