Love Part II

Using 1 Corinthians chapter 13 as the basis for love, we discuss the love our Savior has for us and our responsibility to reflect that agape love to others, even to our enemies.

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to our study on love, agape love. We are primarily using uh scriptures from 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul tells us uh what our rewards will be if uh no matter what we do for the Lord, if agape love is not our uh ultimate and foundational motivation. And then he goes on to describe what love is. It is a tremendously beautiful passage. It is there for us to be reminded exactly how loving our Lord and Savior is, and then it is also there to guide us, to teach us and to guide us how we need to be those people on this earth that show a godly love in all situations. It's not easy. Matter of fact, it's very difficult, and uh the Bible does not ignore that, but yet Jesus has commanded us not only to love him with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, but to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. It is a very difficult commandment to fulfill. It is impossible, impossible to fulfill that within our own flesh. We just don't have what it takes in these sinful bodies. But alas, those of us who are born again have the Holy Spirit dwelling within us. He is the one that can and will give us the power to love unconditionally if only we will allow his will to walk in front of our will. And so let's take a listen at what Paul has to teach all of us in First Corinthians uh chap uh chapter 13. Before we continue, I want to let you know that as I read these verses again and studied them, I understand that there can be a tendency to become discouraged because as we read them and if we are honest with ourselves, we know that we simply can't love the way that we talked about last week, which is the way that Jesus has commanded us to love. And then we can go from being discouraged to inaction. I think that may be one of the reasons why uh we have a tendency to ignore our lack of love to those that are around us uh so much so that we don't even ask forgiveness for not following through on that great commandment. Knowing that it is a sin not to obey our Lord, we ignore the sin, we push away the desire for forgiveness because we have come to the conclusion that what Jesus is asking us is quite honestly absolutely impossible. But that's an incorrect attitude. Because what we're doing is admitting, and rightly so, that we can't love in this manner from a standpoint of our own flesh. But what we fail to do is to take the next step, and that is first to go to the Lord, asking him for forgiveness for our hatred or lack of concern, certainly lack of love or dismissal of those that we don't like, and then ask him to give you and to give me the strength and the love to push our fleshly love away, way into the background, and replace it with his agape love. All by the power of the Holy Spirit that dwells within each one of us. So I don't want us to become discouraged. I don't want us to throw our hands up in the air and say, boy, this just can't do this. This commandment is just too difficult. No, we're stopping way too short when we do that. You know, recently Greg and I had a very short discussion at his home. We spoke about the fact that this is what we all of us in Christ Jesus have available to us 24-7. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ. Every spiritual blessing, just as he chose us in him, in Christ, before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before him, in love to the praise of the glory of his grace, which he freely bestowed on us in the beloved, capital B, in Jesus. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavishly placed upon us. That comes from Ephesians 1, 3 through 8A, and I was reading from the New American Standard Bible. We have access to every spiritual blessing and the heavenlies. When we say we can't love this person, we're lying. We're not facing the truth. We're not facing the fact that we have the power of God dwelling within us to do the impossible, to love when the person isn't worth loving from our perspective. And of course, our model for that over and over and over again is our precious Savior. You see, we do have the power. It is the desire that we lack. And instead of begging God to give us that agape love that He requires of us, we would rather give up. It's prideful, it's sinful, it's self-centered. So, if necessary, let's act upon a new perspective on love from this point forward in our lives. What a difference if we do this, guys. What a difference it will make in your life and in my life. What a difference it will make in the lives around us. There's nobody of the world that expects us to love when they're unloving. Nobody. And what a difference it will make to your heavenly father as you reflect his love to others in like manner the way he loved and loves you. I want to start tonight with this passage from the Gospel of Matthew, where the Lord says this to you and to me. You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. Boom! There's the world, right? There's the world. Love your neighbor, or uh yeah, love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love, and the word is agape. I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven. So Jesus is telling us to love our enemies with an agape love. Why? So that we can show others our Lord and Savior, so that we can be sons of the Father who is in heaven. For listen, he makes his son S-U-N. And incidentally, take note of that. This is Matthew 5, 43 to 47. I'm reading out of the ESV, where uh Jesus says, for he makes his son rise on the evil and on the good. It's his son, right? It's his earth, it's his universe, it's his cosmos, it's