Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

Pitiram Sorokin in his book The Ways And Power Of Love tells of how in 1918 he was hunted down by the Communist Government of Russia.

He was imprisoned and condemned to death.

Everyday he expected to be shot as he witnessed the shootings of his friends and fellow prisoners.

For 4 years he underwent endless horrors of human cruelty, death, and destruction.

In spite of all this he was an excellent example of the power of positive thinking.

He wrote this in his diary while in prison: "Whatever may happen in the future, I know that I have learned 3 things which will remain forever convictions of my heart as well as my mind.

Life, even the hardest life, is the most beautiful, wonderful, and miraculous treasure in the world.

Fulfillment of duty is another marvelous thing making life happy.

This is my second conviction.

And my third is that cruelty, hatred, violence, and injustice never can and never will be able to create a mental, moral, or material millenium.

The only way toward it is the royal road of all-giving creative love, not only preached but consistently practiced."

This all-giving creative love he writes of is the agape love of the New Testament.

God spared Sorokin that he might preach and practice this love.

He became one of the most voluminous writers of modern times in the area of Sociology.

He established the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism.

Altruism is another word for the love of others.

After years of study and experiments Sorokin believes he has established the following truth scientifically:

"Unselfish love has enormous creative and therapeutic potentialities far greater than most people think.

Love is a life-giving force, necessary for physical, mental, and moral health.

Altruistic persons live longer than egoistic individuals.

Children deprived of love tend to become vitally, morally, and socially defective.

Love is the most powerful antidote against criminal, morbid, and suicidal tendencies; against hate, fear, psychoneuroses.

It is an indispensable condition for deep and lasting happiness.

Only the power of unbounded love practiced in regard to all human beings can defeat the forces of interhuman strive.

It is goodness and freedom at their loftiest."

He feels he has established the fact scientifically which the New Testament proclaims, and that is that love is the supreme virtue.

It is the pinnacle of perfection.

It the weapon that will ultimately win over all the forces of darkness.

He says that the finest fruit of scientific thinking is identical to the finest fruit of the Spirit, which is agape love.

Science is a precise method for interpreting and controlling nature, and when it comes to human nature the key factor in interpreting and controlling it is love.

More and more people in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and sociology are recognizing this fact that life without love just will not work.

Smiley Blanton, and American psychiatrist, has written a book titled Love Or Perish.

He writes, "For more than 40 years I have sat in my office and listened while people of all ages and classes told me of their hopes and fears, their likes and dislikes, and of what they considered good or bad about themselves and the world around them....As I look back over the long, full years, one truth emerges clearly in my mind-the universal need for love.

Whether they think they do or not, all people want love.....They cannot survive without love: they must have it or they will perish."

A psychiatrist at a mental institution in Peoria, Ill.

Says: "No matter what a psychiatrist knows he cannot cure a patient with knowledge.

Someone has to love that patient, for the lack of love produced the neurosis.

And only love can cure it."

Dr. Karl Menninger, the noted authority in the world of medicine and psychiatry, said, "Love is the medicine for the sickness of the world."

He tells his staff, which includes doctors, nurses, orderlies, and cleaning people, that the most important thing they can offer a patient is love.

When people learn to give an receive love they recover from most of their illnesses.

The biggest health problem in the world is the inability to love and receive love.

Love is the greatest gift, and God gave us this gift in the giving of His Son.

Paul made it clear in I Cor. 13 that he could have all gifts and powers that anyone could ever hope to have, but if he lacked love he would be nothing.

Peter agrees with Paul, and that is why he puts love at the top.

We can be a very fine person with many virtues, but without this supreme virtue of love we can never be Christ-like in the way that really counts.

There would be no Gospel if God lacked this love, and there would be no communication of the Gospel if Christians lack it.

It is far more comprehensive than brotherly love.

That is a love that is exclusive for those who are brothers in Christ.

Agape love is that which covers all that the New Testament says about our love for neighbors and enemies.

It is a universal love.

It is the only kind of love adequate to meet the human situation because it is not a matter of affection, but a matter of unconditional acceptance.

A love that depends upon feeling and affection would be so limited as to be of no value at all in relation to enemies, and of little value in relation to most other people.

You can only have true affection for very few people, and so we have to get the idea out of our mind that when we speak of agape love we are speaking of some kind of emotion or affection.

Agape love is unconditional acceptance of another person.

It does not demand anything.

Emotional love demands attraction, affection, and some kind of benefit, but agape demands nothing.

The only perfect example is God's love for us.

It was while we were yet sinners that Christ died for us.

This means that God's love was expressed before we responded in faith.

God loved man in an absolutely unconditional manner, and He required nothing of man before He gave His Son to die for their sins.

This was the kind of love Jesus displayed as He went about doing good and healing all manner of disease, both physical and spiritual.

The law said, if you do this I will accept you, but the love of Christ said, I accept you, therefore, do this.

Agape love is the difference between law and grace.

The only way we can carry on the effectiveness of Christ is to add to our lives this supreme virtue of love.

Paul Tillich looking at it from the practical and scientific point of view wrote, "You cannot help people who are in psychosomatic distress by telling them what to do.

You can help them only by giving them something and by accepting them....Only then can one accept himself.

It is never the other way around.

That was the plight of Luther in his struggle against the distorted late Roman Church which wanted that men make themselves first acceptable and then God would accept them.

But it is always the other way around.

First you must be accepted.

Then you can accept yourself, and that means, you can be healed.

Illness, and the largest sense of body, soul and spirit, is estrangement."

The power of the Gospel is, therefore, the power of love and reconciliation.

God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself.

The sense of estrangement is not necessary, for God because of Christ accepts everyone unconditionally.

We do not love in the New Testament sense unless we can accept people unconditionally.

If we demand anything of people before we accept them we fall short of agape love.

This great truth can be perverted if we assume that God's acceptance of the sinner is the same as the salvation of the sinner.

The liberal tends to do this, and by doing so weakens the Gospel of love by not going beyond acceptance by God to repentance and salvation.

The conservative on the other hand is repelled back from the idea of telling the world they are reconciled to God, and they weaken the Gospel of love by changing its unconditional nature.

This puts the sinner in the position of having to do something to win God's love and be accepted.

Both of these perversions of love have hindered the cause of Christ.

The liberal perversion brings into the church those who are not made whole by conversion.

The conservative error keeps out of the church those who would be converted and made whole if they were accepted in love.

This greatest weapon for spiritual warfare is like any major physical weapon.

It is complicated and technical, and it calls for a trained and skilled operator.

To be effective uses of love we cannot afford to be ignorant of its nature anymore than a soldier can afford to be handling atomic weapons when he does not understand them.

It is one thing to be down on the launching pad of faith, but quite another to be way up in orbit controlling the ship of love.

When we come to the top position in any field we have a great deal of responsibility, and so when we come to this supreme virtue and ultimate weapon against evil we have a great responsibility as Christian soldiers.

If we want to be successful in soaring high into the atmosphere of Christ-like love, there are some important things we need to know about love.

We cannot deal with them all now, but the major thing we need to understand is that-

LOVE IS EXTREMELY EXPENSIVE.

None of the weapons of spiritual warfare come cheap, but in comparison to love they are the parachute and love is the airplane.

It costs to climb to love in Christian maturity.

It cost God His Son to love, and it cost Christ His life to love, and a great deal of sacrifice while He lived.

Richard Trench has put into poetry some of the things that Jesus didn't do because He loved.

He might have reared a palace at His word,

Who sometime had not where to lay His head;