Summer 2004
Dakota Community Church
Summer Loving
Introduction:
Hebrews 10: 23-25
23Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. 24And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. 25Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another--and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
- Spur one another on to love and good deeds.
- Encourage one another.
This message is to spur you to love!
- We sing about love.
- We talk about love.
- We read and write and search for love.
- We go to the movies to watch others in love.
For all our efforts we seem to know very little about love!
Proof:
- We say things like I fell in or out of love.
- I love cheesecake.
- I love coffee, I love tea, I love the girls and the girls love me.
These days we think love is a good feeling. We get in touch with our emotions and, if it feels good – we do it.
Somehow this is not the kind of love that the bible seeks to “Spur us on” to.
Here are a few famous love song titles and lines.
- What kind of love is this?
- I want to know what love is.
- Love stinks.
- She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- And I, I, I, will always love you.
- Love is a burning thing it makes a fiery ring.
- I wonder, wonder who, who wrote the book of love.
- Wise men say only fool rush in, but I can’t help falling in love with you.
- Love me tender.
- We had a love, a love, a love you don’t find everyday.
- You’ve lost that loving feeling.
1. Love is not a feeling.
I am not trying to take the romance out of love I am just telling you that you have to choose to keep it.
1Corinthians 13: 4-8
4Love is patient love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
8Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.
These are not feelings!
Be honest, you do not feel like doing what you should most of the time.
- Do you feel like exercising?
- Eating healthy?
- Going to work or school?
- Giving, praying, reading the Bible, or worshipping?
- Practicing anything?
- Paying bills or taxes?
- Making or keeping commitments?
We do the right things because we choose to do them.
I stand by the bed where a young woman lays, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed. She will be thus from now on. The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve. Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private. Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry mouth I have made, which gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily?
The young woman speaks. "Will my mouth always be like this?" she asks.
"Yes," I say, "it will. It is because the nerve was cut."
She nods and is silent. But the young man smiles. "I like it," he says, "It is kind of cute." All at once I know who he is. I understand and I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works. Richard Seltzer, M.D., Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery, 1978, pp. 45-6.
LOVE IS A CHOICE!
2. Love is not phony or shallow.
1Kings 14: 21-28
21 Rehoboam son of Solomon was king in Judah. He was forty-one years old when he became king, and he reigned seventeen years in Jerusalem, the city the LORD had chosen out of all the tribes of Israel in which to put his Name. His mother’s name was Naamah; she was an Ammonite.
22 Judah did evil in the eyes of the LORD. By the sins they committed they stirred up his jealous anger more than their fathers had done. 23 They also set up for themselves high places, sacred stones and Asherah poles on every high hill and under every spreading tree. 24 There were even male shrine prostitutes in the land; the people engaged in all the detestable practices of the nations the LORD had driven out before the Israelites.
25 In the fifth year of King Rehoboam, Shishak king of Egypt attacked Jerusalem. 26 He carried off the treasures of the temple of the LORD and the treasures of the royal palace. He took everything, including all the gold shields Solomon had made. 27 So King Rehoboam made bronze shields to replace them and assigned these to the commanders of the guard on duty at the entrance to the royal palace. 28 Whenever the king went to the Lord’s temple, the guards bore the shields, and afterward they returned them to the guardroom.
We get the wrong idea from TV preachers with their, “I love you and God loves you,” baloney.
Real love, Christian love, God’s love is genuine and is based on a relationship. It is demonstrative.
- Let’s not be plastic lovers.
- Don’t settle for bronze love.
Phoniness happens when we try to carry on an outward appearance that we have abandoned in the heart.
I was attending a junior stock show when a grand-champion lamb, owned by a little girl, was being auctioned. As the bids reached five dollars per pound, the little girl, standing beside the lamb in the arena, began to cry. At ten dollars, the tears were streaming down her face and she clasped her arms tightly around the lamb’s neck. The higher the bids rose, the more she cried. Finally, a local businessman bought the lamb for more than $1000, but then announced that he was donating it to the little girl. The crowd applauded and cheered.
Months later, I was judging some statewide essays when I came across one from a girl who told about the time her grand-champion lamb had been auctioned. "The prices began to get so high during the bidding," she wrote, "that I started to cry from happiness." She continued with: "The man who bought the lamb for so much more than I ever dreamed I would get returned the lamb to me, and when I got home, Daddy barbecued the lamb--and it was really delicious." -Joe Wagner, in Reader’s Digest.
3. We are distributors, not producers.
Romans 5:5
5And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.
- You don’t have to do it with human effort.
- Release the love God has put in your heart for those around you.
- Pray for them because God changes our hearts when we pray for others.
- True love is a reflection of God.
1John 4:7-8
7Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
John 14: 9-11
9Jesus said to him, "Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, "Show us the Father’? 10Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on My own authority; but the Father who dwells in Me does the works. 11Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father in Me, or else believe Me for the sake of the works themselves.
Ephesians 5:25-33
25Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, 27and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. 28In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church-- 30for we are members of his body. 31"For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." 32This is a profound mystery--but I am talking about Christ and the church. 33However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
You see then that our love is to be a reflection of God’s love.
A little boy was working hard at the kitchen table with his crayons. “What are you drawing?” asks his curious mother.
“A picture of God.” Replies the boy.
“Oh honey, nobody knows what God looks like.” Says the mom.
“They will now,” he answers.
Draw the world a picture of God with your love!
