Love in Community

Some of you at time to time despair about answered prayer. And answered requests. Well, Mimi Lodeck, three months ago, very lovingly, with tender compassion, submitted a request for us to have a tambourine in our morning worship time. I'm sure the Lord heard that request right away. I just didn't get the message on it until today. And I know that there were times in those months that she wanted to come and stick the prod in. You say, you know how we are with the Lord sometimes, that if we don't get that answer right when we're expecting it, that we are prone to come on God. Well, she didn't do that. And I'm real thankful because I had the liberty to bring that thing today. And I. I want to use that as an opportunity to say that I know the Lord's planting seeds in your heart for different expressions, and I want you to feel not only freedom, but encouragement to act on those things. There's more people in our fellowship than just the few of us who are participating in the leadership of music. And we want many of you to feel that freedom and to make suggestions if you'd like to come sing some Sunday. Just let us know a little bit in advance. If you'd like to play an instrument, if you'd like to participate in any fashion, we want you to be involved and share in that. So next week, Mimi's going to play the tambourine. Praise the Lord. Galatians 5. And we had talked, beginning in verse one, for freedom, Christ has set us free. Stand fast, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. Over to verse 13. For you were called to freedom, brethren only. Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants of one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. But if you abide and divide one another, take heed that you are not consumed by one another. Before we get into this teaching today, we want to dismiss our kids and send them out and help them to find their way to their classes, except for the first through fifth graders. And as we do that, it's with a sense that we prey upon them the love of God, so that they don't bite and devour one another, especially the four and five year olds. Okay? And I'm anxious to share this word with you today. But we want to send the kids out first, so let's do that. Kids, would you all just stand up where you're seated right now. The ones who are going to be Leaving the four and fives and the little guys, too. Good Lord, we thank you for these little treasures. We thank you, Lord, that in them you see the purpose of your creation fulfilled. Lord, send them forth. Fill the teachers and the helpers with love, Lord, with patience, with gentleness and kindness. Let the spirit be imparted, Lord, by their very presence. And, Lord, we pray for the other children who will be in here with us today that you would speak to them and this word would find root in their hearts. In Jesus name, Amen. Okay, kids, you're dismissed. There are basically four things that I fear in talking about love. Last week, we talked about freedom in community. Today we're going to talk about love in community. And there's four things that I find are concerns of mine as we deal with this. The first one is I fear being trite. How many of you have ever seen a T shirt that says I love you, Pittsburgh? And you've seen a lot of other ones that go down from there, you know, and there's something about saying, I love you, Pittsburgh that personalizes that whole thing. I mean, I love Pittsburgh is bad enough, but I love you, Pittsburgh, as though Pittsburgh is going to rise up and return that love somehow. But we've, in our culture, as you all know, demeaned the meaning of love to the point where it's very trite to say, oh, I love my tennis racket, or I love my new shoes, or I love 31 flavors ice cream, whatever. We don't want to let that triteness immunize us to the real truth of what the word says about love. The second thing I fear is falling, having this stuff off this podium. There's no latch here. But I fear being irrelevant because you can start talking about love in very high and lofty terms, and the grandeur of love becomes something way out there that you'll never experience, or it becomes oozy. And love becomes irrelevant when it's just some sort of emotional spat that you throw on somebody. And I also fear being superficial. I fear somehow glossing over all that love means and never really coming to grips with what it means deep inside. And I believe that so much of our culture expresses love in that kind of a fashion, too. It's very superficial, even when it's well directed and well intended. The Bible talks a lot about love. And in fact, one of the major theological works that I have on my shelves said this about love just to show you that it's not superficial. It says of love. It's the central idea which expresses the whole content of the Christian faith, the central idea which expresses the whole content of the Christian faith. And far be it from us to do a shallow study of the Word. But more than those three things, I fear being quiet about love, because love is the very kernel of our fellowship. Love is not just the thread that binds us together, it is the cap which keeps us together. Love is the. Without love, we would have no Christian community, brothers and