I Corinthians 13, Mother’s Day

If you have your Bible’s please turn in them to I Corinthians 13. Many of you will recognize this as the love chapter.

Today being Mother’s day and love being our topic you will be tempted to think of love as something soft, soothing and gentle. Today I want you to expand you love to include a love that is… Rubust, unyielding and unbreakable.

I want you to rethink of this chapter as the Bible as the “tough/rugged”? chapter. The love that God calls us to have has to be rugged. Why, because biblical love a demanding love.

Introduction about mom - Funny story, but motivated out of love. One summer afternoon when i was 6, i begged mom to pitch the baseball to me. I was learning how to swing a wooden bat. Shot gunned mom right in the eye. I gave my mom a black eye. She was acting out of love, probably a little out of her comfort zone.

That day my mom became the poster child for the saying, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

Mom’s have a rugged and tough love.

If you were a teenager that was not easy to raise like I was, and your parents still loved you, they had to have a rugged love. A love that was robust, unyielding and unbreakable.

Transition: What we find in our passage today is that love is at the heart (of our spiritual transformation. (x2)

Action - The action I would like you to do today is this. Embrace a transformational love that is willing to do the hard things.

1. Love Transforms

Paul begins by addressing the use of very charismatic spiritual gifts in the church in Corinth.

1 Corinthians 13:1–3 ESV

1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Without love...

vs. 1, words that don’t much positive impact, I’m just making noise

vs. 2, just knowledge - just facts, I am nothing, no better than a computer

vs. 3, spiritual actions are just plain Actions that mean nothing

But … Pause - with love, what I do is transformed

vs. 1, my words impact others.

vs.2, I become someone who’s life is used to transform others.

vs. 3, Action have great effect on others lives.

Many of you have experienced this kind of person a Christ follower who was a coach or a teacher, who may have been hard on you, but who loved you. That person changed your life.

I still remember my second grade teacher to this day, Ms. Farrel. A godly older single lady who loved her students, but was demanded a lot of us, and did not play favorites. She made a deep impact or Christ on my on my life.

When you know someone loves you it changes everything.

This is no longer a stranger doing things and saying things to you that that are impersonal personal. That are not connected to you.

The actions of a person who loves gleams through the noise and busyness of life.

Their actions are an investment in you. Their words build you up.

Love changes everything. LOVE TRANSFORMS

Love = Care, concern, investment of heart

Love - God requires the heart. God requires a changed heart. The fullest obedience to God is obedience that includes both the outward act and the inward transformation.

God requires outward and inward obedience. A good outward act done with rightly aligned behavior, but an unaligned heart is not true obedience.

True Christianity is transformational. It changes a persons emotions, attitudes, priorities be submitted to Jesus Christ.

Application

Even today as you are listening to our message God is leaning on you to bend parts of you into closer alignment with Him.

Here in in lies the beauty and love of God.

God is not on a power trip. His fundamental aim is not to control you.

One of God’s great goals is to free you. To free you from the lies you believe, to free you from the sin you hold on to, to free you from the suffocation of selfishness.

God is motivated out of 2 things: 1) Love for His Glory and 2) Love for His people.

Out of God’s love He desires you to love others and for your heart be transformed to love. He loves you and wants to see you free.

Illustration Mother - My mother did the right things. She helped us with school work, fed us well, kept up with the laundry. That was the easy part. She loved and still loves my brother and I. She is not about trying to control. She desperately wants what is best for us: physically, as fathers, in our work … most importantly more than anything else my mom wants me to grow spiritually. LOVE TRANSFORMS. T

Let me ask you this question:

Do you want what is best for yourself and for others?

Do you desire spiritual transformation?

Transition - The 2nd thing we see in our chapter today is that

II. Love Acts, Love Transforms Action

1 Corinthians 13:4–7 ESV

4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love looks to what is in the best interest of the individual.

Love asks the question, If this person were a close friend or my own child. How would I treat them? What would I tell them? What direction would I give them?

Love looks out for the best interest of the individual.

Sometimes living with someone & looking out for their best interest is hard.

At the beginning of our message I described love as rugged, robust, unyielding and unbreakable. There is a toughness to love. In love there are moments of bliss & laughter, but so many times we miss that love chooses the right things even when life is difficult.

Illustration - Combine Jim Elliot & Gospel

I’d like to give an illustration about a man who loved very well.

Jim Elliot was an American Missionary to the country of Equador in the early 1950’s.

What draws a person to be a missionary.

