Do Everything in Love: Despite the pain! Kelly Durant 2-21-10
1 Cor 16:14
14 Do everything in love.
Not often do I preach with a verse that has only 4 words, but actually this verse says it all? Recall we are continuing with what does love imply that we do? God does everything in love…do you?
Consider one of many situations where there is tough love: A parent takes his child to the clinic to get a shot so he will not catch a disease. The child in confusion feeling the needle go in thinks his parent is treating him mean.
A brother takes his friend to the rehab center even though he will be deathly sick without the drugs or alcohol he has been using. This is love with pain, sometimes as humans we only focus on the pain but do not understand the love behind the pain, right?
Here in the Corps and in all churches, some of you when you are corrected focus only on the pain and your feelings, and you do not understand the love behind it.
Love sometimes includes pain, but if it is God’s love, it comes from the sincere good intentions of the heart and the effect is good fruit & healing! But sometimes as humans we fail and to do all things “ in love”. 14 Do everything in love. It is extremely hard to do! Can you? Do you? It is sad when we see sometimes some things not done in love and that makes Regina and I, and obviously the Lord, feels pain!
Ist Type of Pain including love: A loving action that initially is painful to the recipient, but the outcome is a positive, life saving action.
So why do we as humans often not understand the pain that seems to accompany love?
You and I chose to love God as children with faith, and we have confirmed in our spirits that God gave Jesus to us in love to save as many souls as would come to Him. Initially we did not understand the pain Jesus had to endure, but accepting Jesus pain, death, and resurrection is like the child getting the immunization shot trusting that despite the pain, the Father taking him to the clinic knows what is best.
Actually, God being pure love, synonymous to holiness, does not include pain in Himself as what He overtly shares. He is a just God that does require justice for evil actions, which implies punishment, which in consequences is pain. I hate pain and you? God felt pain many times. With man’s disobedience from the beginning we see this:
Gen 6:6
The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain.
We conclude that pain is a product of man’s disobedient actions, or sin and even God gets affected by it!!
2nd Type of Pain: The response to disobedience, a correcting love.
Pain originated from disobedience. Disobedience produced the first pain of shame and sorrow when Adam and Eve were expulsed from the Garden of Eden. The first opening of the eyes was to the fact that they were ashamed to be naked, or no longer in the holiness of God, and the consequence after that was a horrible feeling of fear of God’s presence, knowing He would punish them, then the final effect was death for being contaminated with evil.
Sin brings pain in which ways? Did you see the process which repeats over and over: shame, fear, then death! These are the results of not being in obedience to God’s love! So pain we actually inherited from Adam and Eve but we ourselves keep repeating it, but the healing love we gained from Jesus love! His correcting love breaks our hearts and takes away our shame, fear, and death and replaces it with His holiness, boldness and life! Jesus is the lamb that takes away the sin and pain and puts us back into obedience and life!
1 Cor 15:21-22
21 For since by man came death, by man (Jesus) came also the resurrection of the dead.
22 For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.
What is pain exactly according to the dictionary? Pain:” The condition or fact of suffering or anguish especially mental, as opposed to pleasure; torment; distress; sadness; grief; solicitude; disquietude.
Pain of all sorts comes to all of us in this life, to some younger in their life than others, to some more severe than others, and for some more physical than mental.
But God is love and love heals pain! Pain was not in God’s original plans. God created a heaven on earth, but pain as it turns out is sort of a control mechanism to keep us in state that reminds us we are weak and need Him and His Holy Spirit to bring us comfort! Pain in our body should prevent us from doing destructive things to it! Pain makes us hate the Satan who introduced it to the world!
3rd Type of Pain: A suffering applied to us by evil ones only because we love God.
We are chosen out of this world and this means we are less and less bound to its temptations, suffering and pain and those who have dirty shoes want to step on ours that are clean so they will feel we are no better than them.
In the world we will have pain from the tribulation others will cause us.
John 15:19-20
19 If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. 2
We who do our best for God and love God are hated, and this causes us to reap pain by unjust acts done to us. We have God’s love, peace, and comfort and this exposes that the people with unrepentant sin have no excuse to not clean up, or to justify their continuing sinful actions.
Christians are hated because they prove one can love God, and be happier serving Him than being in a sinful lifestyle! People sinning in pain hate people who are pain-free!
