Love Languages - Words of Affirmation

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone. Welcome to our worship service on this first day of May. It’s good to have you here, and thank you for joining us.

I have a few announcements I’d like to call to your attention as we begin this morning.

Our monthly church council meeting for May is this coming Tuesday at 7. If you’re a council member, please try to attend.

The building and grounds team will be having a work day next Saturday, May 7, at 8:30. That’s 8:30 a.m. for all you retirees who like to sleep in. We’ll need your help with some weeding and painting and scraping, so if you’d like to come out and get some sun, we’d welcome the help.

The men’s cookout mentioned in your bulletin has been rescheduled for the 22nd, so if you’re a man and you’re hungry for some of EW’s cooking, you’re going to have to wait a little while longer. And the men’s group will not meet tonight.

I’ll remind you of our next game night on May 7 at 6:00, as well as our next young adult meet-up this coming Saturday at 9:30 at Panera.

Della, do you have an announcement this morning?

Lastly, please keep Fred Taylor and Betty in your prayers. Fred’s been over at Augusta Health with a pretty bad UTI.

I spoke with Betty this morning. She said Fred is feeling a little better. The doctors doing some blood tests to make sure the infection isn’t in his bloodstream. They think he may come home today.

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Let’s pray:

Father, we thank and praise you for the life you have so richly given us. Thank you for the incredible blessing of being your sons and daughters and for the beautiful creations you have made us to be.

Lord, we give you all in prayer that we are and ask that we might meet you here today. We lift our hearts that you might fill them with new love. We lift our minds that you would pour fresh hope into our thinking. We lift our voices to sing your praises as we come to worship you, our God and Creator. In Jesus’s name, Amen.

Sermon

In 1992, a Christian psychologist named Gary Chapman published a book called The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate.

The book sold 8,500 copies in its first year, which was four times what his publisher expected. The next year it sold 17,000. Two years after that it sold another 137,000 copies, and it’s been selling ever since. As a matter of fact, The Five Love Languages has become every writer’s dream — it’s been on the New York Times Bestseller List since 2009.

Chances are you’ve heard of this book, but in case you haven’t, here’s what Gary Chapman says in a nutshell: there are five general ways called love languages that people use to both express and experience love. They are acts of service, gift-giving, physical touch, quality time, and words of affirmation.

Every one of us has a natural favorite among these, a primary love language. And every one of us has one that’s close behind, a secondary love language.

This theory’s gained a lot of attention in the last 30 years or so. Even mainstream psychologists who aren’t Christian at all believe that Chapman has hit on something here, and a lot of it is based on common sense.

People will naturally give love in the same way that they prefer to receive love. And a lot of the problems people find in their relationships are because the love language they use to show love isn’t the same one that the other person uses to feel love.

Imagine a husband whose love language is acts of service. For his wife, though, her love language is words of affirmation.

He might do the laundry as an act of service to her, which is his way of saying “I love you.” But his wife might not see that as an act of love. She might just see it as him helping out with the chores.

On the other hand, the wife will use her love language of words of affirmation to express her love to him, but the husband might miss it because that’s not his love language.

If they really understood one another, she may cut the grass for him, and he would see that act of service as an expression of love. And he may shower her with words of love, which would speak to her love language of words of affection.

It’s actually very simple, isn’t it? And powerful. Which goes a long way in describing what makes Gary Chapman’s theory so brilliant.

But here’s where the love languages interest us as Christians: we don’t just show each other the love we have through our love language. God shows us his love that way as well.

But he doesn’t just show us through one love language. We might have one big love language and another smaller one, but God’s love language is all of them equally, because love itself comes from him.

That’s what we’re going to do for the next few Sundays: we’re going to take one love language a week and see how God uses that specific one in both the Old and New Testaments to express his love for you.

And I want to sort of frame all of these expressions of God’s love around one specific area: your worth.

And right now a lot of you are thinking, “Oh well, I’m not worth much. I’m old and tired and broken down. Spend my life doing things I shouldn’t be doing and saying things I shouldn’t be saying.”

