What is Love. Baby Don't Hurt Me

What if love isn’t something you manufacture but a life you receive? We dive into 1 Corinthians 13 to uncover why agape—self-giving, sacrificial love—is greater than any gift, achievement, or emotion and how it becomes real in our ordinary choices. Instead of cheering on more effort, we get honest about the limits of willpower and the freedom of letting Jesus live through us. The result is a love that is patient when feelings fade, kind when tempers rise, and unoffendable when criticism or hurt shows up at the worst time.

We break down the four Greek words for love and focus on agape as the only love that can carry marriages, friendships, and church life through friction. You’ll hear how Paul’s two positives—patience and kindness—become visible actions, not just warm thoughts. Then we trace eight things love refuses to be: envious, showy, puffed up, rude, self-seeking, easily provoked, scorekeeping, and secretly thrilled by sin. Along the way, we talk about comparison as a joy thief, pride disguised as public virtue, and the hidden strength of kindness that responds rather than reacts.

Finally, we anchor love in truth that actually holds: Jesus is the Son of God; salvation is by grace through faith; the cross and resurrection break sin’s power; new life in Christ is real; and nothing can separate us from God’s love. That gospel foundation turns failure into formation and security into courage, so we can release grudges, set wise boundaries without contempt, and serve without chasing applause. If you’re hungry to trade striving for abiding and performance for presence, this conversation will reframe how you see love—and how you practice it tomorrow.

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Transcript

Setting The Question: What Is Love?

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Alright, today's sermon is called What Is Love? Don't hurt me no more. Okay. It's called What is Love? Baby Don't Hurt Me. Yeah. There we go. Thank you, John. That was awesome. We could break out into karaoke right at church, right? No? Okay. And we're gonna be studying 1 Corinthians chapter 13. We'll get through the first six verses today. And I tried to Google how many love songs have ever been written. It's worth a Google. And Google told me in its infinite wisdom, over a hundred million love songs have been written. I don't know how it knows that. But sounds right, so we'll go with it. But do we really know what love is? You know, they asked thousands, they asked a few thousand people how to describe love, and these are some of my favorites. Uh people said it's when you can fart freely in front of someone. I thought that's that's interesting. Okay. Uh it's buying an extra thick cookies and cream milkshake after craving one all day, but your spouse drops theirs accidentally, so you give them yours. Aww. It's a term that means zero in tennis. Or this one says, Love is bacon, bacon is love. I can see that. Love songs, right? So when we come to church, we've written love, the church has written 2,000 years worth of love songs to Jesus. And when we sing our songs, that's what we're doing. We are singing the greatest love songs that have ever been written to Jesus. And it is so important and valuable to do that. We don't come here just for a lecture. I hope you don't come here just for a lecture because the lecture will probably disappoint. But if you come here to connect with Jesus, to give him your love, he will never disappoint because he's always initiating that. He's giving you his love. And so we sing to respond and give him love. So that's why we always sing at the beginning of our church service and we close our service in a song usually, because we want that to bookend what's going on here. That this is not, and those aren't religious things. We're not doing that because it's our tradition, but we pick different songs, so it's always unique and it's always fresh, so that it's a fresh expression of love. Okay, we're gonna talk a lot about love today, so let's just look at our text here and see what it says. First Corinthians chapter 13 says, Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I've become a sounding brass or a clinging symbol. And though I 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. So Paul says, We just finished two weeks of talking about spiritual gifts and how important they are in the church, and to understand how God gives you a spiritual gift. But he says here, love is more important than all the gifts of the spirit combined, and it doesn't matter how great your gift is, the love is the greatest gift. But how is love a gift? That confused me. I was like, okay, if love is the greatest gift, how is love the greatest gift? Well, a heart of love is a gift that you can receive from Jesus. And Paul says, I implore you to seek the best gifts. The best gift exclusively is love. So what does that mean? It means it's a gift to have a heart of love, it's not something you can produce. So you shouldn't come to church and hear, be more loving, just do it, just be more loving. You can do it. Because we can't. We can't. We can't produce that on our own. But we can seek him. And in seeking him and asking him to live through us and to transform us, our heart receives that love as a gift, and we can pour out that love as a free gift. So we're gonna talk a lot about a lot about love today. We're gonna talk about what what love is and what love is not. And here's the if you don't hear anything, what I want you to hear is this if you want this love, if you want to be loving, which you do because you're a believer, and so that is your deepest desire, if you want it, don't try to do it, but ask Jesus to do it through you