Together We Find Love Series

TOGETHER WE FIND LOVE

Someone once wrote: If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you it is yours. If it does not come back, it was never yours to begin with. If it just sits in your living room and messes up your stuff, eats your food, takes your money and is always giving you attitude then you either married it or gave birth to it!

Today we are continuing in our series Together and I want to talk with you about love. The Beatles sang ‘All you need is Love.’ Dionne Warwick sang ‘What the world needs now is love, sweet love.’ Elvis sang ‘I can’t help falling in love with you.’ Foreigner sang “I want to know what love is.’ Huey Lewis sang about ‘The power of love’ and the J Geils band just sang ‘Love stinks.’ If we really want to understand what love is we need to ask the author of love.

I want us to look at a passage of scripture this morning that talks about what true love really is. It is God’s way of reminding us all today that what the world calls love is a cheap imitation.

Ephesians 3:16 I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18 may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge -- that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

1. Love brings CONVERSION – dwell in your hearts through faith

Paul prays in verse 17 that God would strengthen us with power so that the love of Christ would dwell in our hearts through faith. That means salvation. The love of God draws us to salvation and results in transformation.

John 13:34-35 A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

Jesus said that love was attractive. It is evangelistic. When people truly see love lived out in a community of faith and then experience the love of God personally it draws them to Him. People long to be loved. They instinctively understand their need for authentic sacrificial love.

Love for God and ones neighbour constitutes the sum of Gods requirements for the Christian. The man who loves needs no counselling. Love cements relationships between God and man and man and man. While love attracts, fear repels. When love gives, lust grabs. What love builds, hatred destroys. With love communication flourishes; with resentment it withers. Love is the ultimate answer to all the problems of living with which the Christian counsellor deals. Love therefore is the goal -- Jay Adams, The Christian Counsellors Manual

As I said at the beginning, often all we see in life is a cheap imitation of God’s perfect love. In the 1986 “Crocodile Dundee” movie, Dundee is, of course, from Australia and visits New York City for the first time. As best I recall, he is being accompanied by a female newspaper writer and suddenly finds himself cornered by a gang of young thugs. When Crocodile Dundee does not give them his wallet, one young hoodlum pulls out a switchblade and threatens Dundee. Crocodile Dundee simply reaches behind his back, while saying, “that’s not a knife,” and pulls out a large Bowie-type knife, saying, “THIS IS A KNIFE!” So what is real love?

1 John 4:9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

This is love. Perfect, sacrificial love. This is the love that God has for you. More than 100 years ago a nurse at an insane asylum in the US was cleaning out the room of a man who had just died. They were readying the room for the next inmate when they found something scrawled on the wall of the room. It was the following words;

Could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made; Were every stalk on earth a quill, And every man a scribe by trade: To write the love of God above Would drain the ocean dry, Nor could the scroll contain the whole Though stretched from sky to sky.