Eleven adults and 26 high school students loaded into three vans in the parking lot of the First United Methodist Church in Hartselle, Alabama, said good-by to family and friends and home and drove over 700 miles to a little town on the shores of Lake Okeechobee. Two of the adult leaders had been here before but the remaining 35 mission team answered God’s call and came to Pahokee, Florida, not knowing anything about us or what to expect … nor had we ever heard of Hartselle, Alabama, or knew anything about them except that they had come to serve the Lord.
They fixed the home of a man they had never met before and wouldn’t get to meet because he was in the hospital at the time. Now he’s in rehab. But when he gets home, he’s going to be blown away when he sees what this group of people he has never met has done to his place. Another part of the mission team got to fix-up a mobile home literally on the other side of the tracks. The team that got to work on the mobile home got to know Juan and he got to know them. For five days … in this crazy heat and humidity … they stood on the roof of Juan’s trailer. They patched up holes and put on all new shingles so that when it rains, as it does every afternoon here during the summer, the water won’t pour down behind his walls and continue to run his ceiling. They also built him some new steps to replace the fiberglass ones that had deteriorated and become dangerous. When they were done, they gave Juan a prayer shawl knitted by members of their church to give out on the trip.
Another team rolled up their sleeves and helped Becky Addison get the Glades Area Pantry school ready for the new school year. They painted all the classrooms. They helped organize the library and school supplies. They patched the roof of a home that Becky plans to use to shelter homeless people. Again, all for people they’ve met and who will never meet them.
What a heart for God and for service this mission group from Heartselle, Alabama had. They worked in the heart … they dealt with some pretty serious rain and thunderstorms … and I never heard one word of complaint, not one word. I didn’t hear any whining either … none. When they finished a task, they immediately asked us what they could do next. They went above and beyond every project we asked them to do. And even though they were bone-tired by the end, they continued to work hard so their wouldn’t be any loose ends when they left.
They not only worked hard, the bought all the materials they needed. They literally spent thousands of dollars of their own money. They brought and bought their own food, their own tools … and they were grateful for everything we did for them. They traveled 728 miles to get here … and 728 miles back … crammed into three vans … gas and food here and back … two night’s hotel for 37 people …
And as I watched them load up their vans and pull out of the parking lot to head home I thought to myself, “What a perfectly wonderful picture of ‘agape’ … true Christian love … they made.” A love that gives and expects nothing in return.
When the world speaks of love … which it does all the time … TV, movies, music, the internet, books … they are usually speaking about selfish and self-centered love. They are speaking about one-sided, hopeless love. They are speaking about deceit and cruelty masquerading as love. And, once in a while, they speak of a mature, other-centered love that stands the test of time. No wonder we take the word “love” for granted. We’re obsessed with it … yet rarely do we witness or hear about what love truly is in the world around us.
If true love is so unfamiliar, why do people write about it, text about it, and sing about it so much? Because there is a hole in the human heart. We are desperate for the experience of genuine love. We long for it. We hunger for it. But the love that we seek is not the “love” that the world has to offer, amen? Everyone one of us needs reassurance, affection, and fellowship. Love … agape .. is oxygen for our souls. We have to have it. The first thing an infant needs at birth is to be held … to literally feel loved.
The Bible has a lot to say about “love.” The word appears over 500 times in God’s love letter to us. From the Book of Genesis to the Book of Revelation, the story of the Bible is the story of God “hesed” … God’s steadfast, unconditional, and relentless love for us. The love that appears at the top of almost every list of virtues in the Bible is not just God’s love for us but also our love for each other Being a Christian means that the very love of God has been poured into your heart. It grows within you just as grapes grow on a vine … for the “fruit” of the Spirit is … love … agape.
Agape isn’t just a spiritual or emotional sensation. This love … this agape … wears work gloves and handles the everyday nuts and bolts of life. It is highly practical. It hugs the lonely … feeds the hungry … tends the sick … comforts the sorrowful … and puts up with the insufferable. It is kind and long-suffering, perceptive, positive in outlook because it is not human love which has been made unlovely by our sin.
