Biblical Love Part I

Scripture calls us to love our neighbor as ourselves. It is quite a difficult task so in light of that, do we have any way out of loving everyone?  Let's check it out...

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Welcome to our two-part series on love. We're taking a break from Ecclesiastes and looking at love according to our Lord and Savior. And there's a number of ways we can look at love. We can look at the type of love that our Father has for us through his Son Jesus, and we can look at the Great Commandment. And that's really where we're going to focus in this study. Great Commandment is split up into two parts. Part one, if you will, is loving the Lord with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. We're going to focus on part two, which is loving our neighbor as ourselves. Now, the love that the Father has for us is an agape love. That's a Greek word. And we're going to discuss the meaning of that word in the study. So if you're interested in that, you can stay tuned. Then we're going to look at the type of love that the Lord has commanded us to have for our neighbor. And so if this interests you, if you think you want to hear what the Lord has to say regarding how we are to love our neighbor, then tune in. Here we go. Thanks for joining. First, I have to uh sort of ask your indulgence with me. I did my very, very, very best at trying to make this one session. And if you look through my notes right now, you'll see stuff that's crossed off, that's scribbled off, trying to shorten us to a point where we could get through this by 8 o'clock or 5 to 8. And I couldn't do it. It is an incredibly wonderful topic to speak of, especially when we look at the love that the Lord has for us. But it but our focus in these two evenings is going to be on the way we love others. And I just couldn't get it done. I uh tried, but I couldn't. So next week, even though I said we're going to take a one-week break from Ecclesiastes, it's going to be a two-week break from Ecclesiastes. And I want to start out with this statement, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart. If there is a study into God's Word where all of us, all of us, need to really listen to the words of the Holy Spirit, then that, but then throughout tonight and hopefully well beyond tonight, carefully look at our own hearts, because it will only be then that we ever can hope to have a change in our in the way that we love those that are around us. Now I know that we're all at different places in our lives when it comes to love. I'm not speaking again about being loved. I'm talking about giving love. Because that, again, is what we are going to focus on in this study. So for the sake of drawing closer to Jesus, for the sake of honoring him through your obedience, please, as we've already said, push the things of this world into the background as hard as that might be tonight. And listen. Not to me. Not to me. But listen to the Lord. Listen to the Holy Spirit. You need to open your heart and your mind to allow him to speak to you. My prayer is that the study will change all of us, including me, of course. For I am I am not any different from you guys just because I put this together only means that I know what I'm going to say unless the Lord changes it before you know what I'm going to say. I may even be worse than anybody in this room with regard to how I display the love of Christ to others around me. But no masks, no hypocrisy. I'm talking about internally now, right? Just honesty with yourself and with your God. All right? That's your assignment tonight. And so let's start. I'm starting with Matthew 22, 37 through 41, and I'm going to read out of the ESV. And he said to him, this is Jesus, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. If I turn to Mark and read the same passage in Mark, Mark adds the word strength in there. You shall love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and all your strength. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets. Are these commandments important? I guess they're important, right? On these two commandments depend all the law and all the prophets. If you want to wrap up everything that the Lord gave to his chosen people in the Old Testament, if you want to wrap up everything every prophet, including John, spoke on behalf of the Lord. You take all those things, everything that was said, that would be a predominance of the word of God. Right? And Jesus said, you can bring that all the way down to these two commandments. You can bring them all the way down. That's how important these are. Now, when you or I think of the greatest commandment, which we just read, what part is easier to attain? Let me put it another way. We fail at both parts. We know that. But which one do you think you do better at? Is it loving God with all your heart, mind, and soul, or is it loving your neighbor as yourself? And I want us all to think about this for a moment. Which one do you think, as I ask myself or have asked myself, which one do I think I we're imperfect? We're not close to the way that we should be doing it. But if you had to make a choice and you looked at your life over the past however many years you've been saved, which one do you think you do better at? As I looked at this great commandment myself, I thought to myself, as bad a job as I do it loving God, I think it's better than the job I do loving my neighbor. I don't know if anybody falls into that same camp or not, but we've probably spent more time praising our Lord this evening than I have loving my neighbor today. Love. Love. If there's one thing that this world is fascinated by and drawn by, the one thing that everyone yearns for, it's love. It penetrates into all who we are. It's intellectual, it's emotional, and it's spiritual. Our souls long for it, and