DOES YOUR LOVE LOOK LIKE JESUS?

We ask a hard question with a soft heart: does our love actually look like Jesus. We trace how presence, grace, and reconciliation replace control, fear, and exclusion, and we invite each other to redefine love by Christ’s life, not our comfort.

• measuring love by the life of Jesus
• presence over agreement as a first move
• fear creates compliance, love creates transformation
• grace before change in real restoration
• reconciliation as God’s agenda in Christ
• erasing insider and outsider lines
• holiness that moves toward the broken
• redefining love without redefining Jesus
• practical shifts: patience, proximity, unity

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage And Intent
• 1:04 The Core Question: Love Like Jesus
• 4:20 Redefining Love Versus Redefining Jesus
• 6:36 Why Our Lenses Distort Scripture
• 9:59 Love As Presence, Not Agreement
• 13:40 Drawing Near Before People “Get Right”
• 18:30 Influence Without Compromise
• 22:32 Love Without Control Or Manipulation
• 27:08 Fear Produces Compliance, Not Change
• 31:24 From Punishment To Restoration
• 35:12 Erasing Lines And Reconciling The World
• 40:10 Guarding The Message From Transactional Love
• 44:10 Beyond Heaven-Or-Hell Urgency
• 48:00 Seeing Jesus Clearly To Love Truly

