“With Others”
Notes
Transcript
What is love? Poets, philosophers, theologians and artists have attempted for a very long time to define that four letter word. Song writers have, too. Did you know that more songs have been written about love than any other topic in the world?
Here’s a few of the songs about love. The Partridge family sang “I think I love you.” Olivia Newton-John confessed, “I honestly love you.” The Doors just said, “Hello, I love you, won’t you tell me your name?” Justin Bieber piped in with, “I just need somebody to love.”
The Beatles said, “All you need is Love”, but “you can’t buy me love.” Roxette claimed that “It must have been love.” Robert Palmer was “Addicted to Love,” and 10cc declared, “I’m not in love.” Elvis crooned “Love me tender,” and “Hunka hunka burning love.”
Usher blamed the “DJ got us fallin’ in love again,” and Stevie Wonder “just called to say I love you.” Ke$ha said “Your love is my drug.” (but I think she’s on something stronger) Ray Charles sang, “I can’t stop loving you.” But Air Supply admitted they were “all outta’ love.” And Kenny begged Ruby “don’t take your love to town.”
Tim told Faith, “It’s your love,” while Taylor Swift wrote “A love story.” Dolly wrote it and Whitney sang it, “I will always love you.” Jackie DeShannon said it best when she sang, “What the world needs now is love sweet love.”
Then some songs just ask questions about love. The Spinners asked, “Could it be I’m falling in love?” Jefferson Airplane asked, “Don’t you want somebody to love?” To which Tina Turner answered, “What’s love got to do with it?” And the Bee Gees, the Brothers Gibbs, just wanted to know “How deep is your love?” Then Sir Elton put on a Lion King DVD and asked, “Can you feel the love tonight?” And Haddaway summed it all up by asking, “What is Love?” So, “What is love?”
A group of children were asked to define love, and here are some of their answers: a 5 year old said: “Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne and they go out and smell each other.” An 8 year old said: Love is when you kiss all the time. Then when you get tired of kissing, you still want to be together and you talk more. Said a 7 year old: “When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you.” A 6 year old said: “Love is when your puppy licks your face even after you left him alone all day.” Another 5 year old said: “I know my older sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and has to go out and buy new ones.” Another 8 year old said: “You really shouldn’t say ‘I love you’ unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget.”
What is love? It kind of depends on the situation, doesn’t it? And yet love is supposed to be the primary marker of our life in Christ as followers of Jesus Christ. Jesus said,
John 13:35 (ESV)
By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.
Jesus also taught that
Matthew 22:37–40 (ESV)
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.
At times, we are prone to catchy slogans. You know, those one-liners that get printed on t-shirts or coffee mugs and it’s not that they’re essentially wrong, it’s just that we accept them without grasping why. There’s one that comes to mind for me this morning and I don’t want us to accept it without understanding the depth and magnitude of it. And it’s the call that everything we do as followers of Christ in some way comes under the heading,
Love God, love one another
Love God, love one another
To remind us of some of the ground we’ve covered, in the first few verses of Romans 12, Paul has been describing, for our benefit, our response to the amazing grace and mercy of God.
For those in the family of faith, God’s grace has given to you a relationship with God through Jesus Christ that you didn’t deserve while God’s mercy has spared you of the judgement you do deserve for your sin. When the Holy Spirit calls you to put your faith in Jesus Christ, it’s not a call to a faith where Jesus is like an airline attendant who is checking your ticket to board the plane to Heaven. If you’ve ever flown on a plane, you know that beyond saying you can board the plane or not, the attendant has no influence upon your life. Some times people approach Jesus with that type of mentality.
If you will, Paul is saying, “In light of all that God has willingly accomplished on the cross, in the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, this is how you respond.” And he says that we are to offer our bodies, our lives, our selves, as living sacrifices to God. The German theologian and Christian martyr during World War II, Dietrich Bonhoeffer expressed it this way:
“When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow Him, or it may be a death like Luther’s, who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world. But it is the same death every time—death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at his call.”