his everything, and everything is his. I love the fact that Jesus says, for he makes his son to rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you or do I have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles or the heathen do the same. The agape love that needs to flow from us to others must derive its source out of God's love for you and for me. Let me say that again. The agape love that needs, that we have been commanded to show to those around us, must derive its source out of God's love for you and for me. We find it easy to love those that love us, don't we? Pretty easy. But frankly, that kind of love is not the type of love that the Lord has commanded us to give to others. After all, unbelievers love those that love them, right? There's millions upon millions of this type of love. There's marriages of unbelievers where one spouse loves the other spouse unconditionally. They just love them to death. Obviously, there's a love between parents and their children. The list goes on and on. The problem is that this type of love does not necessarily derive its source from the love that God has shown us through being born again. It is a natural thing to love those that love us. We are simply responding in kind to those that do that toward us. It's not surprising to us. We do that ourselves. This type of love, this earthly, worldly love, this type of love doesn't require anything super special and it doesn't emanate from a heavenly love for those people. And while we find it easy to love those that love us, because it is, the Lord is requiring that we love those that hate us. And that love that we show must be surrounded by profound kindness and unselfish concern for those that need, require our love, regardless of who they are or whatever circumstances they are in. You know, at the center of our love is our hearts. When the Bible speaks about our hearts, it's really referring to our mind and our will and our emotions. It's the thing that drives us. Every choice you make, every decision you make, every choice and decision I make flows out of what's in your heart and what's in my heart. That's why the Bible gives us scriptures like this one from Proverbs 423. Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life. So in all situations, we must ascertain our motives. Are they selfish? Are they self-centered? Are they what's best for me? Or are they motivated by the love that Jesus has for me? So much so that I want to reflect that love to those rotten, hateful, ignorant, God haters that God has placed before me. It's that serious. Going back to Proverbs, do you see why it's so important to guard our hearts? Because that's going to determine the course of our lives, and it will determine whether or not we will go forth and love the unlovable. But moving on to 1 Corinthians 13, 2, we only did verse 1 last time, Paul says this, and if I have the gift of prophecy, now I'm reading from the amplified version right now, so it expands it a little bit, but the amplified version says this, and if I have the gift of prophecy and speak a new message from God to the people, and understand all mysteries and possess all knowledge, and if I have all sufficient faith so that I can remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. Think of that. Paul says that if he understood all the mysteries of this world, if he understood every word in the Word of God, if he understood Jesus completely inside and out, if he understood the Holy Spirit, if he understood the Father, if he understood angels, if he understood the spirit world, all the dimensions, dimension five, six, some say there's up to ten dimensions that we don't see. If he had all that knowledge and think about all that knowledge, if he didn't have agape love, he would be nothing. That's the Apostle Paul speaking here. Perhaps the greatest of all the apostles. And he says that he, even he, even with all the knowledge that he actually did possess, with all that the Lord had opened up to his mind, if he didn't have a foundation of agape love in all that he did, then what he was doing was worth nothing. He goes on to say in verse 3. If I give all my possessions to feed the poor, again, I'm in the amplified version for these couple of verses. If I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it does me no good at all. Wow. He's not talking about giving a tenth of all that he owns. He's not talking about doubling that. He's not talking about giving 50% of all he owns. He says, if I give all my possessions to the poor, what a noble thing to do, right? Every penny I earn, everything I own, I'm gonna give it to the poor. But if we're giving that money to them, and agape love is not the underlying reason that we're doing it, Paul says it does us no good at all. Then, in the second half of that verse, he says this. This is amazing to me. That if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it does me no good at all. Really? Let's say you or I get to a point get to a point where we're going to be persecuted beyond what we might have even thought about a year or two years ago. While we might not actually be burned at a stake, perhaps it's the loss of everything and maybe even imprisonment for our faith, a faith that we are standing strong for. Paul says that if agape love for others is not why we're doing this, then again, the act does us no good when we meet the Lord. You know, when true martyrs went to the stake for their beliefs, if they had an opportunity to speak, we find that they had a love for Christ that was preeminent in their lives. And that was worth more than the love that they had for their very own bodies, for their very own loves. But you know that if they had kept their faith and beliefs to themselves, they never would have gone to the stake to be burned