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

I'm gonna try to stick close to my notes this morning, try to get uh out of here as quick as possible. I know it's cold, we apologize, but you obviously you don't know what's gonna happen if you come and cut anger on on a morning like this. So luckily it's not feeling like 22 in here like it is outside. It is a little warmer than it is outside, but uh I know it is chilly, so we're gonna try to get done. Thank y'all for staying. I mean I know y'all could have walked in and walked right back out. So thank y'all for staying this morning, and we'll try to get done as quick as possible. I think about you know, those churches in other countries, you know, they don't have walls. Right. We've been to them and they don't have walls. It was hot then it wasn't cold, but that's still that was on the outside, so we kind of know what it's like, I guess. You have an experience this morning that no other church in Bacon County is having. Nobody's probably having church in 60 degree weather this morning. So you had to have that experience. So, what I want to do this morning, I want to talk about something that I won't get into the details of it just for time's sake, but I'll tell you a little bit in a few minutes of how this came about. But this morning we're gonna talk about the title that's gonna be Does Our Love Look Like Jesus? Does Our Love Look Like Jesus? Um this isn't, this morning, this isn't a message about calling anybody out. This is not pointing fingers at anybody and saying, Well, you don't love like she loves or like he loves or whatever. It's not pointing fingers at anybody. I believe it's a message that's really calling all of us in and saying, let's let's check ourselves. Let's just question ourselves a little bit. And ask the question. If what I'm defining as love or what I'm showing as love in my life, doesn't look like what Jesus looked like in Scripture. So I tell you first and foremost, I'm not here as someone who's master of love. I can't stand here and say that and say, I'm telling you this because I've arrived. I'm not here as a master of love. But I am here as someone still every single day learning what it looks like when love actually looks like Jesus. When I start seeing the scriptures and comparing it, what he's doing and what he's demonstrating in Scripture, and then looking at my own life and being okay enough to say, okay, let me do a comparison here. And being honest enough to say, you know, what I'm doing and what I'm explaining, don't always look like him. Gotta be honest to do that. So I believe most of us genuinely love. I believe we love people. I believe we love our families, I believe we love our church, we love our neighbors, we love the people that we're around. The issue is not the sincerity that we have. It's, I believe, I think a lot of times it's our definition. What is our definition of love? How do we, you know, where do we get that from? Some people, because if you ask a question and I asked you, gave you some paper, and told everybody I want you to write down your definition of love, it would look totally different. Based on where you come from, based on what you've experienced. Love looks different to every single person and how we define it. So sometimes what we call love and what Jesus demonstrates throughout the scripture, just does not look the same. And if we're honest, I think it's worth exploring that. I think it's worth taking a look and saying, if my love that I'm demonstrating to people, if the love that I believe in, and my definition of love does not look like Christ, am I willing to just step back and take an honest look at it and say, let me figure out what's going on here. You know, it's not condemning myself, it's just being honest with myself and saying, I want to figure this thing out. Sometimes what we call love and what Jesus demonstrates is love don't always look the same. And uh we need to explore that. Jesus doesn't just teach love. All through the scriptures we see where he walks, he actually reveals it to people. He shows us what it looks like when God is the source and the people are the actual focus. If anything challenges you today, I don't want it to be condemnation. So that's why I'm saying this, I don't want this when we're talking about love and telling you to question what love is. I don't want it, I don't want you to condemn yourself. Maybe there's something in you that says, you know, I do this or I think this way, and that don't look like don't beat yourself up. This is not a challenge to condemn yourself today. This is simply a challenge to say, can I look at myself? Can I look at God as the source and figure out if my love, the love that I demonstrate, the love that I talk about, truly looks like Jesus Christ. That's the challenge. So let the challenge be to redefine it. That's probably the easiest way to say it. Let the challenge be that you're willing to redefine love. If you come to the conclusion that it don't always look like Jesus, redefine that. We're not redefining Jesus. We're redefining the love. We're redefining the definition that he exhibits, that he reveals. So it's not like we're changing, we're not preaching a new Jesus, we're not preaching a new gospel. We're taking the same Jesus, the same gospel, saying, what does it look like? What does he exhibit? What does he show and reveal as love? And if it don't look like that in my life, I need to redefine my definition of love. Right. So that I can do what? Redefine how I demonstrate. Because that's what it really comes down to. So today isn't about trying harder to love, it's about seeing love clearly through the eyes of Christ. Because I believe that we we become what we behold. And I say that all the time. Why do we have so many misinterpretations in scripture? Somebody, we all read the same scripture, we all have a different understanding of what, you know, if we're reading Paul, we have a different understanding of what Paul's trying to say. Why is that? It's just because we come from, we're looking at it through a different lens. We're looking through different experiences. So, my goal is that when I read scripture, that I can make myself and force myself to start seeing it through the love of Christ. What was he really saying in this? What was he demonstrating? What was he trying to show people in whatever scripture we may be reading? So, let's think about what it means. When we say that, sometimes we redefine love. Some people would argue with that. Some people would just say, well, love is love. And if you question them, say, well, what is it? Well, I don't know. Love is love. We've got to have a definition. If we're to be love and God is love, and he created us in his image after his likeness, then we're to be loved. And if I don't even know what the true definition of it is and what it looks like, how can I be an expression of it? I've got to be honest enough to say, okay, do I know really what it is? Do I know what love looks like in