sisters. Without love, Christian community is impossible. And love is not something that we can just spout off about and say that we do and all this kind of thing if we don't really come to grips with its implications on our life. I fear being quiet about love because I think that many times we take it for granted and we don't really fully understand what it means. The Word says, make love your aim in 1st Corinthians 14. Is that your aim this morning above spirituality, above involvement and all these things? Are you aiming at love? The Word says, let all that you do be done in love in Romans 16, let all that you do. Are you teaching out of love? Are you serving out of love? The Word says that apart from love or without love, we can do nothing. And so love is so central to who we are as a fellowship that I must speak about it. But I pray by the Spirit's grace that it's not trite, that it's not shallow, and that it's not irrelevant to you. Now, the crux of the problem for most of us is not that we wonder if we should love. The crux of the problem for most of us is we find that we are unable to. How many of you know that you're under an obligation to love? So I don't need to dwell on the oughtness of love, do I? It's there. It's a commandment, brothers and sisters. It's not a suggestion. The suggestion do I leave one to another, that you love each other as I have loved you? It's a commandment, right? And so the Lord says, we must do this. But the problem is we feel that we can't. And there's two reasons, primarily. One of them is we somehow lack the motivation because of other things. And second, we frequently lack the opportunity. We don't know how to express love. And I want us to look at those things today. I want us to see that we have the ability to love. Remember last week we have a cover for this, bro. Last week we were talking about freedom, and we said that when a person receives Jesus, when a person opens their heart confesses their sin and opens their life to the Lord that they are moved from bondage to sin and to the flesh and to death and put in a position to be free to choose obedience and faith in life. But this doesn't automatically happen. And we said it was a mistake to think that once you got in this position that you would always be what the Lord wanted you to be. But frequently you found the tug back here. Well, when it comes to love, the tug is still there. To not love, to withhold love, to distort love. But, beloved, we are free to choose to love. We're going to look at that today. And I trust that the Lord will open to you some ways of seeing that release, that love dimension released in your life. Now, there's three principles that I've woven in here, but they're not the points of the message. So those of you who get all excited about the three P's of the message, they're different from the three principles. Okay, there are three P's. I didn't want to disappoint you. The first principle is that in order to become a person who loves, you must believe that you are free to love, that love can happen through you. If you don't believe that you can, then you are immediately putting yourself in a position of not being able to receive the grace of love. You've got to believe that it can happen through you. Some people believe that they're not only unlovable, but they cannot love, they cannot give love. They're too destroyed in their character to give love. They feel. But if what we said of the Bible's truth last week is that we are free, then we are free also to choose to love. And you've got to keep that before you as we look through this. Not too long ago, I had an experience with a person who I had known for a season. And I loved this person. I respected this person. I spent time with this person. And this person fell into terrific immorality. A real demonstration of Satan's power let loose in his life. And the brother fell immorally. He fell. He fell in terms of his attitude and indifference. And I knew in my spirit that there was a tug. There was part of me that was saying, I can't love him anymore. But you know something, brothers and sisters? You have people like that too, that you say when you look at them, I can't love him. They're too arrogant, they're too showy. I can't love him. They're a different color. I can't love her. She thinks she's so terrific. But you know something? The truth is that the Lord says that we're free to love. And I found that I was wrestling in my spirit, and yet God enabled me to love someone that I thought I couldn't love. And there's people here today who need to be able to love someone that they feel they can't love. What is biblical love? How is it expressed? How does it endure? I want us to look at these three things as we deal with love. The first thing is from Galatians 5, 13. You were called to freedom. Brethren only. Do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh. But through love, be servants of one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The first thing we have to see about love is that love is personal. Love is personal. It's easy for us to depersonalize just about anything in our culture. And one of the great struggles about love is that we have depersonalized love into a feeling so that we feel that we love somebody