Bonhoeffer talks about “the death of the old man,” and he doesn’t mean our physical death, but he does mean that the passions and the desires and the behaviors of our life before meeting Jesus Christ begin to fade away, to be put to death, as we are transformed from who we were before Jesus to who we are in Jesus Christ. That is a process of the Holy Spirit that comes about as our minds are renewed. It doesn’t all happen at once and at times, our patience with ourselves can wear thin as we struggle to live lives that honor Jesus. That’s why Paul also writes:
2 Corinthians 4:16 (ESV)
So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.
And part of that renewing work of the Spirit involves how we view ourselves. Remember the caution from last week,
Romans 12:3 (ESV)
For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.
That means we take a balanced view of our selves as deeply loved and lovable individuals who have worth and meaning given to us as children adopted by the Father, but also as individuals whose lives are marked by sin and failure and shortcoming and fault, and therefore we are deeply loved people in need of God’s forgiveness and grace. And when we take that truly humble view of ourselves, we are set free to serve God and love one another, even, as we’ll find next week, love our enemies, as God loves us.
Look with me at
Romans 12:9 (ESV)
Let love be genuine.
It looks like it says “Let love be genuine,” but in the original language that Paul wrote this in, there’s no verb, and there’s no command. It simply says “the love sincere” or “love un-hypocritical.” Sounds more like a heading, doesn’t it? Now it’s certainly appropriate to translate it as “Let love be genuine.” That’s obviously included in the meaning of a heading like “the love sincere.” But it also helps us understand that what Paul is doing here is describing that sincere love as it is lived out in the body of Christ, the church. These are practical, real-world ways to love one another as brothers and sisters in Christ, and also real world ways to love those we might in some ways consider our enemies – those who seek to malign us, who speak against us.
Love in the body of Christ is sincere. The word sincere literally means “no play-acting.” Love without hypocrisy. The word hypocrisy, or hypocrite, originally comes from the theater, and it could have a positive or negative connotation. In the positive, a good actress or actor could play any part assigned to them without losing their sense of who they really are. But used negatively, when someone is play-acting off the stage, pretending to be something they aren’t or do something they really aren’t, they become deceivers.
Chuck Swindoll said “If hypocrisy creeps in, love ceases to be love and becomes something grotesque – manipulation, quid pro quo (in other words, I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine), competition, pretense.” Sincere love, genuine love, isn’t manipulative or competitive, and it seeks to love the other, even if they are unable or unwilling to love you back in return. It is real, and it is true.
Romans 12:9 (ESV)
Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good.
Love is also discerning. It doesn’t embrace evil, it embraces that which is ultimately and purely good in the eyes of God. It abhors, or steps back from, that which is evil. In other words, when it encounters evil, it refuses to participate. That doesn’t mean it hides or seeks to hurt the evildoer. It doesn’t mean there’s a list of people who are acceptable to come into church and those who aren’t, or who are acceptable to be friends with and who aren’t. Jesus was friends with all kinds of people the good religious people wouldn’t spend any time at all with. Lying, cheating tax collectors. Unclean, unwholesome prostitutes. Smelly, uneducated fishermen. Those who were sick, diseased, maimed, or handicapped in some way, those who were, or used to be, demon-possessed. But he also didn’t participate in the prostitution or the fraud of the tax collectors. It probably looked like it to the good religious people though. Love isn’t just whatever we want it to be. It is a mighty flowing river, and the two banks, the boundaries beyond which it cannot flow, are truth and the discernment of good and evil, right and wrong.
Romans 12:10 (ESV)
Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor.
The one good way in which love can be competitive is in seeking to outdo one another in honoring and respecting others. Love doesn’t seek to make a name for itself, it seeks to make a name for the other person. As followers of Jesus, we are a people who are otherwise pretty incompatible and yet are eager to love one another.
Now, look with me at
Romans 12:11–13 (ESV)
Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.