And that’s exactly why we all need to hear this. Because as Christians we know two things: God loves us, and we’re sinners.

Our problem is that we can often focus so much on the fact that we’re sinners that it’s hard for us to accept God’s love. And we miss the fact that God’s love for us is completely tied into our worth as created beings.

Too many Christians, and I’d say a lot of you, have a self-esteem problem. You see all the bad in yourself but so little of the good.

And more than that, a lot of us actually think that seeing ourselves as anything less than horrible is somehow a sin.

So we’re going to try to fix that, starting today and starting in the first book of the Bible, Genesis. Turn with me to Genesis chapter 1, verses 26-28. Follow along with me there:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;

male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

And this is God’s word.

What we have here is the final act of creation. The first 25 verses of Genesis 1 describe God speaking all of creation into being. And all of this work is done not only for God’s glory. It’s not done because God is the supreme artist. It was done for us.

God used every bit of his skill, his creativity, his knowledge, his wisdom, and his love to build an entire world just to give us life.

And here in the last verses of Genesis 1, God speaks the words that every human being needs to hear and understand:

“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

I wanted to start this series on the love languages with God’s words of affirmation to us, and one of the reasons I did was because it’s probably the easiest one.

Because the entire Bible is what? It’s a love letter from the author of creation to his creation, isn’t it? From Genesis to Revelation, God gives us words that affirm who we are.

And by the way, what does that word mean? What’s it mean to offer words of affirmation? It means to validate, or confirm.

To affirm something or someone means to state something as a fact both strongly and publicly. Which means that we can affirm that something is good or that something is bad. So what does God affirm about you here in Genesis 1?

First, you are created. God goes so far to drive this simple but very powerful point home that he uses that word three times in verse 27:

God created man, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.

So what does that mean? What does it mean that you were created? Or put it this way: what does it NOT mean if you were created?

It means you are not an accident.

That flies in the face of what a lot of people believe in a time when everything is thought of as true or false based on what science says.

Science says we can’t know if there’s a soul, or if there’s a God, because those things go beyond what humans can observe and study.

We can only go by what our senses tell us, which is a very narrow way to live. And based only on our senses, based on what we can only measure and weigh, what does life look like?

Well, you were born as a result of a biological process that itself was born through billions of years of evolution, and it was all purely luck. You’re here by chance rather than purpose. You’re a cosmic accident — a happy accident, but still an accident.

So make the best of what few years you have here, because at the end of that is death, and death must come to us all. But we shouldn’t be afraid of death, because death is just the same state you were in before you were born, which is nothing.

That’s the modern take on things like life and purpose. You were born without meaning, you will enter into a death without meaning, and so all the years you spend in between birth and death are ultimately meaningless too.

It’s no wonder so much of the world is ruined by hopelessness. It’s no wonder why so many people, particularly in the western nations, don’t really seem to care about anything anymore.

Because they’ve been taught that nothing matters — not what they do, not what they accomplish, and especially not who they are as people.

But right here, right in the first chapter of the first book of the Bible, God makes sure to absolutely demolish that idea. Because you were created. By him, by the all-powerful, all-knowing Lord of the universe.

And this means that you — you, with all of those faults and flaws and imperfections, you represent the most perfect work of God’s creativity. So much so that God rejoiced when you were made.

He rejoiced because you are unique and unlike any other person ever born. Because you are loved as though you were the only thing God had ever created. And because along with your creation came a purpose that no one else at any time or in any place to accomplish. Just you.

All of history from the beginning of the universe to the new heaven and new Earth is held together by a tapestry woven by God. Your life, your person, is a thread in that tapestry. And if you weren’t here, if your life never happened, that entire tapestry would crumble.

Don’t believe me? You better. Because that truth goes hand in hand with a bigger truth: you weren’t just created, you were created in the image of God.

Verse 26: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”

First, and briefly, why does God use that word “our” there? Why not “My” image and “My” likeness? Because He’s speaking to both the Holy Spirit and Christ, right? All three are God, all three are parts of Himself.