What is one of the most popular scriptures read at weddings? Yes … 1st Corinthians 13. “Love is patient … love is kind … love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on hits own way … it is not irritable … or resentful. It does not rejoice in wrong doing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things … believes all things … hopes all things … endures all things. (vv. 4-7). Oh, it would be nice if you could be all these things for your spouse and it would be nice if your new spouse could be all these things for you too, amen? But guess what? Our love is rarely patient … we’re not always kind … usually we’re envious and boastful, arrogant and rude. We constantly insist on our own way … get irritable when we don’t get our own way … we rejoice in wrong doing … and, well, we will lie if we have to to get our own way.
In 1st Corinthians 13, Paul is talking about “agape” … the love of God … the Spirit of God … that has been poured into our hearts. Until Jesus came to earth, this kind of love was unknown to us, to the world. The world’s concept of love was self-centered … love that demanded something in return. But when God sent His Son as a gift to this world, His special, other-centered love was put on display for all to see … and this love was so different from anything anyone had ever seen before that it was given a special name … agape. Agape is unconditional love … divine love … the kind of love that God exercises towards us, His children. At the heart of agape is sacrifice. It is not the spontaneous, impulsive love we see on television or in the movies. It is a reasoning, esteeming, and choosing type of love.
Agape is the highest form of love … the love that everyone wants to receive but few are ready to give because of the sacrifice involved. You see the problem, don’t you? How can anyone receive agape if no one is willing to live and to share and to give agape?
See … here’s the thing. I believe the world, because it is self-centered and one-sided, have this whole “love” thing flipped around, upside down, and inside out. We truly believe that we must “feel” love before we’ll give love or act in love. I have to “feel” love before I “act” in love when the truth is that I must act in love in order to feel love.
Love is not what we “feel” for others. It is about what we “do” for others. The true power of love … agape … is found in selfless attitudes and actions that seek the best for another person without expecting anything in return. When we “act” in that way, the feeling of love follows.
When Paul wrote this letter to the church at Ephesus, it was a dynamic church filled with passion for the Lord Jesus … determined to make a difference in their city. By the time that John had received his revelation on the Island of Patmos, Jesus said that the church in Ephesus had lost its fire, its passion, it agape. “Nevertheless,” Jesus tells John to write, “I have this against you … that you have lost your first love” (Revelation 2:4).
What solution did Jesus offer? Among other things, He told them to go back and “remember then from what you have fallen .. repent, and DO” … not “feel” … “do the works you did at first” (Revelation 2:5). “Do the things you first did to fall in love with me … and by doing that you will fall in love with me again.” In other words, Jesus told them to “act” as though they were filled with passion for the Lord … act as if they were determined to make a difference in their city through their love for Jesus Christ and their love, their passion, their agape would return.
The world constantly tells us to follow our hearts. What they really mean is to follow our feeling and all you have to do is open your eyes and ears, turn on the TV or radio, or go on the internet or any other social media to see how that’s working, amen? But God’s kind of love … agape … doesn’t follow, it leads by example. It’s a verb. It acts. It leads our hearts. And it changes lives. It changes the life of the person acting in love and it changes the life of the person receiving the love. Remember … how can anyone experience agape if someone isn’t out there living agape, sharing agape, giving agape away?
“Let all that you do be done with love,” says Paul (1st Corinthians 16:14). Author Craig Brain Larson puts it this way: “We think giving our all to the Lord is like taking a 1,000 bill and laying it on the table and saying, ‘Here’s my life, Lord, I’m giving it all.’ But the reality for most of us is that [Jesus] sends us to the bank and has us cash in the 1,000 dollar bill for quarters. We go through life putting out 25 cents here, 50 cents there. Listen to the neighbor kid’s troubles instead of saying ‘get lost,’ go to a committee meeting, give a cup of water to a shaky old man in a nursing home. Usually giving our life to Christ is not glorious,” he concludes. “It’s done in all these little acts of love … 25 cents at a time.”
