BEING IN LOVE
I had been dating Tara (now my wife) for some time before I finally got the nerve to say it – you know – those big three words that mark the point of no return in a relationship. We had been out on a date, and I had pulled up to her dorm and was about to let her out when I said to her, “Tara, I have something to say, and I don’t know how you’ll react, but I think I love you!” Let me tell you, there is nothing in the world that will make you feel more vulnerable than having those words hanging in the air while you wait for some kind of response. Finally, Tara blushed a little and said, “Oh, David, I love you too!” It was such a tender moment.
And it would have remained a tender moment if I had left it at that. But no, I had to press the issue. I asked her to explain to me exactly she meant by, “I love you.” That’s when she says to me, “David I know I love you, but now that I think about it, I’m not really sure if I’m in love with you!” What do you mean, I love you but I’m not in love with you! Have you been watching too much Oprah. For the next few hours, I made her explain to me exactly what she meant I love you, but I’m not sure I’m in love with you. I never did figure out the difference. I did learn enough to know that from now on, when she tells me she loves me, I don’t ask her to explain it to me!
But I look back on that time, and as much as I anguished through it, it was a good exercise for Tara and me. We had to define what we meant by the words “I love you.” Because I have learned since then that there are many definitions of love. For some it’s about feeling emotions, for others, it comes with certain conditions. For some, it is a mindset void of action.
This morning, with just two days until Christmas, I want us to get a good handle on what love is all about. And on the fourth week of Advent, we find the answer in the coming Christ. Through the incarnation of Christ, we see God’s great act of love. I want us to examine God’s definition of love, and in doing so, see if our definition of love measures up to his. We find that definition of love in our text today. Turn with me to Philippians 2:5-11 [read scripture]
PURSUING A PRINCESS
The great Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard illustrates the passage we just read with a story about a prince in search for a future queen. One day while the prince was running an errand in the local village for his father he passed through a poor section of the city. As he was passing through, he happened to see a beautiful young maiden. She was poor and lower class, but she was absolutely beautiful. After passing through the village several times, he found he was falling in love with her.
But he had a problem. How would he go about winning her hand in marriage? He could simply order her to marry him, but he wasn’t just seeking a queen. He was seeking a soul mate. If he coerced her to love him, he would never know if she really loved him for who he was or just because of the splendor of his wealth.
So the prince came up with another solution. He took off his kingly robe and put on the garb of a peasant. He moved into the village and began to live among the people. He shared their interests and their concerns, and he talked their language. This was no mere disguise; it was a new identity. Over time, he was able to see the young girl. It wasn’t instant, but in time the young woman grew to love the prince. She loved him because he first loved her.
And so, Jesus Christ, who being in very nature God, made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant and being found in appearance as a man, humbled himself. Why? So that you – YOU – might know him. So that you might have a relationship with him and he might have a relationship with you. He did it so that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.
PHILIPPIANS 2:6-7
Philippians 2 shows us that God’s love is an entirely self-less love. And we see that in verse six. Paul says that Jesus Christ, “Who, being in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be grasped. Now this verse has come under a lot of discussion about what it means. Some of the terms are hard to translate, but here’s what it means.
Paul begins by saying without a doubt that Jesus was in his very nature God. He wasn’t just a good man or a nice prophet. He was eternal God who always was and always will be. So being God, Paul says he did not consider equality with God something to be grasped. The King James says that He thought it not robbery to be equal with God. Upon first look, it seems that Paul is defending Jesus by saying that he did not steal or seize his power to be God. While that is true, that’s not what Paul is saying here.
The word “grasped” here is not taking something that isn’t yours. In this context, it’s about possessively holding on to something that is already yours. In other words, Jesus was God, but Jesus did not consider being God something that he had to possessively hold on to. Instead of being like earthly rulers who seized and hoarded their power for their own good, Jesus let go of it for you and me. Verse 7 says, but [instead, he] made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And then in verse 8: Being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death-- even death on a cross!