But let’s take a look at what that means. Let’s talk about your value and your purpose of being made in the image of God.

Some people think the image of God points to the qualities that make us human — that we have a soul, that we can reason, that we have the ability to have a relationship with him. But that’s not quite it. It’s close, but not quite there.

A lot of scholars compare what God means by making us in his image with the images of kings in the ancient world.

All those powerful kings couldn’t be everywhere in their kingdoms at once, so they would build statues of themselves to let everyone know that the king ruled wherever his image was found.

There were also idols, monuments or statues that represented a nation’s gods. These idols usually weren’t considered gods themselves. They were more reminders to let you know that the god was in some way present wherever that statue was.

These monuments of stone that ancient civilizations would put up to represent kings and gods help us to understand what it means for you to be made in God’s image.

Because when God says in verse 26, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” he doesn’t mention anything about a soul, does he?

Nothing about the ability to think, nothing about being able to conceive of a power higher than themselves. All of those qualities are important for making us human, but they don’t define what it means to be made in the image of God.

Here is what you being made in the image of God really means: it means you have a royal calling of being God’s representative to the world. That is how valuable you are.

Every nation in the world had gods that people worshipped through images, but Israel’s first two Commandments — the ones most important — were what? Don’t worship any God but me, and don’t worship any idols.

There are two reasons for that. One is that unlike all these other false gods, Yahweh is completely different from all he made. He can’t be captured in a carved image.

But second, and this is just as important and something we too often forget: God said Don’t create any images of me because I’ve already done that. I’ve created an image of myself — it’s you. Any other image only cheapens the holy God it’s supposed to represent. That is how much you’re worth.

God said, “I need someone to represent my love to a world drowned in hatred. I need someone to stand as a light in a land gone dark. I need someone who will protect the weak, lift up the fallen, and proclaim my truth.”

And so God made you. Talk about words of affirmation, right? Talk about value. Talk about worth.

But what happens when we forget our value and worth and fall headlong into sin so deep we don’t think we’ll ever get out? Does God stop giving us those affirming words, or does he shout them even louder?

Turn with me to the Gospel of Luke, chapter 7. We’re going to be looking at verses 36-50:

One of the Pharisees asked him to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee's house and reclined at table. And behold, a woman of the city, who was a sinner, when she learned that he was reclining at table in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster flask of ointment, and standing behind him at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head and kissed his feet and anointed them with the ointment.

Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.”

And Jesus answering said to him, “Simon, I have something to say to you.” And he answered, “Say it, Teacher.”

“A certain moneylender had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. When they could not pay, he cancelled the debt of both. Now which of them will love him more?”

Simon answered, “The one, I suppose, for whom he cancelled the larger debt.”

And he said to him, “You have judged rightly.”

Then turning toward the woman he said to Simon, “Do you see this woman? I entered your house; you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair.

“You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment.

“Therefore I tell you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven—for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little, loves little.”

And he said to her, “Your sins are forgiven.” Then those who were at table with him began to say among themselves, “Who is this, who even forgives sins?” And he said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”

And this is God’s word.

A Pharisee named Simon has invited Jesus to his home for what amounts to a dinner party.

In the culture of that time, a host had very specific customs he had to follow. One of them was that during a meal like this, anyone who wanted to enter the home could do so, regardless of who they were.

It was another custom to lie down while eating your meal. The tables were set only a small distance off the ground, and you propped yourself up on one elbow in front of the table and ate with your free hand.

That’s what Jesus is doing here, surrounded by all of these people, when this woman approaches.

Luke calls her a woman of the city, who was a sinner.

What does that mean? Well, again, in that culture, calling someone a woman of the city is the same thing as calling someone now a lady of the night. She’s a prostitute.

We get an idea in verse 37 that she’s heard of Jesus. Maybe she listened to him preach, or saw firstand his kindness and compassion. Whatever the case, she comes and kneels behind where Jesus is reclining.

And she’s crying, though not from sadness. There are a lot of emotions pouring from her heart, but grief isn’t one of them. It’s an outpouring of gratitude, and joy, and love, and relief.