to death. So they must have had another motive. And they did. They had enough love for all the individual flocks that they taught to teach them the truth and not let the lies of at the time the Roman church deceive them. To listen to the Roman church was to lead most to an eternity in hell. So for the love that they had for their own people, those that God had put under them and they shepherded, they spoke the truth. And they would not back down. They looked at the love the Lord had poured out into their lives and took that love and spoke it to their congregations. They loved the Lord as their highest love, but the love that they had for those under their preaching was so great that they were willing to give up everything, including their lives, to speak the truth. That's agape love. From the Bible speaks today, I'll read you this quote I may be successful, I may get results, I may be admired, I may be appreciated, I may be applauded. But as far as God and eternity are concerned, if I don't have agape love, I am nothing. The Corinthians clearly thought that the possessors of certain gifts were extremely important persons. Not only are they unimportant, they are actually nothing. End quote. It has to do with the rewards when we meet the Lord face to face. We will gain, we have gained entrance into the kingdom of heaven because of the blood shed by our precious Savior on that cross at Calvary and the faith that the Lord has given us to believe that he is the Son of God, that he shed his blood for us, that he died for us, and we have run to the cross once again, prompted by the Spirit of God in each one of our lives, for those of us that have given our lives to Christ, to wrap our arms around him and ask him to be our Lord and Savior. That is a guarantee and will never change. And praise God for that. It's a done deal. Jesus said on the cross, it is finished. My work is done, and everybody that places their faith in me receives that completed work. That is, that your sins and my sins were imputed upon him, and his righteousness and his perfection were imputed upon us in a way that goes way beyond anything that I could ever stand. But when that day comes that we stand before our judge, Capital J, he looks at us and says, You are sanctified, you are justified. It's just as though you had never sinned. That's what Jesus has done for everyone that have placed their faith in him. But what Paul is saying here is that agape love must be at the center of all we do, or we are motivated by the wrong values and will have no reward no matter the effort, no matter the work, no matter the outcome. I think it was A. W. Tozer that said this. It's not a perfect quote, but it's what I remember. He said, I shake when I think not only will I be judged by what I did for the Lord, but why I did it. And that's a very, very true statement. That's what Paul is talking about here in 1 Corinthians 13. So when we give, whether it's money, time, devotion, whatever it might be, remember that giving agape love is by far and away the most important thing that we can ever give or show to anyone else. And it's commanded for us to do this. This is not optional. If agape love by us, by everybody in this room, that calls Jesus their Lord and Savior, that lives a Christian life, that spends time worshiping him corporally in a church, if agape love by us is not present, the local church is going to languish and fail, if not completely be blotted out. No matter how active it is, no matter how successful it might be right now, or how large it might be, if agape love doesn't drive everyone in that church, not just the pastor, not just the elders, not just the deacons, but everybody that sits in that pew. Agape love must drive us if we want the church, our local church, to do the work that God has asked us to do. Now, fortunately, Paul doesn't end this passage at verse 3. He doesn't leave us hanging where we might say, Well, what do I do now? He goes on to remind us all what love is and what love isn't. And it continues to be an extremely beautiful passage. It is not a coincidence that these four verses that we're about to go into perfectly describe the character of Jesus Himself, at least as far as they go, and of nobody else, quite honestly. This can become clear if while we're reading this again in our own time, we substitute the word Jesus every time we see the word love in this passage, and then by contrast, insert our own names instead of love when you read this passage. Give it a try. Even if you and I are complete failures right now in our lives, if we substitute our name for the word love in there, and we say, Boy, I haven't done this. Start. You take how do you grow in anything? It's one step at a time. And that's that's what the Lord is going to be asking us to do. We we we're starting low on the totem pole, perhaps. Just start chipping away at agape love, working it, making it a habit in your life and in my life. Verse 4 says this love, this comes from the New King James Version. Love suffers long and is kind. Love does not envy, love does not parade itself, and love is not puffed up. What does it mean to suffer long or to be patient, as the New American Standard Bible says? It means that we are to have long tempers, to be long-suffering, to be patient, is to have self-restraint when normally we would be stirred to anger. A long-suffering person or a patient person does not immediately retaliate or punish. Rather, he or she has a long fuse and patiently abstains from unholy or ungodly reactions. That doesn't come naturally to us. But Paul is telling us the Holy Spirit had Paul write these words. He's telling us that love in part suffers long. We have long fuses with those that hate us, with those that don't agree with us, those that are against us. And who, of