Christ? So I'm going to look at what it means when we say that, that sometimes we need to redefine it. And I won't go into detail on this, but I'm telling you where the sermon comes from. It comes from a dream I had the other night. And I won't go through the dream. I may go through that later. But when I woke up, I'm telling you, that dream was so vivid. And I actually made a Facebook post about it. And that's what the Facebook post said: that we will shout from the rooftops, God is love. But then we redefine love so much that it doesn't even look like Jesus. But that's the first thing we go to. God is love. God is love. But then when we demonstrate it or talk about it, it looks different than him. So that's all I'm trying to do is say, okay, we got this quote that we say, this verse that we speak, and then we got what we demonstrate, and it's so far off from each other. How can we start weeding this stuff in the middle out and get it back to where it's supposed to be? That's the whole key to it. So that was actually the Facebook quote we shout from the rooftops that God is loved, but quietly, without even recognizing it, we redefine love until it no longer looks like Christ. This is not because people are rejecting Scripture. It's not because people are denying theology. I think it's because we try to reshape love into something that's safer, into something that's manageable. We try to sometimes reshape love into this idea and this system that I already have in place in my mind. And we try to form it around that definition that I already have. So we try to import it in and make it fit where I want it to fit. And you're going to see where I'm going with this, and it's going to make more sense in just a few minutes when we go through some of these verses. So the danger in doing this is not that we want to stop talking about love. We want to be loving people. We want to talk about love. We want to share love. The danger is that if we keep using the word love the way we use it, but forgetting the meaning of Christ that Christ put on it, I think we're doing harm to people. I think we're doing harm to ourselves, and I think we're doing harm to other people if we don't understand the true love that Christ exhibited and how he demonstrated it and revealed it. Let me give you a few examples. Let's look at what it looks like when this happens. When love becomes agreement instead of presence, when love becomes agreement instead of presence, Jesus didn't wait for people to get it right before he moved toward them. Now think about that. In Romans 5 and 8. Most of y'all know this verse, but I want you to see it. I got a couple of verses I just want to show you in this. Romans 5 and 8 says, While we were yet sinners, but God demonstrates his own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. This simple little verse that most of all of us know. You may not know where it's at, you may not know this Romans 5 and 8, but you know what the word says in here. You are very familiar with this verse. While we were sinners, he died for us. And I love that part. He demonstrates his love towards us. He demonstrates he came to warn us. He brought his love to us. Not after we got cleaned up, not after we got everything right, not after we said a prayer and got oil poured on our head. He demonstrated and moved toward us while we were yet sinners. That's the love of Christ. That ain't always the love the church shows. Come on now, let's be real about that. That's just one little tiny example of the difference in the way we express love and the way Christ expressed love. He said, I'm coming to you in your worst time. We say get cleaned up and then you can come join us. Little bit of a difference there. That's not bashing the church. I just think that's being honest to say, hey, we got to look at this. We got to be honest with ourselves. It's not putting anybody down. It's not putting Christianity down. It's not putting pastors down to teach that. It's just that we've got to be real with ourselves. If we truly want to get to another place, if we truly want to move from where we're at and be the type of love that God demonstrates and Jesus demonstrates, then we've got to understand the differences in what we're seeing in Scripture. So he never stood in a distance hoping that people would clean themselves up. He entered their world, no matter what that world was at the time. He entered into it. He ate with them, he walked with them, he slept with them, he stayed with them. He entered into their life and become a part of their world that was going on. Now I remember years ago I preached this message, and more similar to this, on that thought. And I remember somebody asked me, What does that mean? We should go into the bars and we should go into all these different places that we've that God's brought us out of, and we should go back into them and minister. That's up to you whether you feel like God told you to do that or not. I do believe that God brings us out of places. He transforms our thinking, he changes our heart. And I don't believe that he always says, okay, now it's time for you to go back in that bar and preach to people. I don't believe that because some people can't handle that. But I believe that I can go back into old places that I used to be a part of, and now I go back into it with a different language. I go back into it, and instead of that place now having an influence on me, I go back in there and I influence it. Because why? He's changing. I'm not the same as I was when I was in that place. Okay? That's why we can still go around people that we used to hang out with. That maybe don't come to church with you. And they not they don't think the same way you do, they don't believe the same way you do. But when I see them, I can still talk to them. Why? Because I don't look down on them because I was there too at one point. And just because they don't believe the same as me right now, don't change the fact that I can still love them. Because Jesus demonstrated that love to the sinners. He demonstrated that love to the people who were still broke and messed up. He didn't tell them to get cleaned up and then come see me. So we've got to look at it like that. We often redefine love as agreement. Jesus shows us a love that doesn't stand at a distance but steps fully in. He comes close, he enters into the mess that they're in, and he stays with them. This other verse right here, John 1 and 14. I pulled it out because I think it shows exactly what it's talking about right here. And the word became flesh. Think about that that right there speaks for itself, but you gotta go to the next part. And dwelt among us. We got this picture of God sitting up on a throne way up there on the other side of Pluto somewhere, looking down at us, hoping we'll get right. Now he didn't just do that. He said, I'm gonna send my son, and he's gonna come into your mess, into your problems, into your circumstances. He's gonna become flesh and dwell among you. Not on the outskirts, looking