In the Bible, love is not just a feeling. It’s not just an option among many. It is a command. “A new commandment I give you,” says Jesus, “that you love one another” (John 13:34). Later on He repeats the command for us to love one another: “This is my commandment, that you love one another” (John 15:12). It’s been my experience that when Jesus repeats a command and does it so consistently, we ought to pay attention, amen? And when God commands us to do something, He always gives us the means to do it. If He commands us to love one another then He will pour that love into our hearts. When we receive God’s love into our hearts, it creates a reservoir of love that we can draw from when we need to love someone. That reservoir of love is pure. And when we “do the first things” and act as if we love, it fills our hearts.
The 19th century Scottish preacher Henry Drummond once used the image of a magnet in his classic sermon, entitled “The Greatest Thing in the World.” “If a piece of ordinary steel is attached to a magnet and left there,” he said, “after a while the magnetism of the magnet passes into the steel so that it too becomes a magnet.” As we stay attached to Jesus, His love will pass into us and out to others and make us like Him.
“The beautiful ‘one another’ commands of the New Testament are famous,” says Rev. Ray Ortlund, “but it is also striking to notice the ‘one anothers” that DO NOT [emphasis mine] appear there … For example: sanctify one another … humble one another … scrutinize one another … pressure one another … embarrass one another … corner one another … interrupt one another … defeat one another … shame one another … marginalize one another … exclude one another … judge one another … run one another’s live ... confess one another’s sins. Our relationships with one another,” he goes on to say, “reveal to us what we really believe as opposed to what we think we believe … our convictions as opposed to our opinion … even sincere opinion … without penetrating to the deeper level of conviction. But when the gospel grips us down in our convictions” he concludes, “we embrace its implications wholeheartedly” (emphasis mine).
Agape is a gift from God that we receive when we experience salvation … but we are responsible for taking care of that gift … of cultivating it with determination and diligence. I had mentioned 1st Corinthians 13 earlier. Chapter 13 ends with these words: “And now faith, hope, and love abide, those three; and the greatest of these is … love.” Agape. But … Paul tells us in the very next verse … Chapter 14:1 … to “purse love and strive for the spiritual gifts.
“Pursue love.” Two simple words that summarizes one of the toughest assignments we’re given as followers of Christ. The command it not ambiguous. We are called to love. “There we have prime example,” says author and professor Philip Kenneson, “of that seeming paradox that stands at the center of Christian life. The fruit,” he says, “is always a gift, but it still requires hard work.” Since love is both a gift and a task, what work do we need to do if we want to live this agape life? How can we become more loving people?
We “pursue love” through prayer. When Paul prayed for the churches, he didn’t pray for greater attendance, bigger offerings, or even more people to become Christians. You ever notice that? When we examine his prayers, we find that he prayed for something far more challenging. For instance, to the Christians at Philippi, he wrote: “And this I pray … that your live may abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment” (Philippians 1:9).
And for the believers in Ephesus, he prayed: “That [God] would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height, to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:16-219).
In 1st Corinthians 11:1, Paul urges his readers to imitate him. We too should pray for greater love … whether we’re praying that prayer for others or for ourselves. It is God’s desire for all of us that we continue to grow in our ability to love one another. I promise you that this is a prayer that God will surly answer.
Some people are harder to love than others. Remember … you don’t have to like someone but you do have to love them as Christ tells you to. Loving anyone … especially those whom you don’t particularly like … is a decision … not a feeling. Once you make that decision, you pray to God to help you do good things to them and for them because that’s how we imitate and express God’s love for that person.
And if you want to practice black belt agape [pause] … try loving your enemies! “You have heard it said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy,’” Jesus taught, “but I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you that you may be sons [and daughters] of your Father in Heaven” (Matthew 5:43-45).
