LOVE
Hope Joy Peace Love • Sermon • Submitted
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· 6 viewsLove and Casting a Vision for Gateway in 2021.
Notes
Transcript
Worship songs
Keep on the sunny side
How deep the Father Love for us
Blessed Assurance
Prayer
Recognize Norm Rozendaal.
Love The Agape Love of Christ for the Church
1 John 4:7 7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.1
This is the call of John in his letter to his “dear children”. John was very old we he penned these verses. He walked with Christ and knew him personally from first encounters with the Messiah.
Casting a Vision of Love for Gateway community church.
In October, Scott Mathis, President of the Berean Fellowship of Churches, welcomed Gateway into the fold of Berean churches and and said it would be through our brotherly love for each other and our community we would grow to become a healthy, life-giving church. Friends, you are making that happen. For the love and care you have shown each other and our extended family through your weekly and daily prayers, by serving our neighbors during harvest season at the two local Co-ops, by calling upon each other offering help for daily tasks, in your faithful gathering for corporate worship and non-formal get together’s and fellowship. Friends, you are growing, and you will continue to grow through the love you share.
As we begin a new year, one that we admit will come with hardships and uncertainty, I want to encourage you to fuel up with the life-giving power of Christ’s love, and prepare yourselves to make a different in our church and in our community as we grow together to become disciples of Christ.
Three areas of our church
Strengthening Families Thru Love
Strengthening Marriages thru Love
Strengthening Community Thru Service.
These things will help build the health of our Church, your Church, thru first its love for each other, and then naturally we will begin to grow the the church from within.
Growing the Church thru prayer and outreach and building on the solid foundations we’re working from when we strengthen marriages, family and serve our community. This will in turn help build up those already in our church to fulfill the needs of our community and get more people plugged into Gateway community Church. The whole idea behind it is to become a Matthew 28 Church
where we go and make disciples of all nations.
19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” 1
Love - What’s it mean to you? Is it a feeling or Is it a choice; an action.
Addressing Love as a feeling
How do you feel when you know without a doubt you are Loved regardless of any circumstances or any action you must take in order to receive love?
Amazing
Cherished
Supported
Lifted to your height of best performance nothing can stop you.
How does the secular world interpret love?
Going back to those first teenage years.
Love as a feeling - That first Girlfriend/boyfriend kiss Date
Physical
Emotional.
Love after 5 years of Marriage
Physical How does it feel after 5 years.
Emotional How are you feeling about love after 5 years?
These are just a few things that are the result of Love as a feeling and
giving us the desires of our heart. There is only one problem with this kind of Love, its Immature, incomplete and not fully grown. Love grows when we grow!
Therefore we want to grow Gateway Church in Love thru improving Family life as God calls us to, making Marriages more Godly, and Serving our community, and we want you to be part this and receive the experience of your church growth.
When we choose love out of the best interest of others we get to experience the grace of love. 1 John 4:19
19 We love because he first loved us.1
Loving out of our feelings only gives us a small piece of what Love is.
Babies Christians love out of feeling alone.
A baby gets love from the feelings of touch and being held cuddled, caressed, kissed, snuggled. This is the love that keeps them alive. In a 2010 article of Psychology today discussing mortality rates in orphanages of 30- 40% they found babies who were not being held and touched enough would stop growing and some would eventually die. The survival rate of babies in orphanages found that babies who don’t experience touch or some form of physical affection in their early years could be very devastating to them in their first 5 years of life. This proves we are naturally wired to receive love and without it eventually dying. If we never grow beyond the baby stage of Love this love becomes unfruitful. Its all about our feelings. Do you know anyone like this that would benefit from learning more about Gods love and needs to Grow beyond the Baby stage? The grand design of this is from God the Father who gave us these feelings but he calls us not to live by our feeling alone. They can and will deceive us.
Lets take divorce for instance, it is usually fueled by the the fact that someone in the relationship isn’t getting their love feelings met. They get hurt over and over many times and don’t see any resolve in their relationship and finally for many reasons give up. Mostly because their love and maturity has not grown past the baby stage or feeling stage. However when we make love a choice, and not about feelings it becomes more meaningful due to the fact we choose to love. Love covers a multitude of sins.
1 Peter 4:8 (NIV)
8 Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.
Thru our own choice our needs get met by God who fills us with his love. Agape love is the Greek term for this kind of Love. Gods Love can be recognized regardless of weather or not you call Jesus your savior because of his divine design.
Once we follow thru with this kind of Love great things begin to happen in Family, Marriages, and the Community. This is just the start of what God has in store for all of us here at Gateway Church.
It is said that God is Love in 1 John 4:16
16 And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.1
How much more do we know this as Christ followers?
We are privileged to know God and his Agape Love. Who do you know you can start praying for to begin to receive Gods Love?
Lets look at love in action
Our Story of overcoming emotional hurts and hangups to choose to Love Each other.
Projecting our past hurts in relation to love onto others
Spouse
Partner
Friend
co worker
boss
What does loving well look like?
Not taking thing personally
Our expectations of others to love us the way we see it.
love flows out to others because of their love for God.
Everyone is filled with wholeness
Coming into relationship with a mis guided notion of what love should look like.
due to a dis-functional family life.
Brokenness in love can be very much redeeming
Gods story and redeeming us to himself in love.
Championing someone else’s dreams is a form of love
What is the dream we have for Gateway community church?
In love we can build each other up to see that dream come in to fruition.
Being open to Grace in order to do this when we live out how God celebrates the love we have for one another.
When you are living out how the father champions you, you can champion dreams. Celebrating others dreams is knowing you can do this in the full confidence God is for us.
Jesus is the way. How do we live out what Jesus calls us to when it comes to loving our spouse?
The greatest aspect of love is living like Jesus calls us to live when we love.
He calls us to love one another like he loved the church in Ephesians 5:25
25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her1
Husbands that means you and I are to Love our wives like Christ loved the church.
HE felt for them. He hurt for them. He disciplined the church. He had Grace with them.
This will in effect again create a healthy environment for love to grow. He gives us the 2 greatest commandments in Luke 10.27 which is to love the lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and strength and to Love your Neighbor as your self.
27 He answered, “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”1
What happens when we follow this commandment from Jesus?
This will bring us to wholeness and fullness of life he promised us.
Being fully alive and in jesus means we can more easily show this kind of love to our spouse our neighbor, our boss our coworker. Don’t we all seek wholeness and fullness of life? Jesus is the only one who can completely full fill that wholeness. Christ is the one who completes and helps us to come to a relationship ready to love like he loved the church.
Lets complete this with what Paul tells the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 1
Pretty simple to read, very hard to accomplish on our own!!! Yet God gave us these words in order to help keep us grounded in Him who is LOVE!!!
To Close I would like to remind you of the vision for Gateway Community Church.
Lets practice loving each other thru Strengthening Families within the church, strengthening marriages within the church, and serving our community outside the church.
Please think of 2 to 3 people you can be praying for over the next month that would benefit from knowing Jesus and experiencing his love and begin to pray for them daily in the next coming weeks. We will do this over the next few months.
This is communion week. Today we have the opportunity to humble ourselves as followers of Christ and partake in communion, the elements representing the body and blood of Christ....) We practice open communion here at Gateway Community church. If you have placed your trust and faith in Jesus christ as your savior and proclaim him as lord of your life then you can partake in Communion Celebration.
Worship
Amazing Grace
Prayer out.