our hearts are always on the lookout for it, seeking to find it. For those that have found it on this planet, there's nothing that compares to it. What does love say to us? Love says that you're not living all by yourself in a vacuum. Love says, I am listening to you, I hear you. Love says, believe it or not, I understand you. Love says, I know you all the way through, and despite your deepest fears and your deepest flaws, you are extremely valuable. If there's one thing in the world that can have you or me sail away, fly away, or imagine paradise, it's being loved. Yet why is this love so elusive for most of us? As much as we yearn for it, we so often can't find it. And I'm talking about on a horizontal basis here. We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves, but way too often we simply don't do that. When we receive love, we want it to be given to us without any strings attached. We want to be loved for just exactly who we are, just as I described earlier. You're valuable. I hear you. You're you have worth. I understand you no matter how flawed you are. That's how we want to be loved. And wonderfully, that's exactly how our Lord and Savior loves us. But when we in turn need to love someone else, we do so conditionally. We won't love someone who isn't exactly or at least close to who we want them or we think they should be. I will love them if they change this attitude. I will love them if they stop doing this or doing that, or if they treat me better than they have. Then they've got a shot at receiving some of my love. And so we rationalize, if we think about it at all, we rationalize that it's okay not to love them because they, at least in our minds, simply are lovable. But what does the Bible say about that type of love? In Matthew 5, 46, Jesus says this for if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? Jesus is not talking about a reward here on earth. He's talking about a reward in heaven. And what he's saying is, if you're only gonna love those that meet your criteria for love, if you're only gonna love those that love you, no reward in heaven. And oh, by the way, you're loving just the way the world loves. Do not the tax collectors do that? He could have put in any other profession in there. Does that sound okay to us? We say, no, that doesn't sound okay. But do our actions demonstrate that we love unconditionally? Think about it, what we're saying is that we know that we're to love unconditionally, but we don't. And in actuality, I think maybe if we're completely honest with ourselves and honest with the Lord, we're okay with that. And the reason I say that is because we seem to be, and I'm looking not at any individual, I'm looking at myself, guys, and if anywhere else, the church as a whole. Since we're so, we seem to be so nonchalant about not loving unconditionally, which is known as sin, we don't even ask for forgiveness for not loving unconditionally. It's not even part of our makeup anymore, if it ever was. My, oh, my, what a hole we have dug for ourselves. It's important that we define the type of love that we're talking about here, the type of love that Jesus has commanded us to show others around us. We're going to be talking about the love as it's used in the New Testament. We have one word in the English language for love, and that's kind of a shame because we can say, Oh, I love that TV program, right? I love the way those flowers look in the springtime. I love my job, and I love my wife. Do all those things mean the same thing? Obviously, they don't. Well, Greek actually has at least seven, if not eight, but in my study, at least seven words for love. I'm just going to uh mention a couple of them. One of the words for love, I don't believe this is used in the Bible, but a Greek word for it is called storge. And that's a family love. That's a love that a parent has for their child or a child has for their parent. It's a kind of love like you might say, uh, I love my sister even though I really don't like her, or I love my dad even though he really messed up raising me. It's that, it's that kind of love. And then we have Phileo love. Philaleo love is a brotherly love. Best friends will display uh this type of love. It is a giving love, it is an affectionate love for the other person in the friendship because it makes each person in that friendship the happiest when they're making the other person happy or joyful. It's a close love. And it's a good love, but it's not agape love. And that's the love we're gonna talk about tonight. When Paul talks about love in 1 Corinthians 13, when Jesus talks about love, it's agape love. That's the kind of love it is. So let's make sure we understand what agape love is before we start talking about what Paul is preaching to us in 1 Corinthians 13. Agape love speaks of the most powerful, the most noblest type of love. It is sacrificial love. Agape is way more than a feeling for the other person, it is an act of the will. We've mentioned it before many times. Love is not true love, agape love is not an emotion, it is an action verb. It's not a noun, it's an action verb. This is the love that God has for his people and that prom that prompted the sacrifice of his only son Jesus to die for our sins. Jesus was agape love personified. And Christians are to love with the same agape love. We can use the parable of the Good Samaritan as an example of that. So, how is this agape love so much different from other forms of love? The essence of agape love is goodwill and benevolence and willful delight in the object of the beloved. The one who is acting out agape love is not happy until the recipient of that love is improved in every way possible that the lover, that the agape lover wants for his beloved. The type of love that characterizes our God is not a sappy, sentimental feeling such as we may hear often