The Greek word implies a shower of tears. It’s an endless weeping coming from deep inside of her, and these sobs turns everyone’s head to what she’s doing.

And then this woman does two things that are so remarkable, so unheard of, that all the eating and conversation in Simon’s house stops, and all everyone can do is look on in shock.

The first thing this woman does is wipe the tears from Jesus’s feet with her hair.

Now again, we have to understand the Jewish culture of that time. Every woman of that society wore her hair up, tied tightly. This wasn’t just the fashion of the day, not something that women did to make themselves look beautiful, this was the law.

In fact, the rabbis had ruled that if a married woman let down her hair in public, it was grounds for divorce.

But look here at what this woman is doing. She’s wiping the feet of Christ with her hair. The only way she can wipe the feet of Christ with her hair is if she takes her hair down first, right there in front of everyone.

This isn’t something that’s simply outrageous. It’s not just scandalous. It’s extraordinary, because remember how this woman makes her living. She isn’t just taking down her hair to wipe Jesus’s feet. She’s doing something for a man that she has never in her life done for free.

But that’s not all. In verses 37 and 38 we see that she has an alabaster flask of ointment that she anoints the feet of Jesus with.

Now an alabaster flask or jar was a little round bulb filled with perfume that women wore around their necks. These jars had a long skinny neck, and at the top was a tiny round opening that allowed the aroma of the perfume to leak out but not the perfume itself.

These necklaces were considered objects of great worth, reserved only for women who had money, because perfume at the time was hugely expensive.

They were considered objects of the great beauty and attractiveness for the simple reason that back then deodorant didn’t exist.

To put it simply, people didn’t smell good. And so for a woman to be able to wear a necklace like this, to walk around in public with a cloud of this sweet and fragrant perfume surrounding her, made her beautiful. Made her desirable.

But again, remember who this woman is. This necklace isn’t a symbol of comfort, of the good life. That alabaster flask meant something far greater to her.

It’s the one thing she owns that was absolutely necessary for her livelihood. It’s the one thing that kept her housed, and clothed, and fed. And Luke says she poured it out right there, right onto the feet of Christ.

But it’s more than that, isn’t it? Because remember, that tiny hole in the top of that flask was designed to let the aroma out, but not the perfume.

That means the only way this woman could have poured out that perfume, the only way she could anoint Jesus’s feet, was to break the flask.

She must have put all the money she had into that necklace, because it was the only way she could make her money. But here she breaks it, and pours it onto Jesus’s feet, and then wipes his feet with her hair.

The only leverage this woman had in the world, the only power she possessed, the only significance she had, the only thing she trusted in up until this moment, was her desirability. And now she’s broken every bit of that desirability and poured it at the feet of Christ.

She’s saying to Jesus, “People call me a prostitute, because that’s what I am. They say I have no value. I have no worth. But I know I have value with you, Jesus. I know I have worth with you, Lord.

“I’ve always trusted in my beauty. I’ve made my desirability the most fundamental thing in my life, but even as I trusted in them, they became my master. They controlled me. But now you are my master, now you control me, now it’s your words that matter, and so now I’m finally free from my prison.”

Those tears she wipes are tears of joy. They’re tears of relief. She wipes them away with hair that she took down not for what she could get, but for what she could offer.

What’s this woman teaching us? The faith that saves isn’t a faith that simply believes in Jesus in general. It isn’t just believing that he really did live once, sometime long ago, and he really did do all these wonderful things and left us some really great teachings. It’s so much more than that.

It’s taking all of those central things in our lives, those things that we value most, and then giving those things to Him because of his words to us.

It’s taking what’s most important to us in this world, and then pouring them at his feet.

Faith alone won’t get us through this life. Faith alone won’t sustain us when God seems to turn away. What we need to be reminded of every day is that no matter what the world might think, even no matter what we tell ourselves, we are valued by a God who affirms our worth every day.

This woman here? This woman was the worst sort of person there was. She was trash. She was unlovable. She was lost. She was damned by the very law that God had given to Moses.

