Cultivating Love

Cultivating Love 2

Illustration from Clinton

The fruits of the Spirit vs the works of the flesh. the

We know that

We have seen that we can

Other directedness.

character - of love.

Unbounds of love.

Reflection on selflessness. use your

Elevated concept, grounded in life.

Love is a soaked quality. It is also a flavourful quality.

I want you to love.

The love.

Pre-eminence of love among the gifts.

Fruitful passage - the vine in . Was Paul thinking of this?

We must look elsewhere for love.

But here is what we are looking for: sources of love, motivations for love,

Illustration from NT Wright

Illustration from Clinton

I have a dog who I love. His name is Sam. You can tell when I spend time with Sam. His fur gets on me. as I write this words, his fur is on my keyboard. It has got there from my jacket.

But the fur doesn’t appear magically because I own a dog. it is only when I spend time with Sam that my clothes get ‘infected’ with fur. they took note that these men had been with Jesus. . God makes a difference when he infects your life. We have been infected with love by God when we come with him. says that God has shed love abroard in our heart - like Sam shedding on me. Sorry for the pun.

it

But we can hear what is happening here: our presence with our father, through the Spirit

You can see the love. Can you see the love tonight?

Cultivating love:

What can we say about Love? well, we certainly struggle in our own language sometimes, just as sometimes we have not enough.

we can get caught - serving the flesh, not the spirit, serving self, not other, and of course.

There are four different words for love in the Greek, one for English. it is very intersted. So we must look for what Scripture says rather than. one of the curious things that I found out is that sometimes . Do you love me, yes you know that I love you. we don’t pick up the nuance that there are two different words being bandied around. sometimes we struggle big time with understanding this.

Character of love.

Character of love.

Standard of love - Romans.

A love that

“O love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in thee” I give the back the

Love is the signifying, unifying quality of God. is the defining voice - often the first verse that is learned by a new Christian.

Boundlessness:

Bound up in ours.

That boundlessness has its origin in

Our issue with Love:

The prem

Introduction:

0. Free to Love

0.1 Love is Pre-eminent. Free to serve via love.The whole law is fulfilled in one word: LOVE Galatians 5:14

0.2 Love is necessary:

Power without love is noise

Faith and knowledge without love is hollow

Sacrifice without love brings no gain

0.3 Love is central. If you could think of the fruit as a rainbow of light, that each of the fruit would be a different colour - an 8 colour rainbow, but when you blend all those colours together, you are left with white - pure white.

God is love. We have Jesus and his 7 I AM statements. we know we need to place importance upon them, because Jesus associates them with his being. God’s identity is love. We might understand from the Bible that God is powerful, or that God. But we have here is God’s identity in love. It has its origin in him.

Whatever we do, we need to understand what love is, and pursue it.

Understand the shallowness of our love.

1 word for all - love. Most people know that, dpending on who you read, there are either 3 or 4 greek words for love. English is a language with somehwere between half a million words and a million. Yet in this area, it is very weak, for there is just one word for love.

I might love my God, but i also love Creme Caramel that my wife makes me often on my birthday, i love the camera that i bought last year, and I love the TV show 24. It is an overused word. And it can lead to massive issues and misunderstandings.

In when Jesus is talking to Peter - do you LOVE me. Peter responds yes Lord I LOVE you. sounds like the same, doesn’t it? But Peter’s first two responses are different forms of love. we wouldn’t know because of the paucity of our language.

We see the exact opposite issue in Hebrew. The stark difference between English, Greek and Hebrew is never more seen than in the Bible. Hebrew has only 8,700 words in the whole Old Testament, and most of those are names: excluding those and the number is 3000. One of the huge challenges whether you are talking about the word day in Hebrew, or the word love in Greek - it is how to translate words accurately across. The biggest divider, perhaps, for Christians is the use of the word ‘day’ in Genesis. we use the word day perhaps 7 or 8 different ways, but each of of those ways has many words that mean the same. But like LOVE for us, DAY for them - the word YOM - has to do every service. There is only one word. So we ought to be careful, and examine the depth of love

Understand the depth of God’s love.

Love unmerited. - God shows his great love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. The long, long history of Israel is a story of love spurned and renewed. Not only that, but God seems especially to delight in showing his love to the undeserving. The thief on the cross seemingly is loved so deeply by Jesus, that even in the midst of the torment of soul, jesus reached out to him in love. it is also the case that the gospel often records - almost as an aside- Jesus looked at him and loved him. The young man had something that was bigger than God in his life - his wealth, yet it didn’t stop Jesus loving him.

