ENGAGE
This week, I came to the conclusion that perhaps I’ve done enough preaching on loving like Jesus and maybe it’s time to move on to something else. That’s because I’m finding that God seems to be providing way too many opportunities for me to apply what I’m learning and teaching each week. Does anyone else feel like that, too?
Last Sunday, there were several people who went above and beyond to help out with the church picnic. At the risk of leaving someone out, let me mention just a few people who did that. As usual Ryan Fregoso jumped in to help – loading up ice chests, cooking hamburgers and hot dogs and helping with the cleanup. And the guy who happened to bring his truck to church – Jon Settlemeyer – got stuck bringing everything back to church afterwards and helping to get it unloaded. Russ Alimena selflessly helped unload and load everything. And of course, my wife, as usual, helped with so many things behind the scenes – everything from picking up ice to helping get things put away at church after the event.
As Mary and I were putting everything away at church, I mentioned to her how nice it would be to get home, take a shower and put my feet up for a while. When we finally got home our new neighbor, Brad, was in the process of cutting down his eucalyptus tree that has been hanging over our backyard for a while and threatening to come crashing down on our grill. A couple weeks before that, I had offered to help him when he got ready to do that.
So I had a choice – I could wave and say hi to Brad and wish him well and go in and take my shower and get off my feet, or I could actually do what I told him I’d do previously and give him a hand. I’m not going to lie. My initial thought was “God, why did this have to be the week that I am going to preach on ‘Love Does Not Insist on Its Own Way’?”
Fortunately, at least this time, I chose to do my best to love like Jesus and so I spent the next hour or so helping Brad cut down his tree. I’ll admit this wasn’t totally a selfless act on my part because there is definitely some benefit for Mary and me in having that tree gone. But I think for the most part, I made my choice based on doing what I needed to do to literally love my neighbor.
TENSION
But I don’t always act in such a selfless way and my guess is that most of you struggle with that as well. Once again this morning, if you always love others like Jesus by not insisting on your own way, then you’re excused since you really don’t need to hear this message. But if that is an area where you struggle, then will you join me in seeing what we can learn from Jesus about loving like that?
TRUTH
As we’ve done each week so far in this series, we’ll begin in 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul described the various aspects of loving like Jesus. The next phrase we come to is found in verse 5:
It [love] does not insist on its own way…
(1 Corinthians 13:5 ESV)
While each phrase in 1 Corinthians reveals an important aspect of Biblical love, in many ways this particular phrase summarizes them all and is the essence of what it means to love like Jesus. Once again, Paul describes love from a negative viewpoint – what it is not. Although the ESV translation of this phrase certainly captures the sense of what Paul wrote here this is one place the NASB actually does a better job of translating his words more literally:
…it [love] does not seek its own…
(1 Corinthians 13:5 NASB)
The verb “seek” is actually a much better translation than “insist”. It is the same word that Jesus uses in the Sermon on the Mount when He commanded His listeners to “seek first the kingdom of God”. It is a verb that describes an all-consuming quest that won’t quit until it finds what it is seeking. So Paul is describing a kind of love here that is completely contrary to my natural tendency to pursue what I want for me, often at the expense of others. Genuine Biblical love does exactly the opposite – it puts the interests of others ahead of my own.
We could easily find a number of passages where Jesus exercised that kind of love, but the one I’ve chosen to look at today is found in chapter 14 of Matthew’s gospel, beginning in verse 13:
Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a desolate place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore he saw a great crowd, and he had compassion on them and healed their sick. Now when it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a desolate place, and the day is now over; send the crowds away to go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” But Jesus said, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” They said to him, “We have only five loaves here and two fish.” And he said, “Bring them here to me.” Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass, and taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven and said a blessing. Then he broke the loaves and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And they all ate and were satisfied. And they took up twelve baskets full of the broken pieces left over. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.
(Matthew 14:13-21 ESV)
In order for us to understand the extent to which Jesus’ love here does not insist on its own way, we need to consider the context of this event. In the first part of Matthew 14, we learn that John the Baptist had just been beheaded. John’s disciples had taken his body and buried it and came to tell Jesus what had happened. So Jesus had withdrawn to a desolate place to grieve the death of His cousin, the one who had prepared the way for His earthly ministry.
But the crowds quickly found out where Jesus was and they flocked to Him before He had a chance to mourn His loss. So even though it was probably the last thing He wanted to do at that time, because of His compassion for the people, Jesus began to teach and to heal the sick. As the day drew to a close, the disciples approached Jesus and suggested that He send them into the surrounding villages to buy food. That was certainly not an unreasonable suggestion. After all, the only food they had on hand was two fish and five loaves of bread, not even enough for the disciples, alone for the entire crowd.
I’m pretty sure every one of us here would have made the same suggestion. And no one could have quarreled with Jesus had He chosen to follow their advice. After all, He had come to that place to be alone and mourn privately and the people had completely ignored His needs and desires and interrupted that time He needed for Himself. But as we’ve seen consistently in this series, Jesus doesn’t behave like we do naturally.