at you, pointing a finger at you, telling you you need to get it right. He's gonna come and dwell among the messed up people. It's a little bit different when you look at it like that. The word became flesh and the word among us. We often imagine this thing in a different order. Get it right, and God will come close to you. That's the way we teach it a lot of times. I've talked about that for years. Get it right, and when you get it right, when you get it cleaned up, God will come close to you. But scripture shows us the very opposite of that. Don't take my word for that. Don't say Pastor Brown believes this. No, the scripture says this. We just read. So if we look at scripture, we look at the love, we look at the life of Jesus in Scripture, it is totally opposite a lot of times of what we're teaching. Jesus consistently drew near to those who didn't have it altogether. The sinners, the outcast, the ones who doubted him, the wounded. His closeness, when he came to people and he dwelt among people, you've got to see this. His closeness was not because they were righteous. He didn't come to them because he said, Oh, I recognize my kind, and I'm gonna come be with you. Come on, like we do in church. We want to be like that with our kind. He didn't go to them and say, I'm coming to you because you're righteous. He said, I'm coming to you because you're messed up, and when you get around me, you're gonna become righteous. But he came to them in their state of unrighteousness, in their mess, in their troubles, in their chaos. That's when he entered into them. His closeness was not the reward for righteousness, it was the very thing that made transformation possible for them. He said, When I come into your mess, things can change now. Things can be different. Think about this. Has there ever been a time that we've made love more about control instead of transformation? Think about that. Have we made it more about control than transformation? Think about a rich young ruler. We all know that story. He asked the question, a very good question. He said, What do I need to do to inherit eternal life? They was talking to Jesus. He said, What do I need to do to inherit eternal life? And it was so funny because I've read this thing many times, but when I started reading it through this lens that I'm looking at with the love of Christ, I started seeing something different. Jesus told him exactly in the scripture. We're not going to read through it, it's a bunch of scriptures. We're not going to read through it, but Jesus told him exactly what he needed to do. Okay? He gave him the answer. But then I want you to look at what happened in verse 22. I put verse 21 and 22. We're going to go to verse 22 first, Mark 10 and 22. He tells him, well, he walks away from it. It says the guy walked away sad, but he was sad. Now this is right after Jesus told him what he wanted to happen, what he wanted to know. He said, How do I inherit eternal life? Jesus told him, and then it says, but he was sad at this word and went away sorrowful. For he had great possessions. Now just let that sit there a minute. Jesus spoke to him. Jesus answered his question. And he walked away sad. There was no threats. You can go back and read the scripture yourself. In Mark 10, there was no threats from Jesus. There was no type of manipulation. There was no pressure from Jesus. But the guy walked away sad. And then I noticed something in verse 21. And I've really never seen before. I'm sure I've seen it, I just never paid attention to it. So you gotta see what happened down here and then go back and look at Jesus, what he said in the very beginning. Then Jesus, looking at him, loved him. Loved him. Now the guy walked away sad at the end, but guess what? Before the question even come, before he even knew what he was going to ask, he loved him. He didn't say, well, let me see what this guy's like. Let me see if he's a good Christian dude. Let me see if he's got everything in order. Looking at him, love him, and saying to him, one thing you like, go your way, sell whatever you have, give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven and come take up your cross and follow me. You can read, go back and read all that. There's some good stuff in there. But the main thing I want to pour light of there is before he ever told him anything, he said, he talked about love. He demonstrated love. He loved him. How many times do we do that? Or how many times is our love conditional on the response that we get from you? And sadly, we we show conditional love a lot. I'll love you if. But if you don't do it, I don't know without you. We don't say that, but we demonstrate it. We say, oh, we always don't love because God is love. We use those words. But we don't demonstrate what we're saying a lot of times. I'm beating myself now. I'm not talking to you. Maybe you don't do that. But I know there's been times you had to prove yourself to me. You had to show that you were worthy of my love. And if you wasn't, I didn't love you. I didn't have anything to do with you. That's just the truth. But what I'm seeing now, as I'm beginning to read the scripture, is what I was demonstrating didn't look nothing like Christ. So my goal is now to say, let me look like him in everything I do, versus doing it my own way. See that verse in 21 tells us something important. Love does not force or manipulate. He loved me before he ever said anything else to me. Before he ever answered him or anything else, before he ever got a response from the guy. He loved him first. How often do we define, redefine love as control? We use fear. We use shame. We use spiritual pressure. To do what? To try to force behavior. We want people to change. So we use this word love to try to force them and manipulate them to do that. And then we call it love. We've said it many times. Fear can produce compliance. Fear can make somebody change a behavior. Some people don't want to go to jail so they stop doing certain things. Some people don't want to die so they stop using drugs or alcohol. Kids don't want to give another weapon so they listen to their parents. Fear will produce compliance. But only love produces transformation. Fear don't change people on the inside. It'll change thinking a little bit. It'll change behavior. But what's truly on the inside is what moves me, what creates who I am, is not produced a lot of times by fear. It don't change, it doesn't cause me to transform. Fear only makes me produce and be compliant to a rule or a law or what somebody wants me to do. One other verse right here, 1 John 4 and 18. These are all very familiar verses. We all know them. But in this verse, the one thing I want to pull out of 1 John 4 and 18 is it talks about perfect love. Casts out fear. Okay? There is no fear in love. We got to see the importance of what that's talking about. