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Good morning, Gateway Chapel!
Scripture #1
Prayer
What is love?
Great song by your favorite Trinidadian German Eurodance band Haddaway.
What pictures, images, or people come to your mind when you think of the word love?
Love is something even young children understand to a degree.
I remember when I was in the first grade, a neighbor girl down the street who was also in the first grade told me her boyfriend moved away and asked if I could be her boyfriend and I said, “Sure.”
And then her mom picked us up from school to take us home and she said, “Mom, we’re in love!” and her mom said, “Very cool.”
And shut the van door.
What is love?
When I think about how we often describe love in our society, it’s this thing, almost a force that you can’t control but it just happens to you.
You don’t know why but you LOVE tacos.
You had no choice in the matter but you fell in LOVE with someone.
A number of years ago famous comedian Woody Allen started dating his ex’s daughter.
In a famous interview with Time magazine he was asked...“Hey she’s 35 years younger than you, and doesn’t that seem odd?”
And he said, “The heart wants what it wants.”
Is that the nature of love?
Just the unknowable stirring of our hearts which demands to be followed.
Love is undeniably powerful.
PBS has a list of the Top 100 Great American reads.
What theme pervades most of these 100 books?
Love.
One literature expert wrote:
“Love is the driving force behind everything that we do.
So I think reading about all these different types of loves and the ways in which they present, is one of the great human questions.”
“I love a good love story.
I think everybody wants it.
If you don’t want it you’re trying to get it.
If you have it, you’re trying to keep it.”
Love is unquestionably powerful, beautiful, desirable, and irreplaceable in our lives.
Yet like a raw egg on a dinner plate, love can be messy and undefined.
This morning we’re continuing in our Advent series: The 4 Gifts of Advent.
Advent means coming, and when Jesus comes, he brings Hope, Peace, Joy and LOVE.
This morning we’re talking about love.
The NATURE of LOVE, the NECESSITY of love, the NATIVITY of love, and the NURTURING of love.
Prayer
According to the Bible, what is the nature of love?
In the Old Testament, there are several senses of the word love.
Quick Bible Quiz…how many times in the ESV translation does the word love appear?
686 times.
Which translation uses the word love the word, the KJ, ESV, NIV, or NLT?
Which testament uses the word love more?
OT! 458 vs 286.
My goal with sermons is to give you useful knowledge, and so I thought maybe I’ll emphasize that with giving you some useless knowledge.
In the Bible, you can love some THING.
In Genesis, Isaac asks Jacob (who he thinks is Esau) to make him some food.
When you say, “I love tacos.”
In some sense, that’s biblical.
In the Bible, you can be in love with some ONE.
It can be a romantic word.
Earlier in Genesis, Isaac meets Rebekah and he falls head over heels for her.
Love is also a sense of affection, care, and warmth.
Like a father caring for a son.
The first instance of the word love in the Bible is used in the story of Abraham and Isaac.
Love can be warmth between friends.
Like David and Jonathan in 1 Sam 18...
So as we can see, love is between people.
Love is also something God experiences.
The most common word for love in the Old Testament is the word ‘hesed’ which means covenant loyalty.
People can love other people, God can love people, and people are called to love God in return.
As it says in the famous Shema prayer in Deut.
Love is multifcated between us and things, us and each other, us and God, and God to us.
It has a sense of warmth, enjoyment, fascination, loyalty, and devotion.
Similarly, love is all over the New Testament, in the life and teachings of Jesus and his apostles.
Jesus said the entire Old Testament teaching could be summarized by love.
Jesus actually expanded the definition of love to include not just people you like, but your enemies as well.
One of Jesus’ closest friends, John, talked all about love.
And he even said in his letter 1 John
Perhaps we can think of biblical love by saying it is...
Grateful devotion to God.
Gracious devotion to others.
That’s a very brief look at the nature of love, now let’s look at the necessity of love.
Why does love matter?
Love is a necessity because it moves us and shapes us.
Love moves us.
God cares about not just what we do, but why we do it.
God created humans to love him and love each other.
It’s not a robotic devotion, but a genuine warmth and affection we’re to have for one another.
Imagine you got a Christmas present from a friend and you said, “Wow, this is really thoughtful, than you!”
And they said, “Yeah, I read a blog that friends should give at least one gift a year to each other and so here is your one gift we’re good now right?”
That’s a lot different than someone giving you a gift with a kind note that says, “You mean a lot to me and I’m so thankful you’re in my life.
Love matters because God didn’t make us to be robots but loving partners with him to bring love to his creation and spread the news that God loves his world.
Love shapes us.
We become what we love.
In Deuteronomy the call is to love God in part because if we love God we become like God.
Have any of you ever had a friend who dated a number of people and each time they dated someone they changed their personality to match the person they were dating?
As a kid I loved Gary Payton the Sonics basketball player, and he would always chew gum and so I would pretend I was chewing gum.
The story of the Bible is a story of love.
The God of love made us to rule with him in love.
But we loved ourselves more than God and this is what the Bible calls sin.
And it distorted our very identity away from the God who loved us.
Hosea is a great book in the Old Testament on God’s love, and it says in Hosea 9:10...
And so the Bible would say the problem with humanity is not a behavior problem that can be managed by changing some habits or tweaking a few things.
It’s a heart problem.
The Bible would agree, “The heart wants what it wants.”
And apart from God that’s not a good thing.
Humanity’s problem is not that we don’t love, but that we love the wrong thing.
Love is a necessity.
We can’t help but love.
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