when we have some sort of emotional attraction to them. For us, in our culture, acquaintance comes first, then love. But from the Bible's point of view, love comes first than acquaintance. Now, as unreasonable as that sounds, I'm telling you, that's what love is. That's what the Bible says that love is. It's not an emotion. It's not fundamentally a feeling. Love fundamentally is God. Who knows where the Bible says God is love? Anybody quote the chapter in the verse? Boy, that's the. Listen to me. That's the number one thing people say when they say, what is God? They say God is love. And I'm willing to say, I don't want to. You know, there's no need for embarrassment here. Where does it say that? First John 4:16, right? And I think it also says it First John 4, 7, and 8, too. Listen, if you're going to learn one verse, folks, learn where it says God is love, okay? Now, if God is love and God came before anything that was, the Bible says that all things proceeded from him. What does that mean about love? If God is love, and the Bible says that God preceded everything that was, what does that mean about love? Love preceded everything. You see that love precedes Bible. Love precedes emotional attraction. Bible love precedes a fond relationship. Now, the Bible talks about love and uses three terms. There are three Greek words for love. Actually, one of them doesn't appear at all. The first one, and this is recap for some of you, it's new. For others, so bear with us. First one is Eros, from which we get the word erotic. And it's love that has to do with fulfilling a need in you. All right, One man said that. I like this. Eros, love is a ladder to reach beyond yourself. You love because somehow it gets you beyond your own limitations. Needless to say, physical love is involved there. But most of our relationships are that way. We get something out of love of a person. And Eros, love is what most of our love is made of. Now, that's not bad love. Don't misunderstand. I'm not saying that that means that that's not any good, but that's not the principal biblical word for love. That's the Greek word. And that word eros does not appear in the Greek New Testament. The second word that does appear is the filial love from which we get the word. Philadelphia, city of brotherly love. And that means primarily love, which deems pleasure found in another worth going after. Love which finds pleasure from an object. Now, that's the kind of love that we generally use in referring to our families and other, quote, loved ones. But the Bible doesn't use those words, doesn't use eros at all. And it uses philia very few times and uses a word called storge love, which only refers to it once. And I'm not even going to define it, but the word that it uses time and time again, scores of times, is agape. Or as one senior hire put it, agape. All right? A G, A P, E is the transliteration agape love. Now, listen to this. You got to grab these definitions. Is love, which demands nothing in return. And here's a precious thing. Listen to this. It's love, which springs from a sense of the preciousness of the object loved. Love, which springs from a sense of the preciousness of the object love. You see, what God is saying there is that love, his love for you, springs from the preciousness that he sees in you. He loves you simply because of who you are now, beloved. You can't change that. And that's why we can say to the world, God loves you no matter what the world does, no matter what the world says, what people say and do, God looks and sees a preciousness in that person and says, I love you. And so I find that that gives me tremendous freedom in sharing the Lord with people, because I know that the Lord loves them just because of who they are, not because of anything that they did. And some of you here today need to receive that. You think that the Lord would accept you because you've been faithful or religious, because you've tried to keep his commandments and all that kind of thing. But he loves you because he finds something precious in you apart from what you do. If that causes you some delight, would you just say amen to the Lord. John 3:16. For God so loved the world that he didn't send a committee, right? He so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. And the chief characteristic of agape love is giving over and over again. When you find grammatically agape love tied in with another action in the New Testament, it's a giving action. Over and over again, you find the word tying those two principles of love and giving love and giving. Now, agape love is only found in God. So if you're in love with biblical love, don't bother looking in yourself, folks, because it's an empty pot in there. Love only comes from God. It only flows from Him. You say, well, I know people who aren't Christians and they love their family. So do I. But I want to say to you that that love with which they love their family is not agape love. Somehow woven into that is a self interest thing, isn't it? It's the pleasure of being a good father. It's the pride of having raised my kids and gotten them through college. Part of the American way, right? But agape love loves with no expectation. The way you know that is, if that kid goes off to college