Keep It Simple Week 3- Love

Last week, we discussed how God is always faithful in keeping His promises. We learned we can trust Him to keep His word no matter what. By contrast, we also noted that people (including us) often don’t keep their word and fail to follow through on our promises, but God is perfect. Plain and simple, He never fails.

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “talk is cheap,” right?

For example, I could promise all of you that I will give you $100 each if you show up here next week. But if I were to promise you this, and next week, you show up only for me to tell you that I was kidding, you’d quickly realize that I’m all talk and no action. By the way, to be clear, I am not promising to give everyone $100 for attending next week. And I fully intend to keep my word about that!

The truth is, the words we say carry a lot of meaning, so it’s really important that we understand the words we use. So, today, I want us to consider one very specific word: love.

For as loaded of a word as it can be, we actually use the word love a lot, don’t we? For example, we talk about how we love things like our favorite foods, such as “I love pizza.” We talk about how we love certain experiences, such as “I love going to Taylor Swift concerts.” We also talk about how we love our families. For example, I tell my [spouse or family members] that I love them every day.

But I don’t love a good pepperoni pizza like I love my [spouse or family members]. Also, just to be clear, I also have never actually told a pepperoni pizza that I love it. That would just be weird, right? Instead, I show that I love pepperoni pizza when I order one, take it home, and eat it.

So, when we say we love something or someone, we mean drastically different things depending on who or what we’re talking about.

And beyond that, what if I were to tell my [spouse or family members] that I love them every day, but I never did anything that demonstrated that love? What if I said I love them but never showed that through my actions? That doesn’t really sound like love, does it? To me, that sounds like all talk and no action.

Today, we’re wrapping up our series Keep It Simple, where we’ve been discussing how to understand the basics of our spiritual lives so we don’t make things any more complicated than they need to be. We’ve been talking about God’s Big 3—three things that are vital to our walk with Jesus. Remember, Paul said these three would last forever.

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13 Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love. (1 Corinthians 13:13 – NLT)

The greatest of these is love. So, just like Paul, we’ve saved the best for last.

SCRIPTURE (What does God’s Word say?)

It’s so important that we understand what love is, and to do that, we’re going to keep it simple by looking no further than what the Bible says about it. Let’s start with the words of Jesus from a passage from the Gospel of John:

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33 Dear children, I will be with you only a little longer. And as I told the Jewish leaders, you will search for me, but you can’t come where I am going. 34 So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. 35 Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.” (John 13:33-35 – NLT)

Here, Jesus is talking to His closest, most trusted disciples not long before He would be arrested and ultimately crucified. I’ve always imagined this as Jesus being very purposeful about making sure He shared these important words with His disciples as His time with them was winding down.

INSIGHTS (What might this Scripture mean?)

And while this passage is only a few sentences, make no mistake. It is absolutely packed with truth, not only for Jesus’ disciples but also for us. So, let’s jump right in. Let’s see what we can learn about love from Jesus’ words almost 2000 years ago.

The first truth I want to highlight is…

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1. Love is a command.

“Love each other” was Jesus’ command to His disciples. And what was the quality of this love? Was it to love others like you might love pizza? I’m going to go out on a limb and say, “No.”

But then, what did Jesus mean? Thankfully, He didn’t leave it to chance. Instead, Jesus told them to love others as He had loved them. So, we are commanded to love others with a Jesus-level love, and to be clear, this is not a small or insignificant kind of love. And we know that because love was one of the ideas Jesus talked about the most.

Here's an example:

Way back in September, Pastor Sterling began our “Who We Are” series by talking about this concept of “Loving God & Loving Others.”

In Matthew 22, Jesus was asked what He thought to be the greatest commandment out of the hundreds of commandments that are found throughout the Old Testament. Here’s how that conversation went:

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36 “Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?” 37 Jesus replied, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:36-40 – NLT)

Jesus said that our number one priority should be loving God with all our hearts, souls, and minds. And then, did you catch that? He said that this should be followed closely by loving our neighbor as ourselves.

Loving others as ourselves should be our second highest priority.

So, when Jesus says to His disciples, “So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other,” this is a command that we should take incredibly seriously.

Another truth from this passage that I want to highlight is…

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2. Love is an action.

We often think of love as a feeling, an emotion. But I don’t think that’s the picture that Jesus is painting here. Now, to be sure, love most likely will result in feelings and emotions. But the love that the Bible describes is not a feeling. It is an action.

And one of the ways we know this is that Jesus didn’t just say to love each other. He said to love each other “just as I have loved you.” Now, did Jesus really like His disciples? Sure. Of course He did! But the love that He showed them (and us!) is so much more than that. It was active.

This is how Jesus’ love was described in the Book of 1 John:

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16 We know what real love is because Jesus gave up his life for us. So we also ought to give up our lives for our brothers and sisters. (1 John 3:16 – NLT)

Jesus went way beyond simply showing His affection when He acted in love by giving His life for us. And this is the standard that He’s calling all of us to. If we are to love others in the same way that Jesus loves us, it’s going to require a lot more than just feelings or emotions.

When Jesus described what it meant to love our neighbor as ourselves, He told the parable of the Good Samaritan.

In this story, Jesus highlighted the actions of a Samaritan man who stopped and selflessly cared for a man who had been beaten and robbed, in contrast to two religious men who passed by and did nothing to help. The Samaritan didn’t just feel something; he did something.

Sure, love makes you feel, but it is not a feeling. Love is an ACTION.