in you. Ask Jesus Himself to give you his heart. That's why we seek the Lord in the morning, that's why we seek the Lord in prayer, that's why we spend time reading his word. It's not to earn something from the Lord, but it's to receive his heart, receive his grace. And that's how that works. As you spend time with him, his love rubs off on you. You start to smell like him. All right, so Paul says, if you have not love, now the word he uses for love there is, does anyone know Greek? It's the word agape. Alright, have you guys heard that word before? Okay, agape. That is the ancient Greek word for love that Paul uses here. But in Greek they have four words for love. So we have to learn Greek this morning. So we're gonna learn the four words for love. There's these ancient words, and so uh the first one we'll look at is eros. So you see eros. They would use that word for the romantic love, the sexual love, that type of love when you describe that. It's um uh very simple, easy to describe, everyone understands, but that's the word that they use. You get the word erotic from that love in England, or from that word in English. The second word is storgy, and that refers to the love in a family. So parents for kids, you know, you for your second cousin who you really love, you know, you're like, oh, family love. That's that's what the word storgy means. The third word is fia. And you just can remember Philadelphia. Okay, what is Philadelphia? The city of brotherly love. And Cowboys fans hate them. So as you rem that's an easy way to remember that the word filia means friendship or affection. So that's so when I say I love my buddy, when we play fantasy football together, or we go to the gym together, man, I love you, bro. That's the word that we're using. But in English, we just use all these words interchangeably, so we just have to have context of to what you mean. Okay. But agape is the only word that matters for us today, because that's the word that we're learning about. And it's it's a love without changing, it's a self-giving, self-sacrificial love that always gives without demanding or expecting repayment. That's agape love, self-sacrificing love. It's a love so great that it can be given to unlovable people, unappealing people, people that don't deserve anything. Agape love will love them and will sacrifice for undeserving people, people who are mean, people who are dumb, people who are unkind and treat you poorly in response. Agape love does not care at all how it's treated. Agape love pours out love no matter what. Because it loves to give, it doesn't love to receive. This is what's wrong with 90% of marriages in the world and relationships. You wonder why dating is so difficult these days and marriages are so difficult. Because when we think about our relationship, we think, okay, I'm gonna give this much and I'm gonna get this much in return. And God's plan for marriage was never that. God's plan was you give and you give agape love, and you keep giving and you keep giving and you keep giving no matter what. You love and you love and you love. Well, where do I get that kind of love? We'll get to that at the end here. So hold on to that question. Agape love can be defined as sacrificial giving. It has very, very little to do with emotion. Emotion. We think when when we see a love movie, you know, a romance, it really gets all get us gets us right in our fields, right? And we have that emotional response. Um, but real agape love is about self-denial for the sake of another. And how we learn about this, how we know about this, is because God is love. So everything God does will be love. He loves his whole creation, so he is constantly giving, he's just always giving to his entire creation. He supplies what the animals need, he supplies what everything in creation needs. And that doesn't stop with people. He loves all his people, he is always giving love. Giving, giving, giving. That's his heart. That's what love is. And so we can read this chapter and think that Paul is saying, man, let's just be friendly. But that's not what this is talking about. He says, if we don't have sacrificial love, everything we do means nothing. Everything we do means nothing. Agape isn't just friendliness, it's self-denial for the sake of another. It does what's best for the other person. So if I just do self-denial things, am I good? If I just do good works and I'm always thinking about other people, is that what love is? Well, let's read. In verse 3, it says, And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not agape love, it profits me nothing. So here Paul says, you know, many Christians think that being a Christian in the Christian life is all about sacrifice. You sacrifice your money, you sacrifice your life, you sacrifice your time for the sake of Jesus. And sacrifice is important, but without love, agape love, he says, it profits me nothing. It profits me nothing. He says that these things we do are not the best measure of someone's true spiritual credentials. Oh, you should listen to me, and I'm I'm this in the church, and I should be respected because look at all these things that I've done. I did this and I did this, and when we have our resume of all the things that we've done, or all the things that we've sacrificed, or all the things that we give in, Paul says it means nothing if there's not agape love there. Because what is that? It's pride and self-focus. Pride and self-sufficiency, self-focus, it ruins all our self-denying good works. So, yeah, you might have done all those good things, and those things can be great. But pride ruins it all, Paul says. Our sacrifices don't matter if we're trusting in our sacrifices. Our eyes are on Jesus. Love can never be focused on