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love. Think about the way we use fear as a tactic or as a tool. I'm just going to say it in the church. Because I've done it too. And I'm sure there's probably some ways I still don't have to realize it yet. I hope I realize it. But we use tools, I mean we use fear and we use manipulation and we use pressure as a tool. Jesus used love as a tool. And then he didn't just use love as a tool. He didn't just reveal it. Then he came back and said, there is no fear in love. Perfect love cast out fear. What was he saying here? All those techniques you're using is not love. It may work, it may bring people to an altar, but it's not love. So when people, when if people hear some people hear me say that, they would automatically say, well, this church's got more people than your church does, so apparently it's working. Yes, it works. There's megachurches out there with thousands and thousands of people sitting in them this morning. And a lot of those people were brought in because of fear, manipulation, pressure. Not all of them. I'm just saying, son, I'm sure it was. Most of them probably were. Can I be real honest and say most of us were probably brought in that way? We may not want to admit it. But that's probably how we got born again. Through fear, pressure, manipulation. Guess what? It still worked. It still changed your life. But now we got to backtrack a little bit and say, I don't want to continue walking in that. It may have helped me at the time. But I don't want to continue walking in fear and manipulation. I want to walk in love. So we have to backtrack now and say what brought me in was great then, but it may not be what sustains me. So I have to go back and have to look and say, no, I want to figure out what love is. I want to look at what love really means when we look at Jesus. If fear is still the primary tool that we use, then love may no longer be our foundation. And that's something I think as a church, we have to ask the question: what's our foundation based on? Is it based on Christ? Is it based on transformation? Changing people? Changing the way people think? Or is it based on numbers? Is it based on how many we get in here? Is it based on how many programs we can produce? Things like that. What if love becomes punishment instead of restoration? In John 8, the woman caught in adultery is dragged before Jesus. I didn't put this verse up. We know the story here. The woman was caught in adultery and she was dragged over, laid down, threw down before Jesus. I love this story because it shows something else about Jesus, too. He never denies the seriousness of her sin. Okay, you go back and read the story. He doesn't deny what's going on with it. Okay. But he refuses to let the sin be the final word. Look what he told her. Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more. Neither do I condemn you. All these people, these Pharisees that drug you up here, all these church folks that drug you up here, they were condemning you. They wanted me to condemn you. They brought you and they threw you down and they told me what you did so that I would condemn you. But I don't condemn you. That was his words. He went against what they were wanting. He said, I do not condemn you. Go and sin no more. Grace came first. Change followed grace. We often reverse that order. That's all I'm trying to get us to see. We reverse the order. We demand transformation before you can belong. Jesus offered belonging that made transformation possible. Go and see him no more. He gave her grace rather than condemnation. What if he would have given her condemnation first? What would have happened to her? Probably a hardened heart. She probably never would have come to him. I mean, there's a lot of things that we can speculate would have happened had he taken the Christian approach. If he would have condemned her first, told her stop her behaviors, called her all these names, said stop doing the things you're doing, and then we'll bring you to Jesus and let him do it. Jesus walked straight up in there and said, I don't condemn you. That's hard for church people to look at. Because it's different. But he's different. Condemnation hardens hearts. Restoration is what he was. Here's another question. Do we ever make love about exclusion instead of about reconciliation? I'm asking these, I don't call them this, but they really are rhetorical questions because we know the answers to it. The church as a whole, and I'm not saying anybody in here or this church or that church or that, I'm saying the church as a whole, Christianity in the West, we make love by exclusion instead of reconciliation. Look at 2 Corinthians 5 and 19 again. You should know this verse by heart by now. I've quoted this verse probably a hundred times in the last three or four weeks. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Cosmos, world, the whole system. Remember, we talked about that. Not imputing their trespasses against him, not holding, some translations say, not holding their sins against him. And has committed to us the word of reconciliation. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Not negotiating with the world, not threatening the world, but reconciling the world. Bringing back into order, back into relationship. He was doing that. He wasn't pointing fingers and pushing people away. He was bringing them back in. Well, maybe only the ones that was born again. No. The whole world, the whole system, everything. See, we think about people on this. We're not just talking about people. Go stay at that word world, cosmos, and look at what that actually says. It means everything that was created. The whole system. Not just people. So he was bringing the whole system, reconciling everything. The cross wasn't God turning away from us. It was God, as this verse says in 2 Corinthians, it was God in Christ, coming all the way toward us. And still, even today, after we read this verse, we can sit here and read this verse for the next 20 minutes, get it down deep inside of us, and then we're still going to walk out of here and we're going to draw some lines in the sand. Because that's just our nature. What kind of lines do we draw? Clean, unclean. Good, bad. Insider, outsider. Us, them. Those are lines that's grown in the ground. To separate who I am from who they are. Come on, we do that now. And even though we've always drawn those lines, and we still draw those lines today, Jesus has crossed every one of them. Every line you've ever drawn, Jesus crossed. Every line the Pharisees and the Sadducees drew in the dirt, Jesus crossed. And said, I don't play that game. And he still crosses the lines today that we keep drawing. We don't do it because we hate people or we we do it because it's our human nature to try to see if there's a difference in people. There's something in us that has to say, if I worship God and I'm born again and you ain't, then you're different than me. I understand that. We draw the line there. And Jesus stepped right over and said, Nah, I'm gonna bring them right in on this song, and I'm gonna bring you in on this song, and I'm gonna put y'all together in unity.