The very best she could hope for was that those who passed her on the street would ignore her. Avoid her. But the very worst she could expect was to be spit upon.

But what words did Jesus give this woman? How did Jesus value her? How did Jesus define her worth not for who she was or for what she did, but for the image in which she was created?

What words of affirmation did he tell give this woman? The same affirming words he gives to us: Your sins are forgiven; Your faith has saved you; Go in peace.

We learn important things here. One is that nothing we do for Christ never goes unnoticed by Christ. Jesus says, “Look at this woman, Simon. From the time I came in she has not stopped kissing my feet. She anointed my head with oil. She anointed my feet with ointment.”

Jesus noticed it all. Nothing that this sinful woman did escaped his attention, just as nothing we do in his name goes unnoticed by heaven. Even the smallest act of goodness, even the tiniest word of love, is celebrated in heaven.

Second, when Simon and everyone else there looked at this woman, who did they see? Look at verse 39:

Now when the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what sort of woman this is who is touching him, for she is a sinner.”

A sinner.

What does Jesus see? Does he see a sinner? Of course he does. But he also sees a woman who is deeply wounded. He sees a person deeply hurting. And most of all, he sees a soul that is deeply loving.

And that’s exactly what he tells her. “Look at how she loves me, Simon,” he says. “See how much she’s worth. Because by her faith, her sins are forgiven. And now she can go in peace.

“Go in peace.” How is it that this woman could then go in peace? How is it that you can leave here and go in peace?

This is a very important point here as we close. The Greek phrase for “go in peace” is actually “go into peace.” It means to move into a new home of refuge.

There is where we stay, right there in the heart of those beautiful words Christ gives us: you’re forgiven no matter what you’ve done, and that is your worth. Your faith has saved you, that is your value. But now go in peace.

Not remain in peace. Go.

You would think that Jesus might spend a little time with this woman, but he doesn’t. And really, Jesus hardly ever lingered with the people he healed. He always sent them away as early as he could. “You’re healed, now go.”

Ever wonder why he did that? I’ll tell you. He did it for two reasons — for the good of the people he healed, and for the good of everyone else.

These words of affirmation that God gives us — we’re made in His image, we’re forgiven — what are they for? Are they just for us to hold like a secret? No.

Jesus gives us these words to teach us to feel the responsibility of ordering our lives, to feel confident in facing every day that comes and everything that comes with them.

We can face a lot of things when we know that we’re fearfully and wonderfully made. We can face a lot more knowing that we’re forgiven and that our place is heaven is assured. But we can face everything when we keep both of those ideas firmly in our hearts.

One more reason Jesus tells us to go: he tells this woman to go, where does she go?

She goes home, doesn’t she? A home that once welcomed any man who had the money to pay for her company. A home of sin. A place of evil. Jesus says to her, “Go in peace to your home, and make that place into a place of good.”

That is what Jesus tells us. Every day he gives us words of affirmation to remind us of exactly who we are, holy beings made in his image. But he doesn’t just give us those words to make us feel good. He gives us those words so we can go and do the work he has for us to do.

And the only way we can do that work is if we believe him. Believe he is the Christ, the savior, yes. But also believe him when he says, “You are worthy. You are valuable. You have to be, because I died for you.”

Let’s pray:

Father we’re bombarded every day with words and images that shape our view of who we are and how we should be. We’re not skinny enough, stylish enough, rich enough. We’re failures, we’re unlovable, we’re hopeless. But your words, Father, lift us up. Your words speak the truth of who we are, wonderful creatures made in your image, forgiven and infinitely loved. Help us to hear that voice. Help us to believe that voice. Help us to live in the light of the truthful words you give us each day, and to hear your voice above all others. For it’s in Jesus’s name we ask it, Amen.

Benediction

Now may God grant to the living, grace; to the departed, rest; to the Nation, peace; to us all Your servants the promise of everlasting life, light to guide us on our way, courage to support us, and Your blessing to unite us in service to You our God and this our Country. Amen.