and spends the dad's money and blows it, what kind of response does that elicit? You know, many times love is withdrawn. You're not my son. My son wouldn't have done that. Agape love only comes from God. And that's the second principle. Love comes through you, never from you. Now, this isn't some little semantic nitpicking here, folks, because if you're looking in yourself for the feeling of love to get started towards somebody, it is not going to happen. And it's so important to see that your focus for the source of your love is from God. And how many of you have ever faced a person in a conversation that you knew that you were struggling and you said, lord, help me to love him. I can't do it on my own. The Lord's been waiting for that. Because the love doesn't come from within you, it comes through you. It comes from the life of the Spirit in you. We are a channel of love. The word says second Corinthians chapter four. We have this treasure in earthen vessels. You see, the vessel doesn't have the capacity to love, but the treasure is in there. The treasure comes from God, and he's the one that supplies us with love. Well, didn't Jesus say, love your neighbor as yourself? Did Jesus say, love your neighbor? So you've got to have something in there. Jesus said that as a quote of the Old Testament. But Jesus final words about love in John 13 were a new commandment. Do I give you that you love one another, what, as I have loved you, Jesus? Love goes beyond our love for ourselves. I hear people say that a lot. Gotta love yourself before you love someone else. Well, the truth is, you see, there's nothing really in us to love apart from Jesus. Depends on what you think about depravity. Some people think there's good in everybody. But whatever that is, it's the grace of God in everybody. The only real good in people, the true and lasting good, the eternal good, is what Jesus brings into your life. And the rule of love at Northway Christian Community, brothers and sisters, must be to love one another. As Jesus loved us. He loved us beyond himself, even to the point of laying down his life. Now, if you're really to love, if you're to be a channel, you really can't talk about it without talking about the cross. You see here. If agape is flowing from God into you, we all find that the love comes so far and then gets stopped by the self. God's stirring in us. But we find ourselves. If the self life in us has not been dealt with and is not being dealt with, we can't be that channel. What God wants, though, is for the cross to have its working in our life, you see. So that can become a channel whereby love flows right through us. I think it's a precious thought. Just the picture in my mind that if we're stiff before the Lord and you picture a channel coming into your side like electricity, it just stops right in there. But if you're crucified with Christ, if you've laid down your right to yourself, then love can flow right here. And that's what God wants. That's his purpose in love. That's what he wants to bring forth. Now, some people say, well, it's not my gift to love. I don't have that gift. I've heard that lots of times. People say you talk about spiritual gifts. People say, what's the greatest gift? Well, it's love. Well, the Bible never says love is a gift. It's not a spiritual gift. I was talking to a man who was having quite a difficult time with his wife. And he kept saying, well, she doesn't understand me. And she keeps asking these things of me and I can't do it. And I said, well, brother, don't you think you need to love her in that? And he said, that's not my gift. Well, that's a cop out, isn't it? Because love is possible through anyone in whom the Holy Spirit dwells. Slide down in Galatians 5 and look at verse 22. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, and the evidence of the Spirit is love. I heard Chuck Smith say on the radio the other day that the evidence of the filling of the Holy Spirit really isn't tongues, it's love. And I believe that's right. People are all hung up. Well, you're only filled with the Spirit if you have a prayer language. I'll tell you, if I know a person filled with the Holy Spirit, if I see love, I see love flowing in their life. And that's an important thing, brothers and sisters. Is that available just to a couple of you? It's available to all of you. Love is available to every person because the Holy Spirit yearns to flow through you. Okay, so love is personal. It's found in a person. It's God's love. It's the only place we get it. Second, love is practical or specific. It's one thing for someone to stand up and say, and I'm not putting down people who've given this kind of testimony, but they'll stand up and say, I just love everybody here. That's as far as it goes. Just splats right out. I love everybody here. But when you get down to the real nitty gritty of specifically caring for someone, well, they're out the door as soon as we're done. A few years back, we used the term sloppy agape. Sloppy agape is love that is not defined. It's love that's not directed. It's love that never reaches its object. Now I love people who are able to exude a warmth. It used to trouble me when I came to Memorial Park Church seven or eight years ago. One of the guys