unknown: 33:52

Amen.

SPEAKER_00: 33:53

That's kind of the way I see it. He's erasing the line, bringing it together. And it's hard for us to do that. So there's always the challenge. It's not beating people up, it's not saying I'm better than you or anything like that. It's just saying, can we do what Jesus done and erase the lines? Can we begin to do that now? And say, I'm not gonna look because you ain't been in church as long as I have, or you ain't been born again, or you ain't done this or done that, or you don't look like a Christian. Can I erase the lines and say, I can join together in unity with you anyway? Why? Because when he was on the cross, a God was in Christ reconciling the world, he was reconciling you as well as he was reconciling me.

unknown: 34:39

Amen.

SPEAKER_00: 34:40

That's erasing the line and saying he was doing this for all. That's hard to do. But that's what we're talking about. Can we just erase the lines? Here's the main point that I'm gonna get into and I'm gonna get ready to close right here. Here's the main point of what I'm saying. We don't want to get to a place where love no longer looks like Jesus. But yet we still call it love. Love's a good thing. We in this church, we're gonna continue to sing about love, we're gonna continue to preach about love, we're gonna continue to defend it theologically. But if we continue to do this while turning around and making it about conditions and making it defensive and fear-driven and transactional, we step on our own message. We can't get on a rooftop and say, God is love, and I'm just like him because he created me in his image and his likeness, and I'm love too, and then cause division. And say you're not like me, or draw the line. When we draw the line, we step on our own message of love. So erasing that line and stepping over that line is just coming to a point of saying, I'm gonna believe what Jesus did. I'm gonna believe in the love that he displayed. And I'm gonna try to exhibit that in my own life and live like that in my own life, and I'm just gonna say that he was in Christ, reconciling the word to himself, not imputing trespasses against anybody, and I'm gonna believe that. And what that tells me is I don't care what you've been through. I don't care what you've been had to go through in your life. I'm not any better than you are. I'm no closer to God than you are if he lives on the inside of me and he lives on the inside of you. He's there with us.

unknown: 36:45

Amen.