If 1 Corinthians 13 is a powerful and poetic and beautiful and complete description of love, our passage this morning is the most succinct. What it lacks in poetry it makes up for with punch. Short, clipped, but powerful statements. 1 Corinthians 13:8 says, “Love never ends.” Here, the Bible says exactly the same thing.
It is natural for us as human beings to ebb and flow. It is in our nature to become complacent over time. It’s like when you first started driving, you used your turn signal for every lane change. Now…not so much. By the way teenagers, please use that turn signal. Or it’s like if you’re married, when you first started dating your spouse you went above and beyond to dress attractively, to look your best, to be on your best behavior. And yet when we go out with our spouses on a date and one tries to dress nicely, the other sees that and wonders, “I wonder who he’s dressing for?” because complacency has made its way into the marriage. Truthfully, in relationships, there was a time we worked overtime to look and act our best and make sure the person we loved knew we loved and cared about them, right? But over time, we lose that sometimes, don’t we? We stop “trying so hard.”
The same thing happens in our ability and desire to love one another in the church. We lose our passion. We lose our desire to serve each other. We start going through the motions. We lose our passion and our fire for worship. Are “passion” and “fire” even words that would describe how you came in here today? We also lose our passion for serving. And we lose our passion for loving and caring for one another. Passion leaks. That’s true of all of us.
This fire, this passion, isn’t just an emotional thing though. It’s more like the sense of determination that keeps you going when you’re being ridiculed and made fun of. A sense that says, “I will not stop meeting the needs of those in our midst who need help, whether it’s a ride, or a visit, or a contribution, or some kind of help around the house. Our love and our hospitality never fail, because love never fails.” In fact, Paul tells us to show hospitality there at the end of Romans 12:13. That’s an exhortation to you and to me to go out of our way to meet needs and be hospitable. We each certainly have our own needs and yet, as the body of Christ, we are eager to help the weakest in the body in whatever ways we can.
Now let’s look at a shift that takes place in
Romans 12:14 (ESV)
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.
The shift here involves our love for those outside the body of Christ. In other words, we are talking about how we love people who do not know the grace and mercy of God.
If love is one of the defining characteristics of a follower of Christ, then love for our enemies is a defining characteristic of our love. There are those who ridicule us. There are those who take stands against us. There are those who don’t like us simply because we follow Christ, simply because we’re a church. For as many conversations with our neighbors as we enjoyed taking the gospel through Devine this year, there were doors that some of our neighbors slammed in our faces once they learned we represent Jesus.
To be fair, as followers of Jesus, we’ve given people plenty of reason to not like us. We have become more known for who and what we are against than who we are for. Yet, let’s not be quick to dismiss the model of Jesus and his love for people. Who did Jesus spend his time with? How did he treat those the good religious people who wanted to stone him to death or run him off a cliff? We must remember that to those who have been beat up by the world, Jesus is a breath of fresh air. Jesus is a cool drink of water on a hot day. Friends, as his people, the body of Christ, we must have the same sense about us.
And that does not mean that people won’t always like us. People didn’t like Jesus. We will and we do take stands in our society that our culture doesn’t appreciate. But through it all, we love. And that means we receive hatred, we return with love. When our culture ridicules or despises us, we don’t get aggressive or defensive. We just keep on loving. Keep on serving. Keep on embracing good and refusing to participate in evil. To bless your persecutors is literally to seek God’s blessing on them in prayer. That’s hard.
We live in a culture and sometimes there’s even a thought that might float around a church like ours that says, “If they do it to me, it’s ok for me to do it back. If they say something ugly to me, I get to tell them exactly how I feel, with a buffet of four-letter words.”
It’s time to get back to following Jesus. That’s real, where the rubber meets the road stuff. And I hope that we remember that this is directly from the mouth of Jesus:
Luke 6:27–28 (ESV)
But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.
Another apostle, Peter, when talking about Jesus said:
1 Peter 2:23 (ESV)
When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.