portrayed. God loves because that is his nature and the expression of his very essence, his very being. You can say you love somebody until the cows jump over the moon. And if that love is not put into action by you toward that person, there's no agape love. There is no agape love. God's love is displayed obviously most clearly at the cross at Calvary. Paul tells us God being rich in mercy, rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us. Even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ, by grace you have been saved. What incredible love that is. We did not deserve such a sacrifice, but again, Paul tells us this time in the book of Romans, but God demonstrates his own love for us while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Do you see the action love there, the agape love? God did what he did. Jesus did what he did. The Holy Spirit does what he does because of agape love from him to us. As we stated already, he loves the unlovable. It is gracious, and it is constantly seeking the benefit of the ones he loves. The Bible says that we are the undeserving recipients of his lavish agape love, 1 John 3, 1. God's demonstration of agape love led to the sacrifice again of the Son of God for those that he loves. He gave it all. With that as the basis for the way we're supposed to love, let's continue on, because we are to love others with that same love. Well, we can't do it the way he did it. He's God, he's perfect, we're not. But that's the standard. That's the goal. That's where the finish line is, and that's what we need to be running toward. And not only are we to love others with the God they love, we need to love them whether they're fellow believers. Listen to John 13, 34. A new commandment I give to you that you love one another, this is Jesus speaking, just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. Is there any doubt in anybody's mind after hearing that scripture that we are to have agape love for every brother and sister in Christ? He doesn't leave it. There's no escape hatch here. There's none whatsoever. A new commandment I give you. And the reason this is a new commandment, even though we find this commandment in the Old Testament, is because now we can look at what Jesus did while he walked on this earth. We can see, we can see the true love of God through Christ. And so now Jesus says, I'm gonna give you a new commandment. Now that you've seen how I've responded to every situation that has come across me in my public life, I'm gonna give you this new commandment that you love one another just as I have loved you. So we're to love fellow believers. What about enemies? How about this passage in Matthew 5.44 where Jesus is speaking to his disciples? This is part of the Sermon on the Mount. And his disciples come up to him and they ask him a question, and so now he's preaching to them, he's preaching to us. We are his disciples. Here's what he says, Matthew 5, 44 5.44. But I say to you, I say, Jesus says to me, love your enemies and pray for those that persecute you. Love your enemies. Love your brothers and sisters in Christ the way Jesus loved us, and love our enemies, and that is an agape love. Again, Jesus gave the parable of the Good Samaritan as an example of sacrifice for the sake of others, even for those who may care nothing at all for us. The Good Samaritan is a great example, because the Samaritan walking along the road didn't know who the guy was, all beat up and robbed on the side of the road. The uh priest and the Levi didn't know him either, but they you know split and went on the other side of the road. And this good Samaritan not only does he do his best to try and help the guy there, but then takes him to an inn and tells the innkeeper, you here's some money, you keep him here, and if he needs to stay here longer, I'm paraphrasing, I'll be back and I'll pay you the difference. That's agape love. That's a love that is not expecting anything in return. That's a love that is motivated by benevolence towards someone that he didn't even know. That in our lives you and I may not ever run across their paths again. Unfortunately, agape love does not come to us naturally. I don't think anyone's going to debate that because we know uh if you're even we know we're we're we're not loving the way we should love. We're not, it's not an agape love. Because of our fallen nature, we are incapable of producing such a love. If we're to love as God loves, that love, that agape love, can only come from its source. And that source is him. This is the love that has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us when we became his children. Romans 5, 5 says this. And hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Do we have the ability to give agape love? Absolutely. That passage tells us that we do. God's love has been poured out into our hearts. God's agape love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. In Galatians 5, 22 and 23, a very common passage, a very well-known passage, but the fruit of the Spirit, what does it start with? Love. The fruit of the Spirit. So Paul says God has poured out his agape love into us through his Holy Spirit who dwells within us. And what's the first sign of him dwelling within us? Of us being obedient to him? Love. Love. That's the fruit of the Spirit. That's the outpouring of the Spirit of God that's dwelling within us. If only we will say, I want to please him and not me. This is how we know what love is. 1 John 3.16. By this we know love. That he, Jesus, laid his life down for us. And listen, this is a passage that I had forgotten about if I ever really read it well. By this we know love that he, Jesus, laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. Because of God's love toward us, because of God's love dwelling within us and in the Holy Spirit, we are able to love