Summer Loving

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.