Here in this passage we learn that…
When I love like Jesus loves
I see life’s interruptions
as divine opportunities
Most of us tend to live busy lives so many of us try to plan out our time carefully to make sure that we get everything done that we need to do each week. But inevitably, there are going to be interruptions to our plans.
Jesus was certainly no stranger to interruptions in His life here on earth. If you think there are things that are urgent in your life, just remember that from the time He began His earthly ministry by standing in the synagogue and reading from the scroll of Isaiah until He died on the cross and rose from the dead, Jesus had only a little over three years to accomplish the task His Father had given to Him. So the kind of interruptions that we see here in this passage were undoubtedly much more disruptive to Jesus than most of the ones we tend to deal with.
And yet, Jesus was never too busy to love others because He viewed those interruptions as divine opportunities. So let’s see what we can learn from this passage that will help us to love others like that.
APPLICATION
HOW TO EXERCISE A LOVE THAT DOES NOT INSIST ON ITS OWN WAY
1. Be willing to put my needs and desires on the “back burner”
Although my schedule is somewhat flexible each week, I do generally set aside most of the day on Tuesday and Wednesday to work on my sermon so that I can have it finished in time to get everything to Paul so he can print the bulletins on Thursday morning. So I try to protect my schedule as much as possible on those days.
So of course this week, God decided to test me again and see how well I was going to actually do what I am sharing with you this morning. So I think there was at least one significant interruption that I was faced with every day Monday through Thursday this week.
For Gerald’s benefit, I just want to acknowledge that I don’t always make the right choice when those kind of disruptions occur, but this week I can honestly say that I think I did a pretty good job of seeing those as opportunities to love others. Now that doesn’t mean that I completely ignored the need to finish my sermon, but I had to put that need on the back burner several different times.
That’s exactly what Jesus does here. If you keep reading the account in Matthew 14, you’ll find that after Jesus had fed the crowds, He did finally get some time alone to grieve and to pray. In this case, He didn’t completely give up on His need for some rest and some time to pray. He just postposed it for a while so that He could focus on serving others first.
So I think there is pretty good evidence here to suggest that loving like Jesus doesn’t necessarily mean permanently and completely giving up our own needs and desires. It is possible that I might have to do that from time to time because there is no option to just merely delay something I want or need to do. Sometimes, loving others might mean that I will forego completely something that is important to me. But most of the time, if we’ll just have some flexibility, we can just put our own wishes on the back burner for a while and come back to them later at the appropriate time.
What we find here is that loving like Jesus requires us to be flexible. While there is certainly a place for structure and schedules and planning, we need to make sure that they don’t become so rigid that we use them as an excuse to not take advantage of the divine opportunities that God provides for us to love others by doing what we can to meet their needs.
While we’re on this principle, I think it’s important to point out that God designed us so that we do need rest. Jesus and the disciples did not ignore that need even though they did have to postpose it for a while. The Scriptures are pretty clear that neither Jesus nor the disciples tried to meet every single need to the point that they never rested. That day after Jesus had fed the crowd I’m sure there were still other people who needed to be taught and healed, but that was going to have to wait until another day because Jesus and the disciples needed a time to rest and be refreshed.
Possible action step:
• As I become aware of the needs of others this week, pick one situation where I can choose to delay my own needs or desires in order to serve the needs of another.
Men, maybe that means that when you get home from work, instead of heading for the recliner, you make dinner or take care of the kids for a while first so you can give your wife a break.
Parents, maybe that means that you turn off the TV or put down that book you’ve been wanting to read and spend some time playing Candyland with your kids.
At work, maybe that means you work through your lunch hour to help a co-worker finish up a project.
In the church, maybe it means you volunteer to work in the nursery or Children’s Church, even though you would rather be in the worship gathering. And while we’re on that topic, let me just say thanks to those of you who love our children by doing that on a regular basis.
When I love like Jesus loves
I see life’s interruptions
as divine opportunities
And that often requires be to put my own needs and desires on the “back burner” in order to meet the needs of others.
2. Don’t limit God
That is the mistake the disciples made here. They looked at the resources they had on hand and came to the conclusion that there was nothing they could do to meet the needs of those in the crowd. And from a human perspective that was certainly true. So their solution was to just send the people away and either let them fend for themselves or let someone else help them. But what they were actually doing was limiting God. They failed to consider that perhaps God wanted to work through them in a way that would both meet the need and result in God getting the glory.
I think that we’re often quite similar to those disciples. We’re made aware of a situation where someone has a need and we look at our own meager resources and fail to see how they are adequate to help, so we just walk away from the situation and leave it to someone else to do something. We fail to consider that God might want to work through us and multiply what we have in a way that both meets the needs of others and brings glory to God.
