Without Love We Have Nothing

Without Love We Have Nothing By Rev. David Rogers

1 Cor. 13:1-13

Prayer

I enjoy going to the mall and walking around or sitting and watching people interact. I watch them running here and there to buy things to find happiness to fill a void. They spend large sums of money on clothes, jewelry, toys to fill a need a hole in their hearts. And for a while it works but the ache always return. Now don’t get me wrong there is absolutely nothing wrong with buying clothes, jewelry, or toys but if you are buying them to make you life complete then they want work. They are useless. I have seen statistics that show marriage today in America is an endangered institution. Many people go into marriage with an attitude that it is a business partnership. They don’t even realize or understand that it is a covenant between each other and God. They don’t realize that God views marriage as a union in which the man and women become one flesh. In our throw away society today this is something else we can toss out when the times get tough.

Families are dysfunctional today because they have forgotten to love. Mom-Dads money will not make you or your family happy. Love is what makes you family happy. Some of the happiest families I know are ones where there is love above everything else. They may not have a lot, they may be poor but in Love they are Donald Trump or Richard Gates. Today the common motto for most people is what is in it for me. We are going to find out this morning what is in it for you. Many parents today do not love their children when they try to be their friends instead of their parents. Every day I see students who struggle with authority at school because at home the parents are friends and not parents. They beg for authority in their lives but they don’t know how to respond to authority. They get into trouble because they may resent someone for trying to exert authority over them. Then here comes the parents upset because you are making their children mind. There is anger in the student because their parent has not loved them enough to discipline them.

Then I see students who are abused both mentally and physically. Their parents don’t love them and in fact may even recent them for living and take it out on the child. In return the children pass it on to their children. There have been generations of families who have not known love. Who have lived life feeling like it was not worth living. They are turning to alcohol, drugs, sex, and many other things trying to fill a void that can not be filled. They are searching in all the wrong places trying to desperately fill that void in their life.

Just what are you looking for? Maybe it is something like this. After the U.S.S. Pueblo was captured by the North Koreans, the eighty-two surviving crew members were thrown into a brutal captivity. In one particular instance thirteen of the men were required to sit in a rigid manner around a table for hours. After several hours the door was violently flung open and a North Korean guard brutally beat the man in the first chair with the butt of his rifle. The next day, as each man sat at his assigned place, again the door was thrown open and the man in the first chair was brutally beaten. On the third day the same happened again to the same man. Knowing the man could not survive another beating a young sailor took his place. When the door was flung open the guard automatically beat the new man senseless. For weeks, each day a new man stepped forward to sit in that horrible chair, knowing full well what would happen. At last the guards gave up in exasperation. They were unable to beat that kind for sacrificial love.

Is that what you are looking for? Are you willing to take a beaten for someone? There is a poem that describes love and it goes like this:

What is love

It is silence when your words would hurt

It is patience when your neighbor is curd

It is deafness when the scandal flows

It is thoughtfulness for another’s woes

It is promptness when stern duty calls

It is courage when misfortune falls

What a beautiful poem and a great description of love but without Jesus there is no love. We can be so busy working that we forget about loving God. We can give everything we have, sacrificed everything, but unless Jesus is involved all that we do is worthless. When we do something for our pride, our honor we are not doing it for Jesus but for ourselves. We are saying see what I have done; see how much I have worked. They want that pat on the back, that stroke of their ego, they want to feel important. We, today, lust after ourselves instead of loving God. We become enamored with our on importance. We no longer think about God. Or what God wants. He no longer is number one in our life. Preacher I don’t know someone like this. You probably do they are in church’s all across America. They work but everything they do they do for themselves. They are looking for accolades as their rewards. They are in it for the self not for Jesus Christ.