INTRODUCTION
Growing up I loved to listen to the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team on KDKA, America’s first radio station. I still remember sitting in a football locker room in the 1960s, listening to the Pirates win the World Series. (When the Red Sox finally win a series, you can be sure that I will be watching it on TV. If you and I are not alive, maybe God will throw a party and let us watch it from Heaven on satellite TV.) In the 1950s, I saved money for streetcar fare and admission to old Forbes Field, and for the first time I got to actually see the Pirates. At that time they were MY TEAM. I clamed them as my own. I knew all their names. I had seen most of their pictures in the newspapers. I knew their batting averages and won-loss records. I guess you could say that I loved those guys. It was a thrill to be in the same ballpark with my team. Believe it or not, each week I am just as excited to come to church to be with my Forever Family.
In the late 1970s, the Pirates won the National Baseball League pennant. A major player on that team was Willie Stargell. The slogan he impressed upon the team, by words and music and actions, was, “We Are Family!” He helped the whole team to see that teamwork was more important than personal pride and selfishness. Each team member would sacrifice when the need arose. He taught them that they were to love each other as family.
We can look at the church in the same way. We are FOREVER FAMILY. We live in a mobile, changing, lonely society. People are looking for family. I read yesterday that the average person can expect to have twelve different jobs/careers in a lifetime. Often rootless people have nothing left but the church. We need to learn to love everyone who comes through these doors as FOREVER FAMILY.
I. IF WE LOVE EACH OTHER, WE ARE OBEYING GOD’S COMMAND.
In today’s Scripture text we read, “This is my command: Love each other.” In Chapter 14, Jesus said, “If you love me, you will obey what I command.” (14:15) Christian love is not a manufactured feeling. Christian love is learning to treat each other the same way God treats us. Love is a matter of the will, not of emotions. Jesus also said, “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.”(v.12) How does Jesus love us? He forgives us and he is kind to us.
We must choose to love. It is a conscious act of our will. Each of us must determine, “I will put him/her first. I will be kind to her/him. I will be patient.” The more we deliberately will to love one another, the more our emotions begin to change. Worship then becomes more meaningful when we are family. We want to spend time with family whom we love. Time flies when we are having fun.
II. IF WE LOVE EACH OTHER, WE ARE FULFILLING GOD’S LAW.
Paul learned this lesson well and he wrote: “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law.”(Romans 13:8)
In the Old Testament God gave many laws to govern the land, to guide relationships to property and neighbors and to guide in worship. Jesus taught that love fulfills the law and covers all the important issues of life.
When we love our neighbor, we do not break up his marriage and family. We do not violate his property. We do not defame his reputation through gossip and slander. John wrote: “I ask that we love one another. And this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love.”(2 John 5 & 6) Love does not substitute for the law, but love fulfills the law. When we love each other as forever family, we meet the law’s requirements.
III. IF WE LOVE EACH OTHER, WE ARE FOLLOWING GOD’S TEACHING.
Paul, who before his conversion to Christianity, used to hate the Christians, wrote: “May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you. May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.”(1 Thessalonians 3:12-13) Later in the same epistle/letter Paul wrote: “Now about brotherly love we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other. And in fact, you do love… Yet we urge you, brothers, to do so more and more.”(1 Thessalonians 4:9-10)
To be able to live the life of holiness we must love each other. “God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us. (Romans 5:5) Any person can carry a Bible. Almost anyone can sing a Christian song. Anyone can attend worship services. So how do we know if a person is a real Christian?(Now don’t give me that “Don’t judge stuff…) Jesus said the evidence of Christianity is this: “By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”(John 13:35)
John, who had followed Jesus during all of Jesus’ ministry wrote: “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. EVERYONE WHO LOVES HAS BEEN BORN OF GOD and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God because God is love.”(1 John 4:7-8) Jesus’ new command was to, “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.(John 13:34) Do we really love everyone who is here with us today in this service?
IV. IF WE LOVE EACH OTHER, WE ARE EXPRESSING GOD’S NATURE.
Time and time again, throughout the Bible we see that “God is love.” (1 John 4:8) When we invite Jesus into our hearts, his Holy Spirit puts God’s nature into us. We become His children. Could we say, we get some of His DNA? We become children of the King.