So we have to be willing to “think outside the box” sometimes. The disciples had already witnessed Jesus turn water into wine. They had seen Him heal people who had been sick and disfigured from birth. And they themselves had been empowered and sent out by Jesus and healed and cast out demons in His name. So they should have understood that Jesus could take what little they had and multiply it in a way that would meet the needs of the crowd. But that would have required them to look beyond their preconceived ideas. Their faith had not yet developed to the point that they were willing to do that.
I have no doubt that God has given me the spiritual gift of giving. So during a time in my life when I made very good money, God allowed Mary and I the privilege of helping out a number of people with their financial needs.
But when we came to a place in our life where we had virtually no income, we no longer had the ability to give money to others. Although I know there were times I used our lack of income as an excuse not help others in need, I eventually discovered that there were some other, more creative ways to assist the people we knew.
In some cases, that meant giving of my time to sit down and help them develop a budget and a plan to pay down their debt. For others, it involved helping them with a home repair so that they didn’t have to pay someone else to do that. And, in retrospect, I’m not sure that those things weren’t actually more loving like Jesus than just giving someone money.
My purpose in sharing this is not to point to my life and say “Look what I did” because I know that there are so many times in my life when I’ve made excuses for not helping others. But what I hope you will take away is that God can love others through you if you’re willing to look beyond your own preconceived ideas and not limit God’s ability to use you.
Possible action step:
• Thinking about my relationships at home, work, in the church and in the community, what needs am I aware of? Pick one of those needs this week and pray about how God wants to use me in meeting that need and then obey what God reveals.
As you think about those needs, be creative. Think about what God has given to you in terms of time, talents and material resources and how you can use them to love your spouse or your children or your co-worker or a friend or a neighbor in the name of Jesus.
When I love like Jesus loves
I see life’s interruptions
as divine opportunities
And in order to do that I need to make sure I don’t limit God.
3. Get others involved
It’s really instructive here that when Jesus stepped into meet the needs of the crowd, He enlisted the disciples to help Him. As the bread and fish were multiplied, Jesus asks the disciples to “wait tables”. And that must have been quite a task distributing that food to a crowd that would probably fill McKale Center.
It wasn’t that Jesus wasn’t capable of doing that on His own. If he could produce all that food out of two fish and five loaves, I don’t think it would have been much of a challenge for Him to distribute it, too. But by involving the disciples, Jesus did a couple of important things.
First, He gave them some “on the job” training. He knew that the way most people learn best is actually by doing. So by including them in the process, He helped His disciples learn what it means to love others with a love that does not insist on its own way.
But even more importantly, Jesus helped the disciples get their focus off of themselves and on to the needs of others. The suggestion that the disciples made to Jesus indicated that they were tired and they just wanted to let someone else deal with the needs of the crowd. But I’m pretty sure once they got busy distributing the food, all their attention was turned to the needs of the people they were serving.
As many of you know, before I came here to TFC, I was a church planter and I was pretty much left to that task on my own. I had no elders so I pretty much had to make all the decisions on my own and do most of the work on my own. And that really wore me down and robbed me of much of the joy of ministry. So when I came here to TFC and had the privilege of sharing the ministry load with Denny Howard, my ministry was much more productive and enjoyable. That’s why I’m so thankful to serve alongside a great group of elders here, as well as many of you who join in the ministry of our church on a regular basis.
Possible action step:
• Think about a need that I can meet by involving others. Ask one or more people to join me in meeting that need this week.
Let me share with you an example of how we’ve done this in our family. For the last several years at Christmas, rather than the adults buying gifts for each other, we’ve decided to take the money we would otherwise spend and use it to adopt a needy family. Although the adults contribute the money and super shopper Pam usually buys the gifts, we involve everyone, including the young kids in wrapping and delivering the gifts.
That is certainly something that one or two adults could do on their own, but by involving the kids, it helps them understand first-hand the needs that others have and lets them be part of showing their love for those people in a very practical way.
When I love like Jesus loves
I see life’s interruptions
as divine opportunities
INSPIRATION
Writing nearly 2,000 years ago, the apostle Paul did a pretty good job of describing the United States in the year 2016:
But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.
(2 Timothy 3:1-5 ESV)
It’s instructive that the first characteristic that Paul lists is the one that is at the root of everything else he writes – people are “lovers of self”. I can’t think of a more accurate description of our country today. So regardless of what any politicians might try to tell us, there is only one thing that is going to “make America great again.” It is not building a wall, or defeating ISIS, or making college free, or putting term limits on Congress, or even defunding Planned Parenthood. All of those potential solutions are merely Band-Aids that do nothing more than cover up the underlying problem of people being lovers of self.
This morning we have studied the only solution to that problem – loving others like Jesus with a love that does not insist on its own way. But that solution can’t possibly be legislated by a bunch of narcissistic politicians.
ACTION
It has to start with each one of us putting into practice the things we have learned today. Each one of us must choose each day to understand that…
When I love like Jesus loves
I see life’s interruptions
as divine opportunities
…and then we must make the choice to take advantage of those opportunities by taking the practical steps that we have talked about this morning. Will you join me in committing to begin that journey by taking at least one of those steps this week?