course, is the source of long suffering and patience. We look to our Lord, don't we? Because that's part of his character. God is the source of long suffering. And here's just a glimpse of his patience. In Exodus 34, 5 and 6, we read this. The Lord descended in the cloud and stood there with him. That's with Moses. Moses is back up on the mountain now, getting the second set of tablets. And think about that, right? As we think about the long suffering of God, Moses comes down with these tablets, and what does he see Aaron and all these cheeseheads doing? They're doing exactly what God said, don't do, right? Give me all your jewelry and stuff. We're throwing it in this molten pot and we're going to create this golden calf. And Moses is ticked off. He breaks the stones that contain the Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, and Moses is mad, but he goes back up onto the mountain. And here's what the word says. The Lord descended in the cloud and stood there with him, that's Moses, as he called upon the name of the Lord. Then the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed. This is the Lord himself speaking. He says to Moses, the Lord, me, myself, the God is saying, the Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving kindness and truth. That's the God that saved us. That's the God that holds us, that's the God that holds us. That's the God that will never leave us. That's the God that will never forget about us. And what he is saying right here when we read 1 Corinthians 13 is that's how I want you, my sons, my adopted sons, and my adopted daughters. That's how I want you to be with those that are against me. Numbers 14, 18 through 22. I'll just read 18 in the deference to time. The Lord is slow to anger and abundant in loving kindness, forgiving iniquity and transgression. Do we do that? Jesus is calling us to do this. He's calling us to be, he's calling us, he's saying that love suffers long. He's calling us to be patient, he's calling us to be long-suffering. He's calling us to be slow to anger, and he's calling us to forgive iniquity and transgression against us. Not to hold it against that person, but to forgive it. In a prayer for mercy with meditation on the excellencies of the Lord. King David writes this in Psalm 86, the very first verse. But you, O Lord, are a God full of compassion and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in mercy and truth. That needs to be us. That needs to be us, Jesus said. And Paul is saying. Listen to this passage in Romans 2.4. Or do you despise the riches of his, God's goodness, forbearance, and long-suffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance, going back to Greg's prayer? God is long-suffering, wanting all to come to repentance. Come to salvation. Peter tells us in 2 Peter 3.15, in the first part of that verse, consider that the long suffering of our Lord is salvation. So when we fly off the handle, when we want to get even with those that are against us, when we have a short fuse instead of a long fuse, are we thinking about their salvation? No, we're thinking about us. Us being hurt. And Jesus says, and Paul is reiterating, all going back to our great, great God in heaven, don't be that way. But having heard those words that Paul spoke, wrote, it should remind us how incredibly wonderful and merciful and long-suffering our Savior is, even with us today, as we sin against him and don't live the life that perfectly that he has called us to do. Be ye holy, for God is holy. We should not take for granted our Savior's long-suffering for granted, as that is why we and everyone else has been saved and can be saved. And it is our responsibility to act out that type of love to others. Then Paul tells us that love is kind. To be kind is to act benevolently, is to act good, is to be good. Paul says this to the Ephesians, and the Bible says the same thing to us. I'm sorry, Colossians, and Colossians 3, 12 through 13. Put on, then, as God's chosen ones, you and me, those in Christ, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts. Put that on. Compassionate hearts. Put this on, kindness. Put this on humility. Put this on, meekness. Put this on patience. And do this. Bearing with one another. And if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other. As the Lord has forgiven you, you also must forgive. Do we act compassionately toward our loved ones, our friends, our neighbors, and especially our brothers and the sisters and sisters in the Lord? Well, you say yes, at least some of the time. Well, that may be a good start for you and for me, but it's only a start. We all have to take the next step. And we must not be pleased with ourselves if we are simply standing still. Because if you stand still, or if I stand still in my faith, we are actually in retreat mode. We're losing the battle. We think we're standing still, we're actually losing the battle. So just from this one verse, we find that we must, we must be long-suffering, patient, and kind to our neighbors. And I use the neighbor in the sense of the parable of the Good Samaritan, to all those that God allows to cross our paths. Now we see the next word of knowledge, love does not envy. We know that envy is a sin. It's actually in the Ten Commandments. And God writes this. You can either get this out of Exodus 20 or Deuteronomy 5. My passage comes from Exodus 20. You shall not covet your neighbor's house, you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's. Where might envy take you? Listen to this in the book of Micah. Micah 2, verses 2 and 3 out of the ESV. They covet fields and seize them, and houses and take them away. They oppress a man and his house, a man and his inheritance. Therefore, thus says the Lord, behold, against this family I am devising disaster, from