me. Agape love is never focused on myself. What I feel, what I think I deserve, or how I think things should be. How many times in the Bible are we told to love ourselves? Zero. But you you ask the world today, you ask the common psychological principles, the common idea that man has of how to find your worth, and it says, love yourself, love yourself, love yourself. And Jesus says, if you want to follow me, deny yourself, let death to self and say no to self, deny yourself. So we have these two opposite perspectives, these two opposite ways of how you're supposed to live life. The world says, love yourself, God says, you already love yourself. You actually, if you want to find life, you need to deny self and see, discover what agape love is all about. Each thing described in what we've read so far in verses one through three is a good thing. Tongues, speaking in tongues, good. It was awesome. Prophecy, that was good, knowledge was good, having faith was good, and sacrifice, living a sacrificial life, all good things. But love, agape love is so valuable, so important that apart from it, every other thing is useless. That's what that's how important this is, Paul says. So vital, so vital. When we focus too much on what we do, we forget that we do what we do because of who we are. We are loved by Christ, by Jesus. And so we love others because of our identity in Christ. All these serving things and all the gifts that he gives us and all the things that we do, they spring out of our identity. That's why in every single one of Paul's letters, he spends the first half of it pouring into your identity. This is who you are, this is what Jesus did for you, this is what to believe, this is what to believe, this is what to believe. Then he says, this is how to act because of that. This is how you can, your identity will inform your behavior. So, how do we know what this love is? How do we know what this love is? I wish there was a simple, perfect description of love that could teach us what love is, and that we could read it at all our weddings and then ignore it for the rest of our marriages. Oh, yeah, that's what we have here. This is a great description of love. So let's read it. Chapter 13, verse 4. Here's two things that love is. Love suffers long and is kind. Love suffers long and is kind. Paul is not writing about how love feels. Again, we think love is all about feeling, but he's writing about how love can be seen in action. So true love, this agape love, is always demonstrated by action. Don't say you love me, show it. Right? You've heard that. Probably said it in your marriage or in your relationships. Don't say you love me, just show it. So the first way he says we can show love is by long suffering. That means I'll choose to love you even when you don't deserve it, or do things that hurt me or annoy me. I'll treat you the same regardless of how many times you fall short of the standard, or how many times you reject me, or how many times you act unlovingly toward me. This is agape love. If God's love is in us, then we will show long suffering to those who annoy us and hurt us. So I'm gonna pause right here. And as we we look at this, we our natural thing is we are gonna self-assess. We're gonna be like, am I long-suffering? And how's that gonna go for us? Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna remember all of the times when we weren't this, when we did not demonstrate it. Maybe you'll think of a few times when you did, okay? But the intention here is yes, to recognize and to learn what love is, but it's real easy to to to change the the subject to Sean suffers long and is kind. And if I do that, I'm probably gonna feel some condemnation. I'm probably not gonna understand the full meaning. But if you put in the word Jesus, Jesus suffers long and is kind, wow, then everything makes total perfect sense. Did Jesus demonstrate long suffering? Praise him, right? Was Jesus kind? I mean, limitless kindness and long suffering flowed from Jesus. Now, where does Jesus live? Up in heaven and in us. He has sent his very spirit to live in us. Jesus lives in us. So I'm pausing right here to take a take a just a backup and say, guys, don't don't get lost in these are the requirements, this is what you're supposed to look at. You already have this love inside of you. You already have it. You don't have to earn it, you don't have to produce it, you don't have to discover it. It's right inside you in Christ. You are in Christ, and Christ is in you. You have this love. This love is how you really want to act. Every time you choose to not walk in this, you're gonna be conflicted, and your peace inside you is gonna go away. And you're like, oh, I want to treat this person and I want to, oh, he just cut me off, and I and you you don't do the loving thing. Your own heart has a disconnect. God doesn't just say, shouldn't have done that. God says, Who are you? Remember who you are. You Jesus is living inside you, that is your identity. So loving is your nature. Love, this kind of love, is your nature. You can be patient, you can be long-suffering. But what about they do? Don't look at them, look at Jesus. But how can I muster up patience? You can't. It's a gift. Seek the best gifts. The best gift is a loving heart. Jesus has given you a loving heart. So to walk in that loving heart is about faith. Do you believe that Jesus loves you? Do you believe that Jesus lives in you? Do you believe that He'll make your actions loving as you step forward to love? The problem is we don't even want to step forward to love because we we know that we're gonna get hurt. We believe the person's not gonna change. We believe the person's gonna treat us the same way again. We don't believe love