SPEAKER_00: 36:47

I may have a, you know, as a Christian, or you know, you may have a better understanding of some of this than somebody else does. Your eyes may be opened a little bit more, but that don't make me better.

unknown: 36:59

Amen.

SPEAKER_00: 37:00

I'm just more aware. And my job as a Christian is to help other people be more aware. Help open their eyes up. He reconciled you. He loved you even before you got clean, even before you got everything right. He reconciled you, he loved you, he died for you while you were still a sinner. That's what our job is. Now, I want to get into this. Notice what I just said had nothing to do with heaven. What I just said that we are called to do had nothing to do with you're going to heaven or you're going to hell. Why do we worry so much about that? Don't just worry about sharing the love of Christ. But we've been taught and trained that it's about a destination. I gotta make sure. I can't, I mean, maybe I want love on you, but I gotta make sure you're getting to heaven. And you're sitting there as this person talking about, why do I want to go to heaven with you when you can't even love me? That's me. That's not biblical. That's I'm saying that. That's the way I used to look and say, You want me to go with you somewhere? I mean, I'm looking at your life. I'm looking at the way you treat people. And you're trying to get me to heaven. But if we just showed love, we wouldn't have to worry about the heaven or hell message. That's just an end-product. I'm not saying that don't exist. I'm just saying that's not even something that we're we've got to worry about.

unknown: 38:46

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 38:46

Can we just love them? Can we just tell them the truth of what the word says? When we walk, when we talk about love, Christ has to be at the center of it. He's got to be the foundation.

unknown: 39:01

Yes, he does.

SPEAKER_00: 39:02

So I'm closing right here, but I want to slow it down just a second because I want you to see this. You got to see this. Because this isn't about trying harder to love better. Okay? It's about seeing Jesus more clearly. Can I truly see Christ? You ever met somebody and you don't even know if they're a Christian. They not quote scriptures. But there's just something about them. You just feel a love there. You feel a connection to them. And they ain't quoted the first scriptures in you. But there's a love of Christ that's on the inside of them. That's more, that's a little bit of what my dream was about. That I'll get into later. And it challenged me. Still challenging me. Jesus doesn't teach love. He is love in human form. He just exhibits. That's it. He just walks around and he is love. Last verse I want to go to, John 14 and 9. We know this one as well. Jesus said to him, Have I been with you so long and yet you have not known me? He who has seen me has seen the Father. There's a lot of stuff in here, but that's really the key point of it. If you've seen me, he said you've seen the Father. Because the guy, you know. So how can you say, that's what he has, how can you say, show us the Father? Because that was the original question. We go back and read this. If you've seen me, you've seen the Father. So stop asking dumb questions. That's the way I interpret it. If you're looking at me, you are looking at the Father. Because we are one. If we want to know what God is like, we don't start with fear. We don't start with systems. We don't start with control. We start with Christ. Look at Jesus. All through the scriptures. He doesn't push sinners away. He doesn't weaponize shame. He doesn't protect holiness by avoiding broken people. Come on, we've been there. Oh, I'm too holy to go around those folks. They might mess me up. We're protecting our holiness by staying away from broken people. We've all been there. You got to raise your hand. We've all done it. He doesn't protect holiness like that. He says, I'm going right up in that mess. His holiness moves forward. Moves them forward. So he don't try to protect it. He says, I am holy, and I'm walking right up in this place. And when I get up in here, everything that's in this room will rearrange itself to accommodate the holiness that's just walking in. That's the mindset we got to have. It's not cockiness, it's not arrogance. You got to truly know that there's a God living on the inside of you, and you have such a love and such an anointing on the inside of you that no matter what you walk into, when you walk in that place, everything's got to rearrange to accommodate your presence. And when you really see that and you really feel that, you will see little shifts and little things start to change. You don't even know if you're about to say nothing. It doesn't because the anointing walked near the door. That's it. And that's powerful. It's so powerful. It's such a testimony to yourself. When you walk in and you see change start to happen. And you never tried to create it. It was created because of what you carried. And when you see that, you're like, man, that's you have to be careful, though. You can get a beathead with it too, man. But it's powerful to see that. Just like, I mean, we used to walk into restaurants all the time with Pastor Don. I mean, you just see things just shift. There would be people that would literally get away from us, and there would be other people start running to us. We couldn't even eat because people coming up to the table and want a prophetic word. And just wanting to sit with us and just want to pray with us. Well, we did go there looking for that. We wanted that, but if nobody came up, it wasn't no big deal. But it never happened that nobody came up. Every time we walked in that restaurant and sit down, there was a flux of people that just came to the table. And we never held up a sign when we walked in and said, Y'all come, we come to sit back here, y'all come. We never did that, we just sat down. But there was a Anointing that when he wished drooping. And it was so powerful. So the cross wasn't Jesus convincing God to love us. The cross was God in Christ showing us how much he already did. How much he already loved us. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. That means love isn't something we earn, prove, or try to defend. It's something that has already found us. We don't have to go looking for it. It's already found us. We've got to open our eyes to it. See, this is where it messes with people right here because when I make that statement about we don't have to go looking for it, people are back and say, well, you just think everybody, you know. You've got to open your eyes up and see it.