Love that endures. The story of Israel is a story of continuous love from God and long impurity interspersed with small periods of purity. The most common line describing God in the Old Testament is ‘The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in steadfast love and faithfulness - Neh9.31 Ex34.6 Nm14.18 Ps86.5 Ps86.15 Jl2.13/

Love that comes close and suffers. God’s people have a sad history of failure. Circumstances in the Old Testament were often brought about in order that Israel might repent and come for restoration. this is the cycle that we have seen played out in the book of Judges.

We know from that the Messiah would suffer, and it confirmed over and over in the New Testament - , .

We also know from the story of Israel in Egypt, that release from slavery was and is a huge theme. In we see it played out. Let us read from ch 3:7-10

(ESV)

7 Then the Lord said, “I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings, 8 and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. 9 And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. 10 Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.”

Love that is boundless. We are constantly looking for the boundaries for our love. It is such a full-on declaration, that we naturally look to limit its application.

Jesus ministry was constantly pushing those boundaries back. He pushed back against all the natural boundaries that we can think of: Age, Gender, Race, Morality and Cursed (with sickness).

He stretched it out to encompass the young - bring the children to me () and do not hinder them that we hear in the gospels as a refrain.

to encompass both genders - like the woman caught in adultery, and the Syrophoencian woman in mark 7:24 whose daughter was healed.

It encompassed other races, like the woman in Mark, like the Roman military man,

It encompassed betrayers of the Jews like Zaccheus, sinners like the prostitutes and the lady caught in adultery, and of course the thieves on the cross, and the disciples who left him, denied him, and I think even Judas himself.

However, it also encompassed the holy ones. More than once Jesus talks about loving those who were religiously held in high esteeem. “Jesus looked at him and loved him.” the dignity that he treated Nicodemus, lovingly filling him in about what it meant to be born again, or Nathanael - the Jewish man in whom there is nothing false.

So we can see how much Jesus’ boundaries pushed up against Israel’s boundaries. When Jesus is asked about love by the expert in the law in , we hear the standard Jewish reply about love - Love your neighbour as yourself, then we read that the neighbour would extend to a Jew, even if you were a despised Samaritan. Jesus shocking words “go and do likewise” means that they were to learn the lesson from their cultural enemies.

Love’s temperature has been turned up, way up. Like a spinal tap amplifier, Jesus has taken them up to an 11 out of 10, or more likely a 21 out of ten.

And then, there is Jesus’ ultimate love, and asks God to forgive. He loved them to the end, we read in Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. And what an end it was. Let me read to you a few paragraphs from Francis Spufford’s book Unapologetic: He has a chapter there on Jesus, called Yeshua. And it is the most poignant prose I have heard about Jesus: We pick it up at that point in when we read that he was despised and we esteemed him not:

And just look at him. There’s something disgusting about him, don’t you think? Something that makes you squirm inside. Something . . . furtive. He’s so pale and sickly-looking, with that dried blood round his mouth. He looks like a paedophile being led away by the police. He looks like something from under a rock; as if he doesn’t deserve the daylight. He’s a blot on the new day. Someone kicks his arse as he goes by, and whoops, down he goes, flat on his nose with the cross pinning him like a struggling insect, and let’s face it, it’s funny. Yeshua is a joke. He’s less a messiah, more a patch of something nasty on the pavement. And as he struggles on he recognises every roaring, jeering face. He knows our names. He knows our histories.

1 Now before the Feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart out of this world to the Father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.

And since, as well as being a weak and frightened man, he’s also the love that makes the world, to whom all times and places are equally present, he isn’t just feeling the anger and spite and unbearable self-disgust of this one crowd on this one Friday morning in Palestine; he’s turning his bruised face toward the whole human crowd, past and present and to come, and accepting everything we have to throw at him, everything we fear we deserve ourselves.

The doors of his heart are wedged open wide, and in rushes the whole pestilential flood, the vile and roiling tide of cruelties and failures and secrets. Let me take that from you, he is saying. Give that to me instead. Let me carry it. Let me be to blame instead. I am big enough. I am wide enough. I am not what you were told. I am now not your king or your judge. I am the father who longs for every last one of his children. I am the friend who will never leave you. I am the light behind the darkness. I am the shining your shame cannot extinguish. I am the ghost of love in the torture chamber. I am change and hope. I am the refining fire. I am the door where you thought there was only wall. I am what comes after deserving. I am the earth that drinks up the bloodstain. I am gift without cost. I am. I am. I am. Before the foundations of the world, I am.

Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense Yeshua

He cannot do anything deliberate now. The strain of his whole weight on his outstretched arms hurts too much. The pain fills him up, displaces thought, as much for him as it has for everyone else who has ever been stuck to one of these horrible contrivances, or for anyone else who dies in pain from any of the world’s grim arsenal of possibilities. And yet he goes on taking in. It is not what he does, it is what he is. He is all open door: to sorrow, suffering, guilt, despair, horror, everything that cannot be escaped, and he does not even try to escape it, he turns to meet it, and claims it all as his own. This is mine now, he is saying; and he embraces it with all that is left in him, each dark act, each dripping memory, as if it were something precious, as if it were itself the loved child tottering homeward on the road. But there is so much of it. So many injured children; so many locked rooms; so much lonely anger; so many bombs in public places; so much vicious zeal; so many bored teenagers at roadblocks; so many drunk girls at parties someone thought they could have a little fun with; so many jokes that go too far; so much ruining greed; so much sick ingenuity; so much burned skin. The world he claims, claims him. It burns and stings, it splinters and gouges, it locks him round and drags him down.

Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense Yeshua

This is love going where we go, all of us, when we end. Yeshua is long past trying to show what lies beyond the limits of the world. He is travelling into limit himself, now, deeper and deeper, and the limits are tightening in on him, tightening down to a ribcage that won’t fill, tightening on him as consequences tighten on anyone. He’s gone to the place our sorrows lead to at their worst: guilt’s dead-end, panic’s no-exit loop, despair’s junkyard where everything is busted. There’s nothing to keep him company there but the light he’s always felt shining beneath things. But the light is going. He’s so deep down now in the geology of woe, so buried beneath the mountains’ weight of it, that the pressure is squeezing out his feeling for the light. There’s nothing left of it for him but a speck, a pinpoint the world grinds in on itself, a dot dimming as the strata of the dark are piled heavier and heavier on it. And then it goes out. Of course it does. Love can’t repair death. Death is stronger than love. We all know that. But Yeshua didn’t, until now. This is the first time in his entire life he’s ever felt alone. Now there is no love song. There is no kind father. There is just a man on a cross, dying in pain; a foolish man who chose to give up life and breath to be a carcass on a pole.

I have exhausted the picture of love. Jesus took everything we feared. That is love without boundaries. That is the love that we are confronted with.

How are we going to respond to such extravagant love?

Spufford, F., Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense,

Cultivate Love - Fruit that is grown, not produced. Imagine the crushing weight of having to try to imitate such love? We can’t. Like the Royal flying doctor service radio Ad? How do you repay someone for the gift of life? You can’t. And yet Jesus says in - ‘Go and do likewise’. Help!!!!!

We can respond to this love, with love back to God. The disciple of love, John, puts it this way in - we love him before he first loved us. The response of the sinful lady in pouring perfume on Jesus feet. She is our example. We can worship, we can say thankyou. You know, when I get to heaven we may be granted the insight to know all the ways that I have been loved by Jesus. That is a story long in the telling. But I know for sure that many many of those ways will be from those who were prompted by God to love me especially. I am really looking forward to that day. But I need to say, Thank you Lord Jesus, for loving me. Because it was a love that was despite by badness, not because of my goodness. Remember Jesus telling that parable about love? Who loved the most, the one who was forgiven the $50 debt, or the $5,000 debt. I have an inkling of my $5,000 debt, but I have no doubt that however much I think I have been forgiven, it is far more than that. Perhaps you don’t love God as much as you should because you don’t yet know just how bad you are. May God grant us an honest look at ourselves. Not the victim self that we build up as ammunition in our various battles, but the true self, the vulnerable self, that needs God’s love more than it needs oxygen. If you haven’t done it right now, let us just bow our head for a few moments in love to God

We can’t leave it there: We have heard above that love is directed toward others, not towards self. Jesus admonition to love our neighbours as ourselves in (going all the way back to ). Sometimes we can even use this verse as a verse that authorises our own self-love! But that is not where Jesus is going with this verse. We may be filled with self-loathing, and this verse can be an antidote for that.

But God calls us to love others in desiring what is genuinely best for fall - friend and foe alike, local and refugee, widow, orphan and CEO. As James tells us. True religion is this, to look after orphans and widows, and keeping yourself unstained by the world.

Illustration: We can try to reduce the Christian life to a series of rules. Heaps of rules, to be fair, so it is tricky to get them all. Here is a photo from a few weeks ago! Can anyone tell me in word what we see there? Hear no evil, See no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil. If we turn christianity into a morality play, we turn ourselves into those three characters. But as James tells us, that is only half the story. And let’s face it, it is the tiny half. We read from Exodus what God did :

He heard the cry of his people

He saw the evil being done to Israel by Egypt.

He Spoke to Moses, so they knew that he saw and heard

He acted

Loving others has not much to do with conventional morality - avoiding impurity. It actually means opening your heart and eyes, and getting into action. Let us learn again from the disciple of love John in the next verse in (ESV)

19 We love because he first loved us. 20 If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. 21 And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.