If you are still in doubt that love is an action and not a feeling, you weren’t listening close enough. Jesus told us to “bless them” … an action … to “do good to them” … taking action again … “and to “pray for them.” That’s how you love your enemy, amen?
To the way the world thinks, this seems to be taking love a step too far. How can you love the people who are undermining the values that you held dear? How can you love the person who lied about you to make themselves look good? Or the person who claimed your idea as their own and got a promotion for it? Or the person who stole your identity … molested your daughter … or murdered your son?
This is where we must truly pray, be kind to ourselves, and be very clear about what Jesus is asking us to do. We are not being asked to abandon our feelings. What we are being asked to do is ask that God will do His work in the lives of our enemies. We are not being asked to expose ourselves to further harm … to let our enemies walk all over us … or keep hurting us. We are being asked to pray to God to bless them and do good for them … which reminds us that they, like us, are children of God deserving His love and forgiveness and mercy as much as we do.
This is an enormous task … one that may seem impossible. But thank God the Bible is full of such great and powerful examples. Jesus, for example, gave us the ultimate example by giving up His life on the cross for the very people who were demanding and carrying out His execution … praying on the cross that His Father forgive them (Luke 23:24).
And His followers took His example to heart. When Stephen was being stoned to death for preaching the Gospel, he also prayed that God would forgive his executioners: “Lord, do not charge them with this sin,” he prayed (Acts 7:60). The Apostle Paul spent his adult life as a servant of the Gospel and was beaten, whipped, rebuked, jailed, and despised for it. And yet, his response was to love his enemies: “Being reviled, we blessed … being persecuted, we endure … being defamed, we entreat,” he wrote in 1st Corinthians 4:12-13. Hear the “action” again … we blessed … we endured … we entreat.
In his letter to the Christians in Rome, Paul said: “If your enemy is hungry,” you are to do what? That’s right … feed him. If your enemy is thirsty, you do what? Give him something to drink. Why? “… for in doing so you will heap coals of fire on his head.” (This doesn’t mean what it seems to say on the surface but really suggests heaping blessings on a person head … but that’s another sermon for another Sunday.) “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good” (Romans 12:20-21).
During the American Revolution, a pastor named Peter Miller was opposed and humiliated by Michael Whiteman … an evil-minded man who did all he could to suppress the Gospel. One day, Mr. Whiteman was arrested for treason and sentenced to die. Rather than breathe a sigh of relief at the news, Rev. Miller traveled 70 miles on foot to plead for his enemy’s life. Mr. Whiteman may have been a cruel man, but Rev. Miller knew that he was not traitor. When General Washington first listened to Rev. Miller’s plea, he told the pastor that he would not spare the life of his friend. At that, Rev. Miller leaped to his feet and shouted: “My friend! Michael Whiteman is NOT my friend … he is my bitterest enemy!” Washington changed his mind and granted Whiteman a pardon. Peter Miller was doing exactly what Jesus calls us to do. He was loving his enemy … not because of how he felt toward Whiteman but by what he did for the man.
I love what C.S. Lewis says will happen if we don’t cultivate the gift of agape with determination and diligence. “To love at all is to be vulnerable,” he observes. “Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one … not even an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries. Avoid all entanglement. Lock it up save in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket … safe, dark, motionless, airless … it will change. It will not be broke. It will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love,” Lewis concludes, “is hell.”
“Therefore,” says Paul, “be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us … a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Ephesians 5:1). I once saw a picture of a little boy trying to follow in his father’s footsteps in the snow. He stretched his legs and carefully put his foot in his father’s much larger foot print … leaving one set of foot prints in the snow. Isn’t that what Paul is calling us to do here? To be imitators, followers of Christ … carefully placing one foot into the much larger foot print of Jesus so that people only see one set of foot prints … Jesus’?
As I watched the Hartselle mission team’s vans pull out of the parking lot, I saw only one set of foot prints … Jesus’! When I look at your life … when you look at mine … how many sets of foot prints do you see?
Let us pray …