unknown: 44:48

Right.

SPEAKER_00: 44:53

But what he did on the cross is not changed by what I do. It's already happened. It's finished. It's occurred. It's done. And then I have to wake up and realize it. I can walk my whole life with my eyes closed. But it still doesn't change what happened on the cross. That's all the finished work is in a nutshell. It does not change. I don't care how you live, whether you go to church every week, two times a week, and teach Sunday school and all this, or whether you're out there and you're doing whatever you want to do, it don't matter. Both of those, Jesus done the same thing on the cross for both of them. But both of them do not see it. So our goal is to wake the one up that's asleep. And say, you know what he done for that person right there? Get it for you too. But you gotta wake up and see it. He'll have to go back to the cross and do it again for you. He's not gonna do that. It's already happened. So when Christ is truly the sinner, love stops being just an idea. It becomes something we live out. It's not something we just talk about in church. It's something we actually do. We love. It looks like patience instead of suspicion. That might be my next sermon. We can preach on that right there. Patience instead instead of suspicion. How many times have you got suspicious when you've seen certain people? I have. Because they didn't have everything just right yet. Why can't we have patience with them instead of being so suspicious about them? Just a little change of mindset there. That's all it is. Presence instead of distance, restoration instead of punishment, reconciliation instead of exclusion. You're with me instead of outside of me. And maybe, if we do this, maybe the real question isn't, do we believe God is love? Maybe the question is this does our love still look like Jesus? Because if it doesn't, it's not Jesus that needs to be reinterpreted. I think it's our love that needs to be reformed. And we need to rethink it. God is love is really easy to say. But it only takes on its full meaning when we look at Jesus and let him define what love actually looks like. We can say God is love all day long. And we can look spiritual and sound spiritual, but if we don't have a true understanding of what that word love truly is, and it's based off the foundation of who Christ is, it's meaningless. It just sounds good. I'm tired of just sounding good. Okay, I want amen. Y'all supposed to say, you always sound good. We do, we sound good as Christians a lot of times. We sound very, very super spiritual in some of the things that we say. And we're taught to say them. It's not that they're bad people saying that. We're taught to say those things. And it sounds really nice to say those things. But I'm at a point now, I'm saying I'm just tired of saying those things when there's really nothing behind it. I don't truly understand where that love's coming from. If it's coming out of tradition just because I'm taught that way, that's great. It sounds good, it feels good. But I'm at a point now I'm saying I want to go deeper than that. I want to know where the foundation of that love is. Where's it coming from? What does it mean? What does it look like? What should it look like? That's just taking it to another level. That's it. It's not doubting anybody else. It's not looking at people and saying, oh, you don't understand love and I do. No, that's not it. That's the way people take it, though. Like you're putting them down. We're not putting nobody down, we're trying to say go deeper. Let's all go deeper. Let's all challenge ourselves. Does my love look like Christ? That's that's the number one question I can ask myself.