one another. We are able to love our enemies. We are able to pray for those that persecute us. One little note here is that as we begin to read chapter 13, we must remember that this chapter does not sit all by itself, obviously. Chapter 13 needs to be studied in the context of the rest of Paul's letter to the Corinthians. The words of Paul in this passage will uncover weaknesses, gaps, failures, and sins, not only in the Corinthian community, but in our community. Your church, my church, your life, my life. It is a particular challenge. This is 1 Corinthians 13. It is a particular challenge to any church which has seen outward success in its ministry. How easy it is for us to focus on a ministry and give God all the praise for its success and yet lose sight of the fact that love must be the driving force for whatever we do within and outside of the church. The words that Paul writes in this chapter should humble us because we begin to see what really, really matters to God. It is foremost on his list. You got a sacrifice to give him, but you got something against your brother, or your brother has something against you. What does he tell us to do? Go straighten out your problem with your brother, then come back, right? What's more important to God? The relationship, the reconciliation, the love that we're to have for our brothers or sisters in Christ, Christ, way more important than any sacrifice, any gift we may want to give him on a Sunday morning. These words, again, should humble us. They redirect us as the body of Christ to our true calling. And our true calling is the great commandment. All the other things that we are commanded to do in God's word fall under those two things. So when you or and I are doing anything for the Lord, we can and should always ask this question: is it in response to my love for God or is it an action of my love for either a brother or sister in Christ or my most bitter enemy or anywhere in between? If the answer is yes, then go do it. Then go do it. Because you want to know something? You can't be wrong. Because all the law and all the prophets fall underneath that great commandment. Everything else that God has said in his word falls under that greatest of commandments. We can check ourselves every step of the way in our Christian walk. Are we doing what we're doing because we're following that great commandment, which is to love? And incidentally, all of our churches, the leadership of all of our churches, should be looking at this on a regular basis and determining whether their church has just lost their first love, just like we read about in Revelation, and make sure that if they see that, that they fix it and fix it quickly and redirect us. And in our own personal lives, we need to do the same thing on a regular basis. In light of chapter 12, which we're not going to go over, but it does talk about some of the spiritual gifts and the way that the Corinthians were putting more focus on their giftedness than they were on love. And Paul has to get in the midst of these guys. There was more problems than that. I'll quickly list off 10 or 11 of them. But Paul is saying that the most dramatic and wonderful gifts that we can imagine that we've been given, uh, that have been given to us by God are useless. Oh, I I go out on this ministry every week or every month, or I'm a behind-the-scenes person every week or every month. Hey, that's great. Why are you doing it? Because if the answer isn't love, love for God and love for those that are your neighbors, then what you're doing from a reward standpoint, useless. As FF Bruce says this listen, the most lavish exercise of spiritual gifts cannot compensate for lack of love. Can't do it. Now, before we look at what Paul is about to say about love, and it is we've read this chapter probably so many times. One of the reasons it's it's it's extracted from the Bible at weddings and funerals and kind of sits all by itself is because there is incredible beauty in the words that Paul wrote that the Holy Spirit uh guided him to write in this chapter. But it doesn't belong as a standalone passage, it belongs where it is in Scripture. It is a response to the Corinthian church really messing up badly. And it's a response to you and me in our lives and our church or your church and where it is now when it's messing up badly. And it's messing up badly when it's not driven by love. So let's one more time talk about agape love because if we don't remember it and how important it is, then how are we going to be able to follow the command of loving in an agape way? So let me just add a couple more things to what agape love is. First thing that I found interesting is this the the word agape was apparently not used generally in the Greek language. It was taken into the Greek of the New Testament specifically because the love of God seen in and through Jesus of Nazareth required a new and better word. God's love completely transcends all human ideas or expression of love. So again, as his ways are higher than our ways, they're different than our ways, so is his love different from the way, even the way that we can love. It is a love for the utterly unworthy, a love which proceeds from a God who is love. It is a love lavished on others without a thought of whether they are worthy to receive it or not. It proceeds rather from the nature of the lover than from any merit of the beloved. This is the true, this is the love which, according to Jesus, has to characterize the control of the Christian community, if it is in any sense to be recognized as Christian, and if he is to be recognized as God's Son, the world's savior. It all starts with our love for him, our neighbor, our enemy. For these basic reasons, Paul spells out why Christian community life without love is nothing or even worse than nothing, as he does in the first