The Apostle Peter, who had also spent three years or more with Jesus, and had been forgiven by Jesus wrote: “Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart. For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God.”(1 Peter 1:22 & 23) Do we love everyone who comes through the doors of our church “deeply, from the heart?”
I can remember a time while I was a young and poor college student of being invited to preach at a church without a pastor. I was to preach and my wife was to sing in the morning worship service and also in the evening service. I was about eighty miles from home. After the service all of the congregation thanked me and many said, “We will see you tonight.” One young single parent came up to my wife and me and said:
“You will need to eat and to rest before tonight. I don’t have much, but please come to my apartment for the afternoon.” When she searched her cupboards all that she could find to feed us was about one half pound of cheese slices and some macaroni, from which she made a small pan of macaroni and cheese, which she served with glasses of ice water to her son, my wife, to me, and then to herself. I’ll tell you, that was one of the best meals I have ever eaten. She shared her best. She had little but love to share. My wife and I understood, because a short time before, we had some out of work and newly wed college friends, who had been living on tomato soup and crackers, over to our apartment several times for dinner. We did not have much, but God blessed them and us as we cared enough to love and to share.
CONCLUSION
How are you sharing God’s love with our congregation? Are you aware of those who are lonely? Those who are in need? Those who need a hug or a handshake, a card or a phone call. What is the old saying? “Blood is thicker than water.” The church is joined together through the blood of Jesus. We must never gossip about our forever family. We must not grumble about these forever friends. Hey, they may just be our next door neighbors in Heaven. We must not take advantage of them. We must realize that we are no better than they are. We must not put them down and make excuses for our own shortcomings, our own sins.(Ever heard the saying, “For him they are sins; but for me they are frailties of the flesh?”) We must be sensitive to their pains, fears, disappointments, setbacks, losses… At times love will lovingly confront the wayward. At other times love will forgive a multitude of sins. James wrote: “Remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his way will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins.”(James 5:20) I remember one evangelist who told me that one day he had preached on the gifts of the Spirit, and one lady came up to him after the service and told him that she had the “gift of criticism.” And she meant it. And she did it all the time.(I am sure she did not read that in the Bible… Maybe in a comic book…)
When we love, we will take time to listen. We will share not just in their sorrows, but we will rejoice with them when they are blessed and obtain more money, adulation, popularity, position than ourselves. Love is kind.
All of us have different worship styles. Some like to raise their hands and others to sit on their hands.(I miss holding hands with my wife in church. That is hard to do with her at the organ and me behind the pulpit.) Some like to say amen, while some nod their heads. Some like long sermons and some want short homilies. Some like the old hymns and some the new praise choruses. I remember way back when Christian films were a great evangelistic tool. They had made a great impact on my early Christian life and as a young pastor I had seen many sinners come to church and Christ when a film was advertised and shown. In one church there were two men who grumbled each time a film would be scheduled for a Sunday evening service. They informed me that they would stay home if the film was shown: And they did. I asked them if their actions were actions of love or selfishness. I asked them to come to the films and sit there and pray for the lost souls in the congregation. They thought their absence would stop the films, so they never came nor did they invite the lost to attend.
Was it John Wesley who said: “By all means, save some.”??? One person’s treasure is another person’s junk. Hopefully, if invited, I will be able to visit in all of your homes at sometime during this year. I know what I will find. Every one of your homes will be decorated differently. Each of you have different tastes in clothes, furnishings, foods, TV programs, reading subjects, hobbies… And yet, when we all come together for such a short time on Sunday morning to worship, we put aside our differences and unite in our worship of the Resurrected Christ. We want our brother to be convicted, helped, or blessed and affirmed. We do not want to be guilty of quenching the Spirit. People need to see Jesus. We want Jesus to be praised.
I think it was Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn who pricked their fingers with a pin or a knife—Rubbed the blood together and symbolically became “blood brothers.” As Christians, we are joined together by the blood of Jesus Christ. We bear his name.(CHRISTian) We are covered by his blood. We are brothers and sisters in the Lord. Blood brothers. Let us love one another. This week, may God help us to share His love in all that we do.
(Final Hymn “Take The Name Of Jesus With You”)
(Parts of this sermon are from an article by Randal E. Denny, that appeared in “The Preacher’s Magazine” in the early 1990s.)
(Bible quotes from the NIV)
(Ron Keller 5/25/03)