This is the foundation to understanding love. God gave it all up for us. He chose not to stay in heaven and possess his power for his own sake. He chose to release his power so that we might share a relationship with him. In Genesis, we see Adam seeking to become God, which makes sense. Who wouldn’t want to move up the ladder? But here, God sought to become man – to humble himself, to become nothing and came down to us, so we might know a relationship with him.
CROSSING THE LINE
Some of you here have yet to cross the line of faith. Let me make this as clear as I can. God – the all-powerful, all-knowing, ever-present God who sees the past, present, and future all at once… The God who is the perfect standard of righteousness and justice… The God who answers to no one and can use his power however he pleases – that same God gave it all up in hopes that you might love him. God’s greatest most earnest desire is that you will choose to enter into a relationship with him.
And for those who have crossed the line of faith, if the impact of God’s love has gotten lost over time, this morning, I hope you’ll stop for a minute and rediscover the magnitude of God’s love for you. Sometimes we lose sight of that. You know how you can tell when we have lost sight of the depths of God’s love for us? We stop showing a godly kind of love to others and replace it with our own selfish expression of love.
This is what happened to the people of Paul’s day. What did Paul say to his readers in verse five? Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus. In other words, this whole excursus about God’s humbling himself for us was not just so we could experience a few warm-fuzzies at Christmas. Paul shows us the love of God so that we might also treat others with that same kind of love. In fact, if we go back to verse one, we’ll get the fuller sense of what Paul’s is saying to us.
HAVING THE SAME MIND
[verses 1-4] These verses are quite challenging. Paul tells us that by accepting God’s selfless acts of love for us, we are in the same way compelled to practice that same love in our relationships with others. How in the world in good conscience can we accept God’s gift of love to us and then turn around and treat people the way we sometimes do? I don’t know why it is, but for some reason, we readily accept God’s unconditional love for us, but we find no obligation to do the same for someone else. And what happens is when it comes to our relationships, we set aside God’s definition of love and substitute our own.
There are a lot of ways we do that. The most common is we make love a feeling or an emotion. How often does our love for someone depend on whether they make us feel good about ourselves, or whether they are attractive or smart? The reason the divorce rate is so high in this country is because someone sold us a bill of goods that said that true love will always be accompanied by an emotional high. And once that goes away, then it’s time to get out or it’s time to seek it somewhere else! There are husbands and wives here today who are at odds with one another because the other person doesn’t do it for them anymore.
What if God’s love were that way? What if God’s love were based on his emotional feelings for us? Do you think he would have ever stepped out of heaven to come to live here on earth to win the love of a bunch of sinful, temperamental humans who can’t decide from one minute to the next whether they will be faithful to him or not? I can’t explain it, but God’s act of love did not initiate out of a feeling. I don’t know what made God choose to love us, I just know it wasn’t based on emotion, or it wouldn’t have lasted long.
WITHHOLDING LOVE
There’s another way we warp the true definition of love, and this is the one that concerns me most. It’s very subtle. This misuse of love comes as we choose to withdraw our love from some. There are a lot of people here who are feeling pretty good about themselves right now because you are very loving person to those whom you’ve chosen to love. But what about those people who, at least in your mind, don’t deserve your love. Maybe it’s someone who’s done you wrong, and by golly, you’ve solved that problem by just withdrawing from them.
I guarantee you there are people in this room right now who will go out of their way to avoid someone else in this room because of what that person had done to them sometime in the past. And we justify it because… they deserves it! They did us wrong. They have a lesson to learn.
I think God has a real problem with people who use righteous indignation to justify withdrawing love from someone. The problem is, we usually go a lot further than just withdrawing from them. Before long, we tear down their reputation. We verbally tear them apart behind their back. And we make sure everyone knows just what kind of person they are.
Paul says, these three remain, faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. If the greatest power on earth is the power to love, then couldn’t it possibly be argued that the greatest destructive power we can have on earth is to withhold that love? There are people all around us that are hurting not because we’ve loved them the wrong way, but because we’ve not chosen to love them at all.