three verses. And again, when I say when I say Christian community, we're all part of a Christian community with our churches and our fellowshipping right here in a community in our ministries that we partake with, but it is us. When Paul speaks to the Corinthian church, he's speaking to individual believers that make up the church. Paul will now describe to us, anyone that reads this passage, what love is, what love is not, and what love does. How important is that? Let's find out what love is. This is agape love. Every use of the word love in chapter 13 is the Greek word agape. Paul is going to tell us what love is, what it isn't, and then what does love do? Pretty important. And finally, toward the end of this chapter, uh, he will paint a lasting and an eternal quality of love, which outlives knowledge and prophecy and all the stuff that he mentions beforehand, along with outliving faith and hope as well, because all those things will fade away and not be needed, but love endures forever. So let's move to 1 Corinthians chapter 13. I'm going to read these verses out of the New King James Version in deference to my lovely wife's Bible. I want us to remember this. This is the Apostle Paul. This is the apostle Paul that's going to write these first, all these verses, but think about who he is. You know, perhaps the greatest apostle of all of them. What he went through for the Lord, how he loved the Lord with every breath that he took, how he loved the saints with every breath he took, how he loved the lost with every breath he took, all the things that he gave up, all the things that he went through to see the glory of the gospel of Jesus Christ preached. It was so important to him that he said if anybody preaches anything other than Christ and him crucified, let him be damned. Let him go to hell. That's how emphatic Paul was about preaching the love of Christ and the only way to get to heaven. Here's this man saying these words. Though I, Paul, the Apostle Paul, speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become a sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. And though I, Paul, the Apostle Paul, have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. And although I bestow all of my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing. Let's stop there and go through these first three verses, and then I'll continue on with verse four, because he changes starting in verse four. The primary focus on this passage of love is creates a pitfall for every Christian that's ever lived, including ourselves. So we must be careful not to fall into it. We might call this, we might think of this passage as being a Christian's basic code of conduct. So we need to review with regularity, not just one night or two nights out of the year. We need to review this with regularity, compare our own attitudes, our own words, our own thoughts, our own actions toward others against what God is requiring us to do. We will fall short. There is no question about that. But to fall short of these words and to brush them off as inconsequential or meaningless in our daily lives is a mistake that not only draws us away from the light of Christ, instead of showing the love that God has for us and those around us, believer and non-believer alike, it actually emulates what everyone sees daily in the world around them. A spirit of hate, a spirit of self-centeredness, a spirit of self-importance, a lack of care or concern for others, and certainly without agape love, all led by the prince of this world. So as we go through these first few verses tonight, out of love, I'm going to repeat myself, out of love for your precious Savior, have a true desire to please him through obedience to word, to his word, and pin these commandments on your heart. Do not, I beg you, I implore you, do not leave this place tonight and continue to live your life and love those around you the way you have in the past, even if it was very good, because everyone has a next step. If lovelessness actively repels people from the church, which it does, you know, who's that Baptist? Who are those Baptist guys that hold the signs up and you're going to hell and uh, you know, in front of abortion clinics or you're a homosexual and you're going to hell, and I forget it, some Baptist church. How many people are drawn to them to hear the gospel? That's my guess. Zero. They don't want anything to do with them. Are they displaying love? Are they portraying agape love in front of these people that if they die in their present sins, they will spend an eternity in hell? No. What are they really doing? What they're really doing is this: I'm better than you. You need to join me to be right. That's not the way it works. We show people Jesus through the love, the agape love that we have for them. Do we agree with their stance? Do we agree with abortion? Do we agree with homosexual marriage? Do we agree with all this trans stuff? Of course not. And we need to stand our ground on all the things that God calls holy. He's not asking us to back away from that. But how do we stand that ground? In love. We look at them as we once were: sinners in the hands of an angry God, being held over hellfire, waiting for us to take the last breath, and then we drop into eternity, into a fiery, bottomless pit where there's weeping and gnashing of the teeth. That's where all of us were. That's where they are. You want to wag your finger in their face, or do you want to tell them what the love of God has done for you in your life and that He is waiting to do that for them as well? If they don't listen, that's their problem. But that's our marching orders. Love, love, love. Without love in your life or mine, it negatively affects our work before our God. God cannot use the loveless Christian for his glory, even if he or she is gifted with prophetic