that preceded me there was a terrifically exuberant, kind of bubbly guy. And one thing I heard the first summer about 2,600 times was how loving he was. Because he could smile all the time. And he just had one of those contagious kind of laughs like Nancy, just terrifically appealing kind of personality. And I know that some of the people, especially the kids, thought that I didn't love them because I wasn't that way and I wanted to be that way. I stayed at night in the mirror and try to. When you're starting out in a ministry, you're really looking for acceptance. Just do anything. But it wasn't in me. I began to realize, though, that really love went beyond that. And I realized that I was loving the kids. And it took them a while to realize it, too. Some of them left before that was able to really come forth. Love must be directed and channeled in order to be effective. I heard this definition, which I want to pass on to you. Practical love is a volitional commitment to another that motivates us to act on their behalf. It's a volitional commitment, commitment of our will to another that motivates us to act on their behalf. So that if you love somebody, you do something again. Love and action, love and giving. It's always linked, brothers and sisters. And I want to say that this As I was praying about this yesterday, the Lord spoke to my heart that many in this room today know a lot about love in their head, but have not really begun to work out the implications of love in your hearts. And that we stand on the brink of getting so big here that love becomes indefined and undirectable. And we must see it's your responsibility, every one of you, your responsibility to love and to be specific and practical in it. We cannot afford sloppy agape. The Bible says to love our enemies and do good to them. God so loved the world that he gave his only son. Jesus said, love me and keep my commandments. Paul said in 2nd Corinthians 8, prove the sincerity of your love by your giving to the churches. Hebrews 10:24. To build up one another in love and good deeds. And here in Galatians 5:13. But through love, be servants of one another. You know, I find something interesting. Jesus never said to a crowd of people, I love you. I thought, God is love. Jay. Jesus Christ incarnated love. He was love on wheels. He loved everywhere he went. But, you know, he never stood up and cried and said, I love you. Do you know that? I didn't recognize that until I really started to. But did he love these disciples? He loved them to the death. He loved them. In every action that the Scripture records, He loved them. In every attitude that he had toward them, he loved them. He demonstrated his love. And how do we, in a fellowship this big, begin to learn to Love in specific. We're already too big to be a nifty little group where everyone knows everybody else. How do we begin to channel that love? I'll tell you. Love is expressed and experienced one person or one family at a time. It's a cop out, beloved, to just say we love everyone and not really experience that one person or one family at a time. And it's easy for us to do that. It's easy for us to shoot the gun all over the place and not hit the targets, right? It's very easy. I find it a real struggle in my life. Bob, would you come up a minute, please? I'm not going to ask you to do anything. I just want to demonstrate something. This is Bob Rudolph, and he's been with us for a while. I don't have a long standing relationship with him, but I want to express to Bob my love for him as a brother in Christ. And, Bob, I want you to know that I'm committed to you. And I want you to know that I will never knowingly say anything to hurt you or pull you down. I want you to know, Bob, that if there's anything that I have that you need that's available to you and that any way that I can, if I can encourage you to be the person that God wants you to be, I want to do that. And I want you to know, Bob, that whatever happens, no matter what you get into what happens in the future, this commitment of mine is not going to change. And the thing of it all is that you don't have to respond to that. It's going to be there. I love you. Thank you. Okay, Now, I said that out loud because I mean it. And I said it to a man that I don't really know that well. But I know God calls me to love him. And I pray that we can give that love to every person here. I pray that love would be so practical, that every person here would know that we, as a fellowship, extend love to you. One of the things that I yearn for in my heart is that no one would leave this fellowship and go home alone. That on Sundays after Sunday after our worship gathering, you would not leave here and go home alone. But you say, well, gee, I have dinner right after church and I need to get back to that. Take somebody with you. It's amazing how you can stretch to feed another person, isn't it? Well, then somebody says, well, up until today, Jay, I could do that. But today the Steelers come on at one o'. Clock. Maybe that person likes Football. I'm not saying you go home and get your Bible out and start reading to them. Just be with them. Share what you have with them. Share your enthusiasm for the Steelers with them. Someone says, well, this is