which you cannot remove your necks, and you shall not walk haughtily, for it will be a time of disaster. Envy. Horrendous sin. You say, well, in Micah, Micah's real, the prophet's really talking about envying physical things, like another person's house or another person's person's boat or car or job, right? Let's add this passage to what envy can turn out to be. This comes from Jeremiah chapter 5, verses 7 through 9. How can I pardon you? For even your children have turned from me. They have sworn by gods that are not gods at all. Now, I fed my people until they were full, but they thanked me by committing adultery and lining up at the brothels. They are well fed, lusty stallions, each neighing for his neighbor's wife. Should I not punish them for this, says the Lord? Should I not avenge myself against such a nation? Envy. It's all out of covetousness. Love will have no part of that. Love, you looking at someone and saying, you know, I just don't like them. They're in a different class. You know, they make five times the money I make. They're in a house that's twice as big as I'm in. Their 401k is gigantic. They're millionaires. They're this. They're that. And what Paul is saying, what God is saying to you and me, hogwash. That's envy preventing you from agape love in that person's life. Ditch it. Get rid of it. Ask for forgive. Repent of it and ask for forgiveness and go. Love that person, not expecting anything in return. Love does not parade itself. It's not boastful. What's wrong with boasting about love? In his Through the Bible commentary, Vernon J. McGee writes this quote, Love is not boastful or ostentatious. You know, there is a vulgarity about boasting. A young preacher stood up in a conference in Tennessee and said, I want you to know that I am not a trained minister. I'm an ignorant minister, and I'm proud of it. And the bishop answered him, I can see you have a lot to be proud of. And young man, it is dangerous to boast even about ignorance. Love is not puffed up. That means it does, I'm still reading from Vernon J. McGee's commentary. Love is not puffed up. That means it does not travel on air. It is not inflated. You know what it is like to be traveling on a tire filled with air, then suddenly have a flat tire. There is many a flat tire, even among Christians, because there are so many that are puffed up. When the air is gone, there's nothing left. So then, other than boasting in Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ in the cross, we will put the spotlight, even if it's dimly, or even if it's only part of the spotlight, we will put the spotlight on us, on the love we think we're giving someone else. And we can fall into the trap of thinking so much of it that we want everyone to know about it. Even there's none of us that are going to walk in anywhere and say, look at me. But you know, we have to fight pride. We have to fight the self-centeredness that all of us have. In 1 Corinthians 13, 15, Paul says that love does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, and thinks no evil. Love is not rude. We are to exercise courtesy when we're around those that don't deserve it from us. We need to be polite because love is polite. Unfortunately, when we're not courteous, when we're not polite, our faith in Christ can look so unloving. And instead of drawing people toward Christ, we're actually pushing them away. Love is not unbecoming. Love is warm. It's grace. Love does not seek its own. This one is very important. Paul tells us to ask ourselves, why am I doing this? What are my motives for my love? Am I doing it out of love for Christ and to glorify Christ? That is why we must be loving. It is extremely important that what we do, we do for his sake and not our own. A hundred percent his sake, zero percent our own. Love does not seek its own. He may be giving us agape love. But when we do exhibit that agape love to a person that we don't want to uh display that toward, that's the spirit working within us. But if there's at the same time, we have to make sure that our pride does not well up because it should never seek to boast about itself. Love is not provoked, love is not goaded or angered. True love does not have a bad temper. We've all been provoked by someone in our lives. How do we respond? Your response to that provoking is a sign of your love. It's a sign of my love. Was Jesus provoked? You know he was. Of course he was. He was called all sorts of names. He was names, he was screamed at, he was yelled at, he was carried off by Roman soldiers to a fake trial. He was scourged, he had his beard plucked out, he was slapped, he was beaten. Oh yes, he was certainly provoked. How could he have responded? He could have obliterated everyone on this planet that ever said or did the mildest thing against him. He had the power and he had the right to do so. But how did he respond? He simply told the truth about who he was, and ultimately, as he was hanging from the cross, he asked his father to forgive them, for they knew not what they were doing. How do you and I measure up to our Lord when it comes to not allowing our love to be provoked? I know we can never measure up to our Lord, but he's the standard that we are to strive for. Love thinks no evil. To think no evil does not mean that no mean thought will ever come into your mind. Because it probably will due to the flesh that we dwell in. But that instead that you will learn quickly to forgive and to quickly forget the slights or imagined slights that have been done against you. What happens when a friend or a good friend really lets you or me down? What are our thoughts when that happens? You see, when someone we hardly know lets us down, we don't think too much of it, or if we do, it typically doesn't last a long time because we don't have an