speaking, even if he or she is able to understand and explain some of the deep things of God, even if he or she can draw exactly the problem, the stress between man and Satan, even if he or she is knowledgeable about some great truth that escapes most of the world, even if he or she has a deep and bold faith, the faith which can move mountains. Without love, that makes us nothing, according to Paul. Nothing. Again, in verse 1, though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I'm a sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. The Corinthians were having a whole bunch of problems in the church. We can't go into them because of time constraints, but if you're interested in them, and they're a mess, chapters 9, 10, 11, and 12 highlights some of the issues that they were having. Briefly, I'm going to just give them to you in summation real quickly so that you understand what Paul is responding to when he writes these things. The church at Corinth had divided loyalty to different leaders, and Paul rejects this disunity, telling the church members to focus on Christ. There was gross immorality in the Corinthian church, and it was being tolerated, Paul tells the church that they must exercise church discipline. Believers were taking each other to court. Paul says they should handle these disagreements among themselves. There was some confusion about whether or not it was better to be married or single and how married people should relate to other people. Paul clarifies those issues for them and for the church today. Because of the mixed background of the church in Corinth, food was an area of conflict and concern. Jews had strict dietary laws while Gentiles did not. How could they maintain table fellowship? Meat sold in the marketplace may have been sacrificed to an idol before being sold. Could a Christian eat that meat? How should a Christian respond to a fellow believer who holds a different opinion? Paul says that the Christian is free to eat anything as long as he is not actively participating in idol worship. However, if a Christian's freedom causes spiritual harm to another believer by enticing him to do something against his or her conscience, Paul says the Christian should voluntarily curtail his freedom for the sake of his fellow Christian. Paul addresses the extent of women's involvement in worship services. He deals with problems the Corinthians were having in their gatherings, including abuses of the Lord's suffer and their misuse of spiritual gifts. The Corinthians were also confused about the future resurrection. It seems that some of them were questioning whether or not those who had died in Christ would be raised bodily. Paul affirms that just as Jesus rose bodily, so also will the Corinthian believers. Paul also gives the Corinthian church instructions on giving money to support ministries, and he enjoins the principle of grace giving versus an obligation based on a set percentage. In spite of all those things, and this is important, he's going to address the spiritual gift issue and the love issue in chapter 13. But listen to what Paul says in light of all these problems that you and I have, at least some of them. Here's what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1, 2. He refers to the Corinthians as, quote, those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be his holy people. God never gives up on us. He never gives up. But I want to tell you this as well that you are sanctified in Christ Jesus and you are called to be his holy people. He's not let you go. He is faithful for all eternity. He's called you to be holy. I'm now going to show you where you've fallen short, how you need to change, and it's going to come through in part in chapter 13 of 1 Corinthians. Not the only place, but it's what we're studying. And you know, it might be easy to read this passage, these passages in both 1st and 2 Corinthians. Um, if we think that, well, you know what Paul really means is that we can, we, we, we're not as good as we could be if we don't show love. Or we could always do a better job if we don't show love. He doesn't say that. He doesn't say that. He is very matter of fact when he goes through these verses and tells people that without love, you're nothing. He starts out with the fact that if he was able to speak in every language on the planet Earth, and even if he could converse with angels in the spiritual realm, or spoke in tongues, I suppose, and could do so, but without love. His words, whenever he spoke, would be like a sounding brass or a resounding gong. ESV says a noisy gong. Noisy gong, right? There's no melody, there's no harmony, there's nothing to it. It's just, you know, like a symbol smashing. There's no note that a symbol plays. However, that symbol is built, that's the only sound it can make when you smash it together. And it's just, it doesn't add anything, it just interrupts the conversation. It's a noise that doesn't let the conversation, which is supposed to be love, to be able to propagate because there's this clanging symbol or this noisy gong. In other words, Paul's great words of communication to all who live in the world would be just like an annoying distraction unless his words came from a heart of agape love. You see, in these first few verses, Paul asks the Corinthians, and he asks us, to imagine a world without love. And he directly focuses on what the Christian says and what he does. And in each of these instances, he is going to ask us to imagine a world, again, without love. And so as we read this, think of what kind of world that would be. No love. Because Paul, everything Paul says in these first three verses is, but without love, I am nothing. Or I gain nothing. Paul was addressing the fact that the Corinthians were placing speaking in tongues and other spiritual gifts as a very important as very