transforms people. And Jesus says, It does. Look at you. I've loved you and it transformed you. So why don't you just let my love flow through you to these people that you need to love, that you want to love. Love suffers long. Love is kind. So kindness is the description of love. I'll choose to treat you in a way that is best for you, not what I think you deserve or how I feel I should treat you. I would treat what is truly best for you. I'll respond with kind words and actions instead of reacting with my feelings. Did you see that? I'll respond instead of react. Love responds. The flesh reacts. It's always best if you feel like you're gonna say something stupid to not say anything at all. Just wait. It's best to respond with patience and kindness. This means love is gentle. What is kindness? It means gentle, considerate, compassionate. It seeks the well-being of others and it acts in a way that is beneficial and supportive to the person that it's loving. In Ephesians 2, 7, it says that God shows the incomparable riches of his grace. Let me read it to you in the New Living Translation. It says, God, so God can point us, point to us in all future ages as an example of the incredible wealth of his grace and kindness towards us, as he has shown in all he has done for us who are united with Christ Jesus. That means for all of eternity, our whole life, our purpose is to be the object of God's kindness. You're not gonna be playing a harp for all of eternity. We're not gonna be just bragging about our mansions. For all of eternity, it's gonna be about God revealing in us exploring the kindness He has had to us. It will be an exchange of kindness and love with God. That is our that is what eternal life is. Experiencing the love, the agape love of God, and responding to it with love. This kindness is not something that we muster up on our own, but it is the result of receiving his love and believing he lives in us and will live through us. So now let's look at our next text here, which is verses four through six. We're gonna see eight things that love is not. Eight things that love is not. It says, Love does not envy, love does not parade itself, is not puffed up, does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil, and does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth. So let's just break down each one of those. First, it does love does not envy. This means we do not compare ourselves with each other. Comparison is always, always a work of the flesh, an idea of the flesh, a mode, it's motivated by the flesh. Love will never compare our life, our state, our blessings with someone else. Something they have should belong to me. I wish I had their life. I wish I had their gifts. I wish I had this, I wish I had that. That's never love. Love is happy that someone else is blessed, love is happy that someone else can be lifted up. Love is always willing to take that lower place to lift up somebody else. The next thing, love does not parade itself. So love in action, this agape love, can always be anonymous. Love never has to have the attention, it doesn't have to have the limelight, doesn't have to people say it did a good job, and it doesn't have to see a result. Love does not have to see a result. We want to see results so we can hear, well done, good job, you did a good job. And love says, That's just what I do. Love says, I just love. I will love and I will do it in secret if I need to. I will care about other people because it never shows itself off. Sometimes the people who seem to work the hardest at love are the ones who are furthest from it. They do things many would perceive as loving, yet they do them in a manner that would parade itself. And this isn't love, it's pride looking for glory in the appearance of love. Again, don't just say I love you, just be loving all the time. Sometimes we say I love you, so we can hear someone say I love you back. I said I love him, and he doesn't say it back to me. That's not love. Agape love loves no matter what. We are called to agape love. Love is not puffed up. Again, that means prideful. To be puffed up is to be arrogant and self-focused. It describes someone who has a big head. Love doesn't get its head swelled up, but it focuses on others. No one is worried about their position or their standing or their title or getting attention. That's that's not agape love. It's not the heart that Jesus gives us. It's not the heart we have inside us. Next, love is not rude. Rudeness. That means polite manners, right? Love never rushes people. Love never is insulting. Love never is insulting. Love never insults another human being. Made in God's image, no matter what they believe, no matter what they do, they are an eternal soul. And that soul will either live in eternity with God or will be separated from God for eternity as well. And if we can see people as eternal souls, it really will affect the way that we treat them. And we will lovingly avoid rudeness. We will never laugh at others' expense. We will never joke about people who aren't like us or don't look like us or don't act like us or don't believe like us. I've been reading, my wife and I have been reading about these missions to the Congo from C.T. Stud and then this the next guy, Norman Grubb, his son-in-law, and they would go into the Congo, and the the Congolese people at that time in the early 1900s, I mean, they wore like nothing. They were just naked all the time. And they were cannibals and they had you know worshipped awful things and they had every kind of iniquity you could do. And and they could go in, you you could hear the heart of these missionaries. They would go in and they would be like, We could we could just decry all the evil stuff. And they said that