emotional bond with them. But when it comes to someone that we have loved, let's say, especially with agape love, that's quite a different story. Because we get hurt, and we get hurt deeply. We never thought something like that would happen to us. We never thought this good friend of ours would ever do this against us. Our friend has let us down and let us down in a gigantic way. It might even apply to spouses, but our love needs to be for everyone. How do we respond while the tears are running down our faces? While we want to just be left alone? Do thoughts of getting even jump into our minds? Do we want bad things to happen to them because of what they've done to us or what evil we perceived has taken place to us? Do we now want to begin to tell others some of the innermost things that they have shared with us so that we can cut them emotionally like they did to us? Do we now push the goalpost even closer to gossip, to put gossip at the top of our list? I'm guessing that all of us might have had some of those thoughts in our lives, if the love we had freely given to someone else was returned with something less than what we thought we deserved. But that's not agape love. It's just at that time when that happens that a true agape love takes over. Paul says that if you or I have this agape love that Jesus showed us and shows us, then with maybe a little bit of a scrambled thought process, we would come out of it and continue to love. Jesus did. You say I can't do that. It's impossible. And I would reply, you're right. You can't do that, I can't do that. It is impossible. It's impossible because we live in these wretched bodies of flesh. But again, as we started this out, who resides within each one of us? The Holy Spirit. And as I tried to interject quickly before we started to sing Waymaker, he is not here, he is not in you like this, auditing your life, auditing your times. Like a like an audit takes an auditor takes place in a classroom instruction where they just sit in the back and watch the class take place, and don't do anything to disturb that class, don't do anything to change that class, don't do anything to put that class back on track. They're just there watching. That's not how God's presence works in this place or in you or in me. He is active. The response is up to us. Are we going to let the activity that he wants to take place, which is to always glorify the sun, are we going to let that activity move us, be our guide, be our power, be our strength? That's the question. And too much of the time we say, nope, I'm doing it my way. Love does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth. Verse 6. It is a strange and twisted thing in human nature that it seems that we're more interested in hearing the bad news than we are the good news. When you look at the daily newscast on TV, what do they focus on? They've been doing it for years. They focus on the bad stuff, right? If they do a segment on something that's good or something that someone did that was good, it's usually toward the end of the broadcast and it's a one-minute clip or something like that. That's because the producers know that the audience will lose interest in the show rather quickly if it's not bad news. But those who really love others do not rejoice in iniquity. Rather, they are happy when the truth is known and acted upon, and they have no desire to veil the truth, cover it up, or to edit it. They honestly rejoice in the truth. Think of someone being very honest with you, you have agape love for them. And they're being honest with grace. How do you respond? If you love that person with agape love, not only don't you rejoice in iniquity, but you find it pleasing and honorable that they love you so much that they will tell you the truth. They recognize the shortcomings of the loved one, and without ignoring those shortcomings, allow their love to overcome those things. Their love is greater, far greater than the iniquities of the loved one. In other words, the agape love that you and I should have and must have for others far exceeds, it far outweighs any of the shortcomings. Any of the iniquities that the one we love might possess. I guess I'm going to end with this. Love bears all things. Love believes all things. Love hopes all things. Love endures all things. 1 Corinthians 13 7. It's not getting any easier here as we go through this list. Love bears all things. What does that mean? The picture of bears all things or endures all things. It's much more than simply letting things go by, even though they are troublesome. In other words, you get hurt again by one that you're loving, might be a spouse, a sibling, a parent, a neighbor, a church member, a brother or sister in the Lord, or even a stranger. Love allows us to remain true to our ongoing desire to love, even in the most adverse circumstances, and perhaps beyond that, to transform the situation into something even better by actually enduring through those difficult times, bearing those difficult times. True Agape love is simply the best possible thing we can ever receive, and it is by far and away the best thing to ever receive. The greatest love of this sort is from our love to us, to his own. Because he does bear all things with us. We let him down. We sin against him in all sorts of manners and ways. We ignore him. We push him into the background. We forget about him. We don't thank him for all the good things that take place in our life. The list goes on and on and on. How does he respond to his children? He bears and endures all things, and by doing so, never loves us less and never lets us go. That may not be headlines to you and to me about how our Lord is. It's great to be reminded of this. But what Jesus is asking us, and what Paul is reminding us of, is this that's how we're to