Now, I want to offer a disclaimer because I am well aware of difficult experiences that some of you have gone through or, God-forbid, are going through. The Word of God is not saying that this means you have to stay with an abusive spouse or an abusive parent or something like that. The Bible is talking to the church as a whole in relation to society as a whole. We are to pray for God’s blessing on those who ridicule and persecute us in small ways and in large ways. It is a love that sincerely hopes that the evil doer will be led to repent of their sin just as we were. That they would repent and be transformed. We are a marginalized body repaying cursing with blessing.
Look with me at
Romans 12:15–16 (ESV)
Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight.
Do you feel the rapid fire, direct nature of Paul’s description of love here? It isn’t poetic, but it packs a punch like a series of body blows. This is what real love, really is. Real love is sincere and discerning. Real love perseveres, it keeps going even when it gets hard. Real love is tough, it is willing to seek God’s blessing on even our enemies, just as God loved us when we were his enemies. And real love refuses to be jealous.
“Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.” We tend to want to do the opposite. We rejoice at the weeping of others, especially our enemies, and we weep at the rejoicing of others. Why? Because we’re vindictive and jealous. When someone else has reason to celebrate, instead of being happy for them, we feel bad about ourselves. We’re like children saying “They got something we didn’t” or “something good happened for them that didn’t happen for me.” Rather than celebrating the pain of others and mourning the victories of others, we join them, intimately, in their celebration or their grief. We meet them where they are.
Paul then summarizes his description of love in this way: “Live in harmony with one another.” Harmony doesn’t mean we all see every issue in the same way. It means that we have an ability to stick together even when we view things differently. But we don’t want to do that. When someone says something we disagree with, we blast them, or we go running to another church where the “real” Christians are. We have completely lost our ability to stay in relationship with a group of people mostly different than us for a long period of time. And that is exactly what we are called to in the body of Christ. We are called to live in harmony. In a harmony, the notes aren’t all the same. They’re all different, but they’re in sync.
Love is sincere and discerning. It keeps going even when it’s tough. It is willing to seek the best for those who seek the worst for us. It refuses to be jealous. And it leads to harmony. And that’s only possible if it is marked by real humility. “Associate with the lowly.” Associate with those who cannot help your career or your climb up the social ladder. Associate, not as a superior helper but as a friend, an equal, with those who can do nothing for you. Eat with them. Laugh with them. Cry with them. Do you hear that? Do you hear what Paul is saying? That’s real friendship.
Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, tells of two lawyers he knows who used to hate each other. They were partners in the same firm.
When one became a Christian, he asked Bright, “Now that I’m a Christian, what should I do with my partner?” Bright said, “Why not ask him to forgive you and tell him you love him?” The Christian lawyer said,“I could never do that!” Because I don’t love him.”
That lawyer had put his finger squarely on one of the great challenges of the Christian life: On the one hand, everybody wants to be loved, but on the other hand, many people never experience it. That’s why we need to learn to love as Christ loves. We can’t manufacture that kind of love. It only comes from God; and it’s a love that draws people to Christ.
Bright goes on to say, “I prayed with that attorney.” The next morning, he told his partner, “I’ve become a Christian, and I want to ask you to forgive me for all I’ve done to hurt you, and to tell you that I love you.” The other partner was so surprised and convicted that he, too, asked for forgiveness and said, “I would like to become a Christian. Would you tell me how?”
Do you see what love can do?
We are a body of mostly incompatible people eager to love one another.
We are a body full of needs and eager to help the weakest.
We are a body maligned, and yet repaying cursing with blessing.
We are a body filled with people of different experiences united in humble harmony.
We are a body who represents our King who eagerly loves us and died on a cross so that we can be reconciled with God.
We are a body who represents our King who has met our needs, most supremely for salvation.
We are a body who represents our King that when he was cursed, he blessed.
Despite the wide array of our diversity, we are a body who is united under the banner of our King who alone is able to bring all things into submission.
What is love? It is live-giving, it is transforming, it is forgiving, it is reconciling.
Love is Christ
Love is Christ