these are evil, they're very evil people. But they went in there and they were willing to be killed and not just killed, but brutally murdered, and some of them cannibalized because they valued these people. There was nothing you could say that just gave them value as people, they they weren't educated, they didn't have anything that you could say was redeeming about them, except they were created by God and loved by God, and so these missionaries with the heart of Jesus went in and sacrificed their lives for people that they had no guarantees would would turn. But God used it and through agape love, a great revival happened in that country when there was it was incredible violence, it was stuff we could not even imagine. Like the the treatment was just unspeakable what they were doing to each other. And um, and God's love penetrated it, transformed them, and won because Jesus always wins. When he is lifted up, he can draw all men to himself. And that's what we do when we love. All right, love never seeks its own. Paul says the day is the same idea in Romans chapter 12, verse 10. He says, in honor, giving preference to one another. And in Philippians 2, 4, he says, Let each of you not look out for his own interest, but also for the interest of others. And that's being like Jesus in the most basic way, being others-centered instead of self-centered. So love doesn't, it doesn't matter what I get out of this relationship, I'm going to pour out love. And then it says love is not provoked. We're just getting deeper and deeper and deeper. Here. This is insane. This is crazy talk. Love is not provoked. That means you are unoffendable. Nothing anyone says about you, about God, about anything will ever offend you because of love. Because you know it doesn't matter what they say, I'm gonna love them anyway. It doesn't matter if they have a lack of understanding, it doesn't matter if they hate, it doesn't matter the differences. We can all find easily uh ways to get uh provoked or become irritated or get offended because people are just annoying in this world, and further than that, people are evil. But God says, agape love doesn't get offended, and that heart is in you, it's already there. You can love the unlovable without being provoked. Moses was kept out of the promised land because he became provoked by the people of Israel, it says in Numbers chapter 20. And the promised land for us is this life, this victorious Christian life where our church is a light to this world and we are overcomers. That's our promised land where everything we do is is a light to this world. It'll never happen if we're being provoked, if we're letting ourselves get annoyed. We're gonna love people deeply because that's how Jesus loves them through us. Lastly, it says, well, second less, thinks no evil. Literally, this means does not store up the memory of any wrong it has received. Does not store up the memory of any wrong it has received. People will treat you poorly, people will take advantage of you, people will speak evil of you, forget it. Love forgets it. Your mind can't forget it. I'm not, he's not saying you have to forget it, because your mind won't forget those things. But love is more powerful than even your mind and your memory. You can love people. Love will put away the hurts of the past instead of clinging to them. One writer tells of a tribe in Polynesia where it was customary for men to keep reminders of his hatred for others. And these reminders were suspended from the roofs of their huts to keep to keep alive the memory of the wrongs, real or imagined. And I think in some of our huts, we're doing the same thing sometimes. Sometimes we judge other people's motives. That's thinking evil of them. Oh, I bet this person is just this, I bet they think that. I bet this, that, or the other. We we group people. Well, because of this, you're all that. And that's not love. It says love does not rejoice in sin. What makes our hearts, the hearts of love that we have, the hearts of love Jesus has given us, what makes us the most happy? Not sin. Sin doesn't make you happy. I know that many of us struggle with sin, and when we choose to walk in that sin, I know that we are not happy. I could go around and I could say, Well, you should stop doing this and you should stop doing that, and you should stop doing that. Or I could say, Are you happy doing that? I know the answer is no. Because if you're a believer, your heart is filled with his heart, and your heart rejoices in the truth, not in sin. And so I don't need to try to convince you not to sin. I need to remind you of who you are. You are a beautiful child of God whose heart has been renewed by the Holy Spirit. You are love personified because Jesus lives inside you. And when we surrender to him, that love oozes out of every part of our every action, everything can be filled with his love. So it says, We don't rejoice in iniquity, but we rejoice in the truth. Well, what is this truth of the gospel that makes us so happy? I'm gonna tell you, what is this? The truth of the gospel is the good news that Jesus has finished his work on the cross. He finished all the work that was needed to do on the cross. It's it's all about the grace of God and the salvation that Jesus freely gives us by grace, and our side of it is always faith. Are we gonna believe in what he did? So here's four things you can remember that we can rejoice in. When you want happiness, when you want joy deep in your heart, when you're looking for that joy, when you're hungry for joy and you've been struggling with the struggles of this world or sin, you've been struggling against sin. Rejoice in the truth. Number one, Jesus is the Son of God. Rejoice in that. He came to earth, he