Sermon Tone Analysis

\\ "Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart

be acceptable to you, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer."

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"For The Love Of God Is..."

(1 John 5:3-4)

*INTRODUCTION:*

            An eight-year-old little boy by the name of  Arnold wrote a letter to his pastor: , /"Dear Pastor, I  know God loves everybody but he never met my little sister."/(1)

/            / Sometimes kids say the funniest things.

And sometimes in the midst of that humor, there's a message from God.

I think the message is about love.

Love happens to be the most talked about and discussed  topic of all time.

Not counting songs like, "Beans In Your Ears" or George Thorogood's  "Get A Haircut and Get A Real Job" or Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue" most of the popular music of our day and almost any day is about love.

It might be about the mushy, hand-holding, big eyed, heart throbbing kind of love or it might be the broken-hearted, down in the mouth kind of  unrequited love that causes the blues.

I would say that ninety percent of Country Western music is about the fall out from broken hearts, like Alan Jackson's ""Up To My Ears In Tears."

But what is this thing called "LOVE."

Popular music paints a pretty confusing and sometimes conflicting portrait of what love is or what love is all about.

Just look at some of the titles of some of our love songs.

Love is Kind, Love is Blue, Loving Blind, Love is True, Love Hurts, Love bites, Love Stinks, Love Is Strange, Love Me Tender, Love Potion #9, Love Makes The World Go Round, Love Boat, Love American Style, What The World Needs Now Is Love Sweet Love, Love Letters In The Sand, All You Need Is Love, To Know Him Is To Love Him, Never My Love, and Love Lifted Me.

I really didn't mean to get your mind racing like an oldies station.

But as you can see, one of the big topics of music is love.

And every song has a different twist or a different spin on love and what it's all about.

In the New Revised Standard translation of the Bible, there are 489 verses with the word "love" in them, 262 of those appear in the New Testament alone.

There are well over 600 variations on the word love and over 750 words that can be associated with various kinds of love.

It's all rather mind boggling isn't it.

So what is this thing called "Love?"

            That's sort of the question I asked at one point in time.

What is love and what is the difference between God's love and our love?

How does that effect our lives and our faith?

A couple of months ago, this passage rolled around in the Lectionary, a three year plan of reading the Scripture for the Church.

I preached from this passage but while I was preaching, I had an inspiration for a whole series of sermons based upon these two verses.

I get lots of sermon ideas in lots of different places,  Joshua says that my favorite phrase is, /"Ooh, that will preach!"/

and that I can find a sermon or sermon illustration in almost any event.

And he's probably right but that's my job.

But I usually don't get sermon ideas while I'm preaching.

However, this time I didn't get just one but several and they dealt with the phrase from verse 3, /"For the love of God is this..."  /So for the next few weeks I'm going to be preaching a series on The Love Of God.

I may shift gears a little during our stewardship campaign or when we celebrate the Lord's Supper but  our focus for the next  couple of months will be God's Love and what it is.

In the English language, love is one of those ambiguous terms which means all kinds of things from a mild affection to unselfish motivation.

We have one word, "Love," for all the different aspects of love but in the Bible there are four different words used for love.

Storge, Eros, Philia, and Agape.

Each word concerns or defines a different aspect of love or a different kind of love.

And each kind of love is unique unto itself.

They are very specific in their meaning.

The first three are always used to describe worldly attributes or worldly human kinds of love.

And the fourth is used to describe God's love and the highest form of human love.

*I.

WORLDLY LOVE:*

*            A.

AFFECTION:   *Often times we use the word love when we really mean affection for something mainly inanimate objects.

It's what we would call love for stuff like when we say, /"I love pizza or peanut butter or chocolate."/

or /"I love the works of Charles Dickens and John Grisham."/

Or even, /"I love your house."

/But it's not limited to inanimate objects.

It also has to do with those things which cannot reciprocate.

I think maybe that's why this kind of affection also has to do with the feelings we have for pets.

You can love a cat but they're so independent that you're never quite sure they return your affection.

I saw a bumper sticker that read, /"If you call a dog and it will come.

If you call a cat, you get it's answering machine and it might get back to you."/

Speaking of cats, our orange friend from the comics, Garfield, walks up and sees a cake sitting on the table.

His eyes light up and he says, /"I love chocolate cake!" /And then in typical Garfield fashion, he gobbles down the whole cake in one bite.

As he tosses the plate away he says, /"Love is fleeting."

/(2)

            Garfield is right when it comes to our love for things.

Things never fill the void in our lives.

Things can bring some happiness or add pleasure to our lives but they never fulfill that longing for a deeper relationship we all have within us.

Things never reciprocate.

Who can have a deep and abiding relationship with a pizza or a stereo.

They can give pleasure but our affection for them really is fleeting.

*            B.

STORGE:*  But the kinds of love which the Bible talks about are different.

They are reciprocal in nature.

The words we're going to look at all come from the Greek and Greek is filled with words that have meaning and shades of meanings, some of which are dependent upon the words that modify it.

The first of these Greek words for love is "Storge."

Storge is actually a noun which means affection and in the Bible it is used mainly to describe  family affection, the love of parents for their children and children for their parents.

It is the love that brothers and sister have for each other.

It's that love that makes us do things for each other.

It's the love that holds the family together.

It's the love that allowed the little boy in the opening letter to write to his pastor about his sister.

It's the love that makes teenagers roll their eyes and say, /"Dad!!"/ in that two syllable way they have when you show them some affection in public or crack a dumb joke in front of their friends.

They roll their eyes and push you away but secretly they're glad you're there and they love you for it.

Storge is family affection.

*C.

EROS :  *The next form of love we're going to look at is "Eros."

Hagar the Horrible, the Viking in the comics is sitting in his easy chair with a beer in his hand.

His wife, Helga, is completely frazzled from cleaning.

She stands there, mop in hand, looking at Hagar and says, /"Remember how you said I'd live a life of luxury as soon as your ship came in?"/

            Hagar says, /"Yes?"/

Helga asks, /"It sank, didn't it?"

/(3)

            We laugh at that partly because we've all been there and partly because of this  form of love, "Eros."

It's the root word of erotic.

It concerns itself with the love shared between a man and a woman, especially a husband and wife.

It encompasses the passion of human love and describes the bond between a man and woman.

Within the passion of Eros there is always sexual love.

Eros finds its deepest fulfillment in the sexual passion and relationship between a husband and wife.

This is the purpose for which man and woman and marriage were created, to bring passion and fulfillment and companionship to one another.

But our human understanding of Eros became corrupted.

We began to think of Eros only in terms of its negative, sinful side: lust.

As a consequence, Eros never appears in the New Testament either in its noun or verb form.

Eros is love shared between a husband and wife.

*D.

PHILIA:  *Then we come to Philia.

This Greek word describes brotherly or sisterly love.