NEW YORK FUNERAL
Tony Campolo tells the story of a New York City pastor who chose to take a funeral that no other minister would take. The man who died was a homosexual who died of AIDS. The minister agreed to do the funeral. When he got to the graveside, he discovered an audience of thirty homosexual men. He conducted the funeral, and when he finished, he motioned for everyone to be dismissed, but no one moved. So he turned back to the crowd of men and said, “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
One of them said, “Yeah. They usually read the 23rd Psalm at these things. You didn’t read the 23rd Psalm. Could you please read it?” So he read the 23rd Psalm. Then another man said, “There’s something in the Bible about nothing separating us from the love of God. Can you read that?” And so the man read the eighth chapter of Romans that said nothing can separate us from the love of God.
And for about an hour, the men asked the pastor to read from the Bible. The pastor was surprised to find that these men were hungry and desperate to hear about the love of God. To hear that nothing – NOTHING – could separate them from the love of God. He wanted to ask them why if they were spiritually hungry they didn’t just go to a church. But he didn’t have to ask. It was obvious why. God may have loved them, but the church despised them.
The church has become so good at pronouncing condemnation to those who have done wrong that those who need God most never hear the message of God’s love. But David, hasn’t God called the church to prick the consciousness of this world and to point out sin when sin arises. Absolutely so. But the problem is we think we do that best through judgment and condemnation. But nowhere does God grant us the power to condemn. He only grants us the power to love. Love has a far greater power to change the world than condemnation.
Jesus proved it. Jesus did not consider equality with God something to be grasped. But instead, he humbled himself. Jesus gave up his power in love, and that’s when his power became powerful enough to bridge the gap between God and us.
A HUMILIATING MOMENT
One last story. A few days before Thanksgiving, my family and I boarded an airplane for the first time since September 11. I was very interested to see how the security would be handled. I wanted to feel secure when I boarded the airplane. Be careful what you wish for.
On my flight from Dallas to Newport News, I was pulled aside at the security checkpoint. I expected the security guard to wave the usual wand over me for a few seconds and let me be on my way. Instead, she asked me to extend my arms. She asked me to empty my pockets. Everything was run through the x-ray machine. Then she asked me to remove my coat. She proceeded to unzip every pocket, and run her hands through every part of the coat.
Then, I was asked to unbutton the top of my shirt. She searched all around my neck for a good 30 seconds. Then, she questioned my watch. She asked me to take it off, and she ran that wand up and down my arm for another 30 seconds sure something was there. Then she asked me lift up my sweater and unbuckle my belt! In front of at least a dozens people. What else could I do with two national guards personnel with M-16’s standing right behind the security guard. She spent a good minute checking my waist line to be sure there were no foreign objects hidden.
Finally, they asked me to roll up my pant legs. Then she began to frisk every inch of my legs. A good five-minutes later, I was standing there, arms straight out from my side, belt unbuckled, shirt unbuttoned, pants rolled up with all my personal items piled up at the end of the x-ray machine – all of this in front of an audience of a dozen people.
I was upset. I was so mad that they treated me like I was a criminal. I was innocent. I didn’t deserve to stand there with my arms stretched out while they humiliated me in front of the world. I was ready to call the governor or something.
I was thinking about that experience the other day, and that’s when it hit me. For just a brief second, I got the tiniest sense of what Jesus went through for me. Jesus was the most innocent person who ever lived. Yet they took him, they stretched his arms wide. They nailed his hands and feet to a cross, and there they stripped him naked, and they spit on him and beat him and eventually killed him. And the thing is, he didn’t have to do it. But he did, and he did it for me.
May I never accept that gift for myself and not be willing to extend that same gift to others. That’s my prayer this morning. Will you make it yours? Will you ask God to help you extend the same love to others that God has extended to you? I pray you will.