And the third truth I want you to see is that…

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3. Love for others is proof of our love for God.

Let’s go back to see how Jesus finished the passage that we read earlier. Here’s what He said:

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35 Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.” (John 13:35 – NLT)

Here, Jesus told the disciples how the world would know they were His disciples: their love for others would prove it. If they loved each other the way Jesus had loved them, it would be obvious to everyone else that they were people who were following in Jesus’ footsteps.

And the same is true for us: genuinely loving others is the greatest proof that we also love and want to be like Jesus.

By the way, not loving each other is also proof of something. And it’s not good! John wrote this in 1 John 4:

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20 If someone says, “I love God,” but hates a fellow believer, that person is a liar; for if we don’t love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we cannot see? 21 And he has given us this command: Those who love God must also love their fellow believers. (1 John 4:20-21 – NLT)

When we don’t love our fellow brothers & sisters in Christ, it proves that we don’t truly love God.

OUCH.

These are incredibly strong words from John. If our entire relationship with God means loving Him, but we never actively love others, there’s a 100% chance that we don’t actually have the relationship with God we say we do. Saying that we love God while not loving others means we are deceiving ourselves and claiming to be something we are not.

ACTION (How could we live this out?)

Of God’s big three (faith, hope, and love), love is by far the greatest. It’s more than a feeling. Love is an action. But if we want to love God well, where do we start? What steps do we take?

There’s a passage near the very end of the Old Testament that I think gives us three great places to start. Here’s what it says:

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8 O people, the LORD has told you what is good, and this is what he requires of you: to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8 – NLT)

So, let’s take a quick look at each step to see how we might put these into practice. The first step we need to take is to…

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1. Do what is right.

I know this is going to sound overly simple, but that’s because it actually is that simple (if we’ll let it be)…

When we’re faced with a choice where one way is right and one way is wrong, we are called to be people who always choose what is right. The challenge is that we’re not only called to do what is right for ourselves. Remember? Jesus commands us to love others as ourselves, so that means we can’t just put ourselves first.

Another way to describe this is that we need to be people who seek to do justice, especially when it’s on behalf of someone else who might not be able to seek that justice on their own. It means we must be the kind of people who choose to stand up for others when they are bullied. We must speak up for people when they are oppressed. We must be the kind of people who aren’t willing to wait for someone else to make things better.

And, this is the tough part. There are times when seeking justice (doing what’s right) might mean that we need to be ready and willing to sacrifice our own comfort and our own desires for the sake of others. That’s the kind of love that Jesus demonstrated when He gave Himself for us. And it’s the kind of love that He’s calling us to show to others.

Not only should we seek to do what’s right, but if we want to love others, we can choose to:

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2. Love mercy.

I know how this is about to sound, but I think that most of us already love mercy… especially when it’s being shown to us.

Mercy is what we experience when we aren’t given the punishment we deserve. And receiving mercy feels incredible. It’s such a relief to know that the weight of punishment has been taken off our shoulders, doesn’t it? But if we truly love mercy, we will desire mercy to be shown to everyone, even those who have wronged us. Yes, even them!

Loving mercy and desiring mercy for others—especially when they have wronged us—is an incredible display of love. But it doesn’t happen by accident. It's just not within our nature, is it? Usually, when we’re wronged, we want the other person to be punished. We want them to be sorry. And we want them to mean it.

But loving mercy means choosing a different response. And it’s a choice that’s best made before ever needing to prove it.

If we choose to become people who are determined to show mercy, with God’s help we will be ready to show it when the time comes.

One last step we can choose to take if we want to love others well is to:

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3. Walk humbly with our God.

Humility unlocks our ability to love others well, but it's one of the most challenging qualities to cultivate in our own lives—and it’s even more challenging to make it second nature.

Please hear me when I say that I’m still working on this. I haven’t achieved it by a long shot, but there’s a trick I’ve learned that I want to share with you. When I regularly remind myself of how God has shown me mercy, it makes it easier for me to show mercy to others.

When someone does something that hurts me or makes me angry, it’s so easy to immediately jump to the conclusion that they are wrong and need to be punished. But humility means being able to take a step back and consider that the other person might not be the only one in the wrong. Humility means being able to own your own shortcomings, admit that you don’t know everything, and see that others just might be going through a lot of the same struggles that you are.

As we walk humbly with God, we start to fully realize what God has saved us from and that God is still working on us. Embracing humility means realizing that each of us still has more room to grow! Walking humbly with God unlocks our ability to love others well, regardless of how we feel about what they do, or say, or even think.

Believe me when I tell you that I know how difficult it is to try to put this all into action, but love is an action, and it’s an action that God is calling us all to.

If you want to love God, it doesn’t get simpler than loving people. This is simple to say and understand but not always simple to do. But it’s worth the effort. I pray that, out of our love for God and others, we will seek to do what’s right, love mercy, and walk humbly.

Pagans were awed by how early Christians loved one another, how ready they were to die for one another.

-Tertullian

“The attractive power of communities of love is no less evident in our age, where such communities are increasingly uncommon.”

In a world where true, selfless love is becoming rare, let’s be a people who choose to love God first and love others with our lives, with our loving God flowing through us so that others may know Christ and the power of His resurrection.

Before we dismiss to our small groups, I’d like to pray that God would remind you daily that faith is a decision, hope is a promise, and love is an action.

Let’s pray.

[Close in prayer.]

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