important gifts, but he puts them in their place by stating that speaking in tongues, having the knowledge to speak in every every earthly tongue, and even to speak to angels is worthless if it's not done with agape love. So let's bring this to you and to me. Paul says the same thing to us, you know. You or I think we're a hot shot Christian because we can quote verse after verse of the Bible. You or I think that we're all that because we can debate our faith with the best of them. You or I think that, you know, maybe we've got the gift of tongues, might be debatable whether or not you, depending on what you believe. Does that mean anything all by itself? While all those things would be wonderful if you were gifted by God with them, Paul says all you're doing is making noise. If agape love is not the foundation of your words. Hmm. You mean when I speak, the foundation of my words should sometimes be agape love? No. The words that we speak to whomever we're speaking to should have a foundation of agape love behind them. How hard is it to get angry, to yell, and to scream at somebody if agape love is at the foundation of your words? I don't think you can do it. Unless you're screaming at your top of your lungs about Jesus. You think that quoting scripture for knowledge's sake is really worth much? Or it might impress fellow believers and you might even use it at the right time in defending your faith. But why are you doing it? Why did you take the time to memorize the word? Why are you actually standing before a non-believer arguing with him or her about Jesus? Is it to show others what you know? Is it to show God what you know? None of us, I don't think, would go in a discussion with a non-believer and say, Lord, watch this. But, you know, what's the real purpose of the discussion? Is it just to win the argument? See, God, I got the blue ribbon in this debate. I knew more scripture, I defended you to the nth degree, and that non-believer lost this debate. Is it to be able to show off your skills to others, your spouse, your pastor, people in this room? If that's why we do it, Paul says, save your breath. Save your breath. You're just making noise. Love has to be at the bottom. It has to be the foundation of everything we say. When we quote scripture to a non-believer, we do it because we have agape love for that non-believer, that we truly don't want them to go to hell, that we want to present the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ. If they reject it, they reject it. That's their call. But if we go to them in love, and by the way, let me add this. Can we not tell someone about the gospel if we have agape love for them? We can't. We can't not say anything. Can we not say anything to a sibling or a mom and dad or anybody like that that's dying and say, well, I just hope. No, agape love is going to drive us to say, I want to do everything out of love for this person to make sure they know the truth. When we don't tell somebody about the truth and we let them pass into eternity, have we really loved them? Agape love? Was their eternal life so important to us because we love them so much, even if it's not love that's generated in ourselves, but from the Holy Spirit dwelling within us? How could we let them go? How could we let them go? The love that must be the source for all that flows from our lips must be a love that is for others growing out of God's love for you and me. That's what we do. We're not the light. We reflect the light. Jesus dwells within us through the Holy Spirit. He is light. We have an opportunity to reflect that light. Like the moon reflects the light of the sun. The moon has no light, but it reflects the light of the sun. You can look out on a cloudless night and you can see that moon if it's in most of its phases. It's reflecting the light of the sun. We have no light in this flesh, but we have the Spirit of God dwelling. We have the Lord dwelling in us, uh dwelling in us, and we have an opportunity to reflect that light. How do we reflect that light? It's one way. It's love. It's love for him, and it's love for those around us. Friend or foe. This love that we must have for our enemies and our brothers and sisters needs to be surrounded by a profound thoughtfulness, kindness, and unselfish concern for others, regardless of who they are and where life has them at any time. So the obvious question is when we speak, is it from love or is there another motive for our speech? I hate to stop now. But in light of the clock, I'm going to I want to uh read this to you and I'll close. Or I'll ask somebody to close for us. So this was written by a twentieth century theologian. And if someone, whoever uh would feels moved to do so, if you would close us out after this, that would be great. This man's name is uh H. Richard Naibor. And he has written a beautiful definition of love that unfolds the idea of agape love in addition to what we've talked about tonight. Love is rejoicing over the existence of the beloved one. It is the desire that he or she be rather than not be. It is a longing for their presence when they are absent. It is happiness in the thought of them. It is profound satisfaction over everything that makes them great and glorious. Love is gratitude. It is thankfulness for the existence of the beloved one. It is the happy acceptance of everything that they give without a feeling of jealousy. It is a gratitude that does not seek equality. It is a wonder over the other's gift of himself in companionship. Love is reverence. It keeps its distance as it draws near. It does not seek to absorb the other in the lover self or want to be absorbed by it. It rejoices in the otherness of the other, the uniqueness of the other person, the differences of the other person when compared to us. It desires the beloved to be what he or she is and does not seek