John nails us down here, by joining these two loves together. The secular world, at its best, seeks to love others. The religious world has sometimes sought to love God and love your brothers and sisters and to hate the world. But they must be joined.

I like what Mother Theresa says about this in encouragement. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, with thy whole soul and with thy whole mind." This is the commandment of the great God, and he cannot command the impossible. Love is a fruit in season at all times, and within the reach of every hand. Anyone may gather it and no limit is set”

is instructive here: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us”. So it definitely is a gift given to us, which is comforting! we don’t have to generate it ourself. But it would be deceptive to say that it was easy. paul when he talks about love at the end of his love Chapter , finishes with the challenge to ‘pursue love’. So it is both a gift and hard work.

Let me finish our talk today with a third point - Barriers and Blessings

Kenneson, P.D., Life on the Vine: Cultivating the Fruit of the Spirit,

We had three contrasts last week, so perhaps it is fitting to finish with a contrast.

Firstly, the barriers to loving others:

Treating, God church and others as consumer choices.

We live in a culture that from start to finish is trying to sell us something. Constantly trying to get us to select a Ford over a Holden, a cruise over an adventure holiday. And if the leaders of this church don’t pay careful attention, we might run the risk of trying to get you to ‘sign up’ for this church because it is a good consumer choice. As if we have to fulfil your needs to make you stay. We might be able to do that for a year or two. But when something happens in your personal life, or you have a clash with someone, or something else that the consumer in you doesn’t work - then you will be off to find a better ‘deal’ elsewhere.

That might fit our culture perfectly, but it won’t help you understand God’s Kingdom. As Paul warned us last week - - do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.

Kingdom Culture, as defined in love, is self-sacrificial. We learn to love by learning to love when we don’t want to love - when we want to run instead. We don’t gather because we want to be blessed. We gather because we are deeply aware of the gratitude we have towards God, and we want to give back to him and to others.

I think often love doesn’t come because gratitutude has been swallowed up in resentment, in bitterness, and in division. The barrier to me learning to love might be as simple as learning just how much I have been forgiven, and living humbly in that knowledge, not looking down on others, but getting down alongside others, like Jesus came down and descended.

Anna McGahan was a great example of this. She is an Australian actor to starred as a prostitute on one of the underbelly series. She was a part of the LGBT community, and she had an eating disorder, and her testimony was that she didn’t judge anyone (except for Christians). She was turned around by being loved by a Christian. Their acceptance meant that she was able to hear and respond to the Gospel. She became free in an instant. Her eating disorder vanished overnight. Now she constantly looks to free others in that acting community - she wants to love them like she was loved. That is overcoming the barriers with His beautiful love!

Which leads me into the Blessings part: What can help us cultivate that love, to prepare the soil of our life.

I think the answer is simple: In the early life of the church, we read in Acts that they took note that these disciples had been with Jesus. I think the answer is - Let’s be with Jesus. I was talking with Tim earlier this week and we both confessed that our quiet times had suffered in our busy-ness and that we had suffered as a result. I won’t be able to love unless I am close to Him - the source of love.

Let me finish with a final illustration: I have a dog who I love. His name is Sam. You can tell when I spend time with Sam. His fur gets on me. as I write this words, his fur is on my keyboard. It has got there from my jacket, and it spread to my jacket because I was quiet concerned about the amount of time I didn’t have to prepare this week. Getting back at lunch time yesterday from interstate was exactly what I spent my week trying to avoid. So in trying to calm myself from panic about how little work i had done, I spent a minute patting Sam and being calmed by him. My blood pressure dropped, as that is the physiological reaction that we have when we interact with a pet. Alexx would be able to give me a psychological reason for that. But Sam’s hair got all over my keyboard. I didn’t even intend it.

To excuse the pun, in the KJV says that God has ‘shed’ abroard love into our heart. That is the humorous point. But this is the serious point.

And if you are with God, just pursuing him in love for his own sake this week: Then His Spirit will be doing his work in your heart. And you will be cultivating deep dark soil, in which His word will be watered in like precious seeds.

And you will be fruitful. The dog hair will get on everything you own, and over everyone you come in contact with. Ones like Anna McGahan will feel the love flow into their lives, and they will want to get in on the action.

His love will be your love, and your love will be their love, and then His LOVE will be their love.

That is fruit, that is fruit that remains.

Let’s pray for us

But the fur doesn’t appear magically because I own a dog. it is only when I spend time with Sam that my clothes get ‘infected’ with fur. they took note that these men had been with Jesus. . God makes a difference when he infects your life. We have been infected with love by God when we come with him. says that God has shed love abroard in our heart - like Sam shedding on me. Sorry for the pun.

But we can hear what is happening here: our presence with our father, through the Spirit