lived a sinless life, he revealed God's love and his truth to all people. And if you understand that and if you believe that, then he's revealed it to you, and you're living in that truth. And that truth is the beginning of all knowledge, is the beginning of everything. Jesus was God, who Jesus is. The second thing you can rejoice in is that salvation is by grace through faith. All of salvation is by grace through faith. It's a gift from God, not something we can earn with our efforts. No part of your Christian life is something you earn with your efforts. Oh, I went to church, so God's gonna bless me. I did good things, so God's gonna bless me. I said no to those bad things, so God's gonna bless me. It's never about that. It's always a free gift of grace. It's received by grace through faith. Everything you can get from God, your side of it is faith. Am I gonna trust in Jesus or am I going to try to earn it by myself? That's the law, that's a religious mindset, not the Christian relationship grace mindset. It's a gift, that's grace. If I have to work for it, that's religion. And we are not religious. The Bible doesn't teach religion, it teaches a relationship with Jesus. The third thing that will make you happy is the death and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus died on the cross to take away the sins of the world. He rose from the dead, conquering sin and death, and both those things are yours. So what happened to Jesus happened to you. So his death on the cross was your death to sin. His new life that he raised with is your new life. We are we identify with him. We are one with him. He gives us his forgiveness and his new life of joy and victory over sin. As a Christian, you do not have to sin. You have been set free from the power of sin. Now, do we walk in that all the time? No, because we're growing in faith. But the more we believe in our oneness with him, in his victory over sin, in his death and resurrection, the more we believe, the more we will walk in his victory and in his love. It's all about faith. Here's another one. New life in Christ will make you happy. Believers are made new through Jesus. We have a new life. The old self-life has been crucified, and the new life has begun. And so now we have the Holy Spirit living inside us. That means we don't ever rejoice in sinning. We have a new life. The things that made us excited and excited our flesh and made us happy before you were saved, they just don't work anymore. They don't make you happy anymore. And believing that will make you happy. The last thing is we have eternal security through our relationship with Jesus. We are secure in Jesus. Nothing can separate you from his love. Have you failed as a Christian? Yeah. Have I failed as a Christian? Big time. But we will never lose our salvation through that type of a failure, through a mistake, through a sin, because we are forever united with him. And that can make you super happy. The gospel, everything that we know about the truth of the gospel is not about religious rituals or human efforts, but it's about trusting in the finished work of Jesus. It's the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. That's what the gospel is. Not for everyone who goes to church on Sunday, not for everyone who does the right things, and not for everyone who votes the right way. For everyone who believes. We will be a light to this world if we love other people and we believe. And we will have the joy of the Lord. Okay, that's our study for this week. Next week, we'll pick up where we left off, and we're gonna learn about four more things that love is. So we're gonna learn about four ways that love can be expressed in our lives, and we'll go pretty deep on that verse, on a couple verses next week. All right. So as the worship team comes back up here, let's pray. Father, we surrender our lives fresh to you. We believe in the finished work of Jesus Christ. Not only that, we believe that Jesus Christ is love because the Bible says God is love. We believe you have been patient with us. We believe you have been kind to us. You were never self-centered, you were never prideful, you were never you never rejoiced in iniquity, but you rejoiced in the truth. You rejoiced in the word of God, you rejoiced in the finished promises that you were going to accomplish that God would make for us. God, we thank you for how perfect your love is. And we thank you that we do not have to strive and we do not have to work to become loving, but we simply invite you to live through us, Jesus, live through me. Lord, protect me from living off my own power, protect me from living by my own strength, protect me from living to protect myself. Lord, the only safe place is to be fully surrendered to your will, to fully invite you. I beg you, Father, live through me. Live through me, Jesus. Live through me. Make me loving towards my spouse who is frustrating to me sometimes. Help me to be loving to my children who don't always walk in the truth. Help me to be loving to this world who needs your light and your love more than they need anything, even though they don't know it. Father, help us to love you even more than we love our own lives and our own comfort and our own self safety. Help us to love you even to death. Father, you are our life, you are everything to us. Jesus, we surrender the words we've been saying, the things we've been writing, the things we've been thinking. We surrender it all to you. Let us only be your love in this physical world. Jesus, we rejoice in how you have loved us and how you were patient with us. And Jesus, we ask you to take over our church and help us to love you in a way that we could never have loved you before. In your name we pray. Amen.