Sermon Tone Analysis
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Some things that musicians, poets and philosophers have said about love.
Love is a Banana Peel
I look at you and wham, I'm head over heels.
I guess that love is a banana peel.
I feel so bad and yet I'm feeling so well.
I slipped, I stumbled, I fell.
(Ben Weisman and Fred Wise, "I Slipped, I Stumbled, I Fell," sung by Elvis Presley in the film Wild in the Country, 1961)
Love is an Open Door
I've never met someone-
Who thinks so much like me!
Jinx! Jinx again!
Our mental synchronization
Can have but one explanation
You And I Were Just Meant to be!
Say goodbye To the pain of the past
We don't have to feel it anymore!
Love is an open door!
(Disney’s “Frozen”)
Love is A Bull
Happiness is the china shop; love is the bull.
(H.L. Mencken, A Little Book in C Major, 1916)
Love is an Ocean
Love is an ocean of emotion entirely surrounded by expenses.(Sir
Thomas Robert Dewar)
Love is a smoke
Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs;
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers' eyes;
Being vexed, a sea nourished with loving tears;
What is it else? a madness most discreet,
A choking gall, and a preserving sweet.
(Romeo in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, 1597)
What do you say that love is?
God is the author of love.
Lets look at how God loves.
What can we learn about God’s love from the Bible?
We are not going to do a full survey about what the Bible says about love.
But I do want to talk about how God loves.
Spoiler alert, its not at all like the poets, musicians and philosophers that I’ve just quoted.
God’s love is described in different ways in the Bible.
Pastor, Scholar and Theologian Don Carson has done us a favour of classifying these into 5 different ways that God loves.
(book is The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God)
The love of the Father for the Son and of the Son for the Father.
The Father is perfect.
The Son is perfect.
Neither needs redeeming.
Neither needs forgiveness.
Neither needs to overlook the others imperfections.
God’s providential love over the entire universe
God providentially loves the just and the unjust.
Does God only sustain those who are good?
No, he providentially sustains the evil and the good.
In fact, we read here in Matthew 5, that those who are children of God will have that same loving characteristic,
We don’t just love those who love us, we love our enemies as well.
We love our neighbours.
God’s Yearning, Inviting, Seeking, Saving Love.
What is the way that God loved the world, he gave his Son so that all who would believe would have everlasting love.
This is the type of love that saves.
When God loves this way, it is more than just to sustain human life, it is to make salvation possible for humans.
God’s Choosing Love
An example of this is God’s choosing the nation Israel to love.
He didn’t choose them because they were better than other nations, or some reason like that.
He chose Israel because he loved Israel.
The difference between God’s choosing love and God’s providential love has to do with distinctions.
God’s providential love is for all, but his choosing love is by his selection.
Although this love works in concert with other ways that God loves, it is also unique.
God’s conditional love
You don’t hear about this kind of love very often.
Usually we speak of God’s unconditional love, which is true.
But there is also this way that God loves conditionally.
The condition is faithful obedience on our part.
We can fall out of this way that God loves us by not keeping his commands.
(Although he freely offers forgiveness and restoration through Jesus Christ.)
God loves in these different ways.
This is not a list of the way that God loves in an order of importance.
It is just a way of looking at the different ways that God’s love is described in the Bible.
In every instance of God’s loving, we see that he is perfect, holy, right and good.
We trust God, because God is love.
Everything that God says and does comes from his love, we trust that to be true as well.
In Mark 12, we see a religious scribe come up to Jesus and ask him a question that was being debated around religious circles.
The scribe wanted to know what was the most important command.
In first century Israel context, that meant looking at the law of Moses, and saying what does it all come down to.
There were 613 laws, and that’s too many to keep in the front of your mind.
So, what should a good Jew keep in the front of their mind.
What does it all come down to?
In today’s context, the questions might be stated a little differently.
We might ask, “What is the most important doctrine, or teaching, of the Christian faith.”
What would your answer be?
What do you think is the most important thing for someone to know about being a Christian.
Lets look at Jesus answer to that Scribe’s question.
How can we say we love God and not also love our neighbor?
How can we possibly love our neighbor without first loving God?
God's law shows us how to love God, and how to love each other, and points us to Jesus.
Jesus starts off his answer by quoting a verse that was spoken in Jewish homes daily.
It comes from Deuteronomy 6:4-5.
In quoting this passage, Jesus adds to it the category of mind.
This is what God’s law is all about.
This is what living is all about.
If we can just learn how to love God with our heart, soul, mind and strength.
If we can let that love consume us, and flow to our neighbours.
We will be satisfied, we will be everything that God’s law always intended for God’s people to be.
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