a time I'm with my wife. Well, all right, I'm not going to, you know, draw a line somewhere there. But be open, brothers and sisters, to the fact that there are a lot of single people here, there are a lot of lonely people here, and there are a lot of very comfortable and satisfied people here. And we can add joy to another person's heart by opening our doors to a person. I really believe that. And I know that that's a strain and it impinges on all of our things, but we've got to begin loving, specifically, loving directly. You know, I found, too, that when I began to examine my own heart in this thing of love, I found that one of the reasons why I hold back is because I feel like I'm the only one doing it ever feel that way. I'm the only one that's lending my car so and so just got a new car. They'll never lend that out. I'm the only one that's visiting the people in the nursing home. If those women that we're getting together and talking about recipes all the time, I wouldn't have to go as often. You ever feel that way. What difference does it make if I'm the only one that's loving? Well, you see, it makes all the difference in the world because it multiplies. And don't let Satan lie to you and say that your love doesn't matter or your love doesn't counter. It's not good enough. If you're the only one here that's loving, then God, by the name of and the grace of God, don't quit, but add to it. How can we love? Practically, many times it's just your presence. It's just a phone call. It's just a visit. You don't have to do anything. You know, the word here in the Greek, in Galatians 5:13, is through love, be servants. That's the word doulos, which means household slave. And that means you just do the basic things. Folks, there's some people here that you could walk into the foyer of their home and eat off of it. I dare you to do that in my house. Right? But some of you could love our family by helping there. And we could love another family by spending some time with them. And we all have these things we don't need to be real complex and cute about how we love. We can just love simply. And I want you to know this. I believe it's happening. Mary Lou Campbell told me just this last week when Sandy Leese. We had a request last week to have Sandy Lisa's home cleaned. And she said that four women showed up to do that. Now, that's a pretty good crew. You ever see women with their bandanas in their hair and sleeves rolled up, and it's awesome. They just step back and let them go to work. Well, apparently when they got there, they went right to work and they were charging through and rejoicing. They weren't saying, oh, this is really dirty. They were doing it with joy. And a neighbor came and I think I'm getting this story right. A neighbor came and was watching it. She said, I just don't believe this. I just don't believe this. Well, that's what happens when Christians will demonstrate love. The world doesn't believe it because it's foreign to the world. And the Bible says the world will know that you are my disciples by your love for one another. Finally, love is personal, it's practical, and it's persevering. Don't you just swell up with great comfort in your spirit when you read the end of Romans 8? Why don't you turn over there, just a few pages back? Don't lose Galatians 5. There's another point there. Romans 8 says this, Verse 38. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. And then 1 Corinthians 13. Just look at it. Get it cemented in your mind. First Corinthians 13, Verse 7. Look. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things. There it is. Endures all things. Let's read it together. Love never ends. Now, it's one thing for us to take the initiative in loving. We need that beloved. We need people who will step out of themselves and take the initiative in loving. But there comes a time when love is put to the test. Back in Galatians 5, you'll see. Moving on from 5 into 6, it says, verse 9, Galatians 6, 9. And let us not grow weary in well doing, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart. There comes a time when your love is put to the test. Now, anyone who's a parent knows that that your love is put to the test, right? Two years ago, I had a conversation with a person who had a foster child, 14 year old, that had been placed in their home. And this child, this boy was particularly difficult. But for the first couple of months he really was alright. He was well behaved, did what he was told. And the parents really sought to give that child love. They provided for him, they spent time with him. You can't love without spending time, brothers and sisters. But after two months, this boy came to the point of recognizing that he had to challenge that love and his inner man. There was something that wanted to put that love to the test. And that boy put those foster parents through a hell. And for three months he was disobedient. He would stretch the rules every time he could. He would go through periods for days and not say anything to them. And do you know, the parents, rather than rejecting him at that point, recognized that love endures all things. And after three months he was stirred in his heart and he broke down in tears and he said, I've never had anyone love me l