It is 3 things: 1) A love for God’s glory.

2) A love for the Gospel.

3) A love for strangers. You have to love people you have never met so much that you are concerned for their eternity. A missionary has to have a transformational love.

Jim Elliot- He and his team (that included his wife) had done some missionary work in Equador when God laid on their heart a burden for a tribal group in the jungle that had never ever heard about Jesus. If you asked this tribal group, “Who is Jesus.” They would say, “Jesus who?”

Jim Elliot knew that those in this tribal group who died would go to hell, if they did not hear about and trust in Jesus.

Jim Elliot and those on his team decided reach this group.

But there was a problem. This particular tribal group were savages. Murder was a way of life in the tribe. If you lived to be 25 years old you were considered an old man in this tribe.

Jim and his team loved these tribal people (a people they had never met) that they risked their life to get the Gospel to them.

When Jim and 4 others from their team made first contact they thought that things might be initially going well. Things turned bad, they were murdered and their corpses left to rot.

Now Jim’s wife, Elisabeth Elliot was faced with a decision. Do I pack my bags and go home, or do I stay in Equador and focus on a safe group of people?

She decided to do neither. She also reached out to this same savage tribe.

She too wanted them to have spiritual life in Jesus, despite the murder of her husband.

Why? Because she has a robust, unyielding and unbreakable for these strangers that she had never met. These stranger that murdered the love of her life.

Long story short. She had success. She got into the tribe. She shared the Gospel of Jesus.

She did something that this tribe had never heard of. She told the men that murdered her husband that she forgave them.

This tribal group was completely changed by Jim Elliot’s sacrifice for them and Elizabeth Elliot’s forgiveness and ministry.

They saw the love of Jesus come through in Elizabeth Elliots life.

She chose to love when it was hard.

Elisabeth and Jim Elliots’s love was a love that acts. God is calling you today to choose a love that acts.

These 3 verses show us how love well:

vs. 4, Love-Chooses patients, kindness and humility.

vs. 5-7, Love -Choose selflessness, generosity and truthfulness.

-We do this when we follow the example of Jesus.

Application

Who right now is God calling you to love well?

-Is there someone in your family that you struggle being short with?

-Is there a humility that you need to embrace when engaging with someone else, who you think is inferior you to?

-Is there a child or a friend that has been difficult to love or who has hurt you, that you are bring called to have this robust, unyielding and unbreakable love for?

Transition - There is one who has this unyielding love for you. His name is Jesus.

Gospel

-The great new is this, You can be saved today by a God that has an unbreakable love for you!

-Before you and I were ever created Jesus decided that he would be The Savior.

-He has seen all the mistakes of your past and all the mistakes of your future.

-Out of his unbreakable love for you, He still offered himself a sacrifice on a Cross for you.

-He invites you now to trust that He paid the price on the cross for your sin.

-He invites you now to give your whole life to follow Him.

-Will you do that now? Will you say “yes” to Jesus now?

Transition - One of the most beautiful things about love it is not just for the past and for present, but He has made love to last forever. Love is Eternal. Love Lasts.

III. Love Lasts -

So far today we have seen that:

Love Transforms, Love Acts - Love lasts.

1 Corinthians 13:8–13 ESV

8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Love never ends.

There will be a day that the Christ follower goes on to be in heaven.

When that happens the Christ follower will enter a place of perfect love.

Vs. 8, Love never ends.

This passage tells us that God has given us many wonderful spiritual gifts. However, none of the spiritual gifts God gives will be in heaven.

There will be no need of them.

-What will be in heaven is love.

-Love is in heaven, because God is in heaven.

The reason that love never ends is because God never ends. And love is an attribute of God. Love is part of who God is.

God’s love is robust, unyielding and unbreakable. How do we know that? It is eternal.

Closing

We cannot give away what we have not received.

-Christ follower - Have you allowed God’s love to invade all the areas of your life. Have you surrendered all your regrets to Him and received His great forgiveness of you? Some of you have areas of failure in your life or areas of shame that you have not let God into. He wants to come in and apply His love to those bruised places.

-Christ follower - God is also calling you to be tenacious in your love for others.

John 13:34 ESV

34 A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.

Who is difficult to love that God is calling you to love well?

-Unbeliever, Will you right now give your life wholeheartedly to Jesus... to follow a God of wonderful persistent love.

Will you say, “Yes” to Jesus? Will you say “Yes” to Him right now and experience his forgiveness and great love for you?

Pray