be. We sin against Jesus, we forget about Jesus, we ignore Jesus, we don't care about sinning against him in some instances. You think about somebody doing that to you, and we want to be like the disciples and wipe the dust off our feet and walk away. And that's not what we are called to do. What we are called to do is to be exactly as best as we can in these sinful bodies, but with the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling within us, to uh bear and endure all things. Because by doing so, your love will bless that person and bless your Lord and Savior. Finally, what does it mean when the Bible tells us this to believe all things? It says love bears all things, believes all things. To say that love believes all things does not mean that we are gullible because of our love, but our love calls us to assign the best motives to others and to create a spirit of trust. Love, agape love, is never censorious. It is never censorious. It is never judgmental, it never comes down on the side of negativity with the person that we are called to love. Not some of the time, it's never censorious. It's never judgmental. We're not gullible, but we're always giving the one, the beloved, the one that we love, the benefit of the doubt. We're always saying, hey, he or she did this, and it could be looked at this way in a negative way, or it might very well be able to be looked at this way in a positive way. Agape love always goes to the right. Always goes to the right. You get hurt by that person, and they try to explain to you what happened and why it happened, and you're like, I you're like, I don't care what they say. I'm hurt, I don't care. Nope, back over. Back over to the right. Not being censorious, always giving the benefit of the doubt, waiting to see the outcome. But even while we are waiting, we continue to love in the way that Paul is describing to us. And then finally, this last paragraph, even when things are not looking good, this agape love, when we truly have it, has a way of looking to God's future, knowing He is in complete charge and control and seeing a better day. And that's a great way to live because it's placing all things in your life, all things in my life, the good, the bad, the ugly, into his hands. So when we when we have to address these issues that come at us and we're trying to love the person from an agape love standpoint, and things aren't going well, when we look at the future, knowing God is in control of everything that takes place, we rest in that. We look forward to that, right? Seek ye first the kingdom of God and its righteousness. You keep going to God, going to God, going to God. That's where we need to go every single time. We fall on our knees in prayer, crying out to him. We continue to be obedient to him. We don't give up on agape love. We don't give up on that person that's mistreating us, made us angry, hurt us. We don't give up, we don't give up because Jesus never gave up on us. I don't know how many years you spent, I don't know how many years you spent before the Lord saved you. More than half my life, even on this day, was spent against him. Was spent hating him, was spent not thinking about him, not caring about him, not thinking about the Bible, not thinking about anything that is important to him. And the things I did were heinous sins against him, and I did them over and over and over and over again for 40 years of my life. Did he give up on me? No, he didn't give up on me. Why not? Because his love is an agape love. And the descriptions, we haven't gotten through all of them, the descriptions that we see what true love truly is, is what Jesus has done in your life and in my life, and what he continues to do in our lives, every minute of every day, regardless of how we respond to him. He goes on to love us, forgive us. He is long-suffering. He forbears all things. He is an incredible, amazing, wonderful God. He is the one to whom we look for all things, including how to agape love those we don't like. How do agape love those that hate us? How do agape love those that hate God? How do agape love those that have hurt us? And we don't let them knock us down. I'm not saying you don't have feelings. We all have feelings. We get hurt. All those things take place, but we know that he is right there by our side. And those pains and that agony that we go through, as we get through them, you know, just leaning on him and looking to him, we start to get a better glimpse of what he has done for us. Because ours is nothing like what he went through. The perfect God of the universe, crucified, beaten, whipped, scourged, mocked, having fingers, oh, he saved others, let him save himself. God's hanging on that tree. And what does he say? Lord Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. Can we do it? Not in this stuff, we can't do it. Can we do it with him? You bet we can do it with him. If we haven't been doing that for a while, tomorrow, tonight, it's a good time to start. One step at a time to be more like Jesus and watch the world around you, the influence you have on those around you, change. And watch yourself change as God continues to bless you for standing up for agape love, for reflecting the love that He put into your heart to those that are around you. Thank you so much for listening to uh our part two in a three-part series on love, on agape love out of uh 1 Corinthians chapter 13. We certainly hope that this has been uh a blessing to you and informative to you and gives you the uh strength to pray to the Lord, to uh show more of the type of love that he has shown you to others that he puts in your path. And so may it be the desire of all of us to be more like our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And until next time, may the Lord richly bless you and yours.