to refashion them into a replica of themselves or to the mate or to make them a means for themselves to advance. In all such love, there is an element of that holy fear, which is not a form of flight, but rather deep respect for the uniqueness of the beloved and the profound willingness to uh to not violate their integrity. Love is loyal. It is the willingness to let the self, yourself, myself, to be destroyed rather than that that would happen to the other person. It is the commitment of yourself or myself to make the other person as great as we can possibly make them. What great phrases to describe what love looks like. It is always, always all about the other person, the one that's being loved. The lover of the beloved doesn't care about him or herself. Jesus said, we read the passage. We are to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. We have to consider their lives as more important than ours. We have to consider agape love for them greater than any self-love we might have for our own beings. Love rejoices over the one being loved, rejoices over it. It's thankful for the beloved. Love reverently respects and demonstrates loyalty to the other person. The lover has loyalty toward the beloved. Now, when you guys leave tonight, I just pray that you will take nothing that I forget about anything I said. There is so much in these few words of scripture that we have studied tonight. There is so much. It is so rich, it is so humbling. It is so in need of us to ask the Lord for forgiveness in the way that we carry out our lives, putting ourselves first a vast majority of the time. That's not the Christian life. Not as the way that Jesus has called us to live. Do we not take care of ourselves? Of course we do. Do we not take care of our family? Of course we do. We go to the doctor for our health. We try to eat healthy foods. We go to work, we do those things are all part of what he has called us to do. But when it comes to interacting with the world around us, when we speak to someone, when we look at someone, when we think about someone, it is supposed to be wrapped in agape love. So, can we hate the homosexual? Can we? No. Not biblically, we can't. Not as born-again Christians, we can't. We can't do that. Is killing an abortionist okay in our eyes? We hate abortion. Hate abortion providers, hate Planned Parenthood and everything that it stands for. But are we to hate those people themselves? No, we are to love them. That's the way we're going to bring them to Christ. Not by wagging a finger in their face, not by screaming at them that they're headed for hell. You think about the encounters Jesus had with all the people, whether it was a healing encounter, whether it was an encounter like the woman caught in adultery, whatever, whether it was with Lazarus, whatever it was, whatever those encounters were, what did we always see Jesus exemplify? Love. Every time. If there was a sin that everybody in Israel would agree on, its punishment, it would be adultery. No exceptions if you really get down to the rule book. None. You're married, you had sex outside of marriage, you're stoned, and if we catch the guy, he's stoned as well. No exceptions. Oh Jesus, are you gonna follow the law of Moses on this thing? What does Jesus tell say, right? Let ye without uh a sin cast the first stone. And they all left. At least they had enough integrity to realize that they weren't sinless. And they all left. And he says to this woman, caught in adultery, can you imagine how embarrassing that is? Can you imagine how embarrassing that is? That uh you're you're, I don't care if you're a guy or a woman, and the other spouse, the other married spouse comes in and sees you and throws you out on the street, maybe naked, screaming and hollering, caught in adultery, how embarrassing, humiliating that is, how wrong it is, how sinful it is. And what does Jesus say to this woman? Where are your accusers? I don't see them, Jesus. Well, I don't accuse you either. Now go and sin no more. What love, what love our Lord has for sinners. And we want to step in between our Lord and the sinner and wag our finger in their face and tell them what we think they are and who we think they are. There's no love in that. There's no love in that whatsoever. How much you and I need to change is wherever we are this evening. And if we don't change it all, then we are in no better condition than we walked in here. We remain nonchalant about how we treat others in our lives. We remain sinful and don't care enough about it to think about it, or to go to God and repent of it and ask Him to forgive us and ask Him to change us. Ask yourself, am I okay with that? Am I okay with being the way I was when I walked in here tonight? If your answer is yes, I ask you to go home, reread these verses, the verses from Matthew, the verses from Luke, the first three verses from Corinthians, and ask the Lord to open your heart to loving your neighbor as yourself. Thank you for joining us for part one of a two-part short series on loving your neighbor. We certainly hope that this was an informative and spiritually motivating message for you to hear. We all need help on both parts of the great commandment, on loving our Lord with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, with loving our neighbor as ourselves. And as we focused on the latter part of that great commandment that our Lord Jesus Christ gave to us, I think we'll find that we have been short, sometimes woefully short, in the type of love, the agape love that the Lord has commanded us to have for those that cross our path. So may this study help all of us to do a better job to glorify our Lord while we love those who we might rather not love. Thanks for listening, and uh I certainly hope you will join us next time. Until then, may the Lord richly bless you and yourself.