The world hates the fact that we as Christians do not suffer as they do for their wrongful actions. The people who are marked with shame, fear, and death are jealous of our ability to cope with pain in this life (and we can only by prayer and loving support amongst ourselves).
These unrepentant people would love to see us you and I suffer the torment, anguish, sadness, and grief, for our sins as they have to, but that is not how it works for the Christian. “There is no rest for the wicked!” “But he giveth his beloved rest!”
Have you understood this lesson on love yet? Pain my happen in our lives for love and for our good, a purging, a refining fire, a medicine. Pain may happen due to our reaping of the consequences of our destructive actions. Or pain may be caused by others who do things out of hate, not love.
Pain is what is here due to disobedience, but Jesus takes all the pain away with His Love! Starting right now in this life, and then forever in the life to come! Jesus did everything in love!
Remember Jesus says:
John 14:18
18 I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you.
2 Cor 1:3-6
3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. 5 For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. 6
God’s love provides for relief from pain right now while we are on earth & hereafter!
So God is not cruel in not abolishing pain completely on earth, He gives happiness and pleasure to those that love Him and are obedient to Him to a great degree so we get a little glimpse of what heaven will be like!
Earth is a school and all people need to be warned of what hell is like, on what pure pain is like, on what disobedience to God brings! The pain s so severe in hell that Jesus says that “there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth!”
But obedience brings love, peace, and joy! And once you are on the holiness path it just gets better and better with God, but it gets worse with people of the world who hate God!
One time I forgot to tell one of my sons when he was about 12 that when he used the lawn mower he needed to check the oil, to make sure that there was enough there. And guess what happened? He used it and it got overheated and burnt up!
It is like God made us like as humans like a piece of machinery that must have God’s oil of the Holy Spirit present at all times. If not we will burn up with all the heat and stress or life! We can die young in life when love is not present! Pain is a stressor that destroys its own machinery! But pain in someone’s life opens the door for us, as Christians, to tell others about Jesus!
The people of the world without love by their own choice would love to see everyone destroyed along with them, and they want no God in the schools, abortion, war, sinful pleasures legitimatized, and they hate the good, the love, and the comfort we possess!
There is always the dialog of the rejecters of Christianity that accuses God of being a sadist to make his Son, Jesus to die, as if God is a cruel Father and therefore unfit to worship because He had a desire to see his Son in pain and be tortured. But His love was cruel!? Have you ever thought about that part? The devil is creative to discredit God’s love and sacrifice that God gave Jesus up with extreme pain! What an insult! Pure pain in Jesus paid for our sins!
Another thing, people predictably try to escape the pain they feel, often a pain produced from the shame of who they are, just another miserable rat in the rat race! Pain is temporarily masked with parties like the publicans had in Jesus day, with alcohol or drugs, illicit sex, and the pursuit of some sensory stimulation. I know what that is like when I was in sin and it is a miserable empty life!
It is like life on a roller coaster, up and down. But when all the friends are gone home, when the music is turned off, and the hangover is present, when pain is present, you are reminded no amount of pleasures satisfy, they only leave you with more pain.
For Christians that repent, however, God brings them out of the pain, the shame, the fear, and the death that would come as a consequence. God only allows pain for a while in our lives, no one, not even His own Son could escape feeling pain because of what others did to Him.
The beautiful part is all pain will be erased! When we go to be the Lord forever pain will no longer exist in that realm and we will remember it no more.
Rev 21:4
4 And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.
So love could appear to have within itself pain in this regard: We feel sad when a loved one is not with us to spend time with. We also will feel sad when we do not spend time with God. People that love others, and God too, will hurt when they are not together and getting attention. But love between Christian people and God heals pain!
Do you feel pain sometimes? Jesus came to free us from mental & physical pain! Remember He healed and still heals bodies and sicknesses; He frees minds enslaved by the demons of depression, loneliness, guilt, and sadness.
Love is the solution! In my life I have seen dozens of people come alive with God’s love and be healed of their life of pain. All I do, and what all of us should be doing, is to love everyone in “everything we do” and pray to know how to be a blessing to love everyone in our lives. I love people despite the many sins I may see in the people. Do you? If you love you will see others like a dying flower come back to life with the water of God’s love in the word and by your love if you share enough of it! Do you do everything in love?
