Optimizing Love
Notes
Transcript
Efficiency
Efficiency
Growing up we had all these big beautiful eucalyptus leaves in the backyard. But they would drop leaves EVERYWHERE! Not even seasonal, really, because Southern California didn’t have seasons.
So my Dad came up with this great idea. Pay the children. For every bag of leaves… I’ll pay you a dollar.
Oh man, yes! I saw dollar signs. I have a bad habit, it has followed me through life, of always looking for the loophole. I am always looking for the most efficient, strategically lazy way to do things.
It’s a huge win as a software developer, by the way. Not so much in any other dimension of life.
Does anyone see the loophole?
My Dad didn’t specify how full the bags have to be!
So I happily took an entire box of trash bags, stuffed a handful of leaves in each, presented them to my father… “That’ll be $40, please!”
Efficiency! Optimization! I love it.
Guess what I spent my $40 on.
Nothing… because that’s what I got paid. Nothing! Turns out “verbal contract” doesn’t count and the man wouldn’t pay out. Truly tragic. I should call my Dad, he owes me $40!
Anyhoo… you should know we aren’t going to learn anything knew today. I’m not going to tell you anything you don’t likely already know. But I do pray that God calls you, convicts you, to begin practicing what you already know.
What Would Please God Most?
What Would Please God Most?
What would please God most?
What a HUGE question! Should we always be asking it? Yes.
How do we answer it? Well… that’s the question.
Especially if I want to be efficient. I want to “optimize” the way I love God.
Where is the biggest bang for our buck? If we were to “love God” the best by doing “this one thing” what would it be?
Would it be Sabbath keeping? Because that’s certainly a big deal across the Old Testament and New Testament.
Would it be sacrifice? That’s a big deal. Suffering? Tithes and offerings? Songs, praises?
As a software engineer I am all about efficiency. So if I am looking to optimize, maximum efficiency, to do the thing that is most pleasing to God, I want to focus my efforts in, to at least prioritize the very most pleasing thing first.
What is it? Am I going to find it in the Top Ten Words, the Ten Commandments? I can “not murder” people all day. All Day!
The ancient scholars had this question to. They debated back and forth the best way to “love God”. They knew the Scriptures, they knew the commandments and so they wanted to know: what is the greatest commandment?
What is the Second Greatest Commandment?
“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”
And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
This is the great and first commandment.
That’s the question they asked. Answered.
and we all agree we should “love God.” But as we said last week, that’s an answer that leaves another question hanging. How? How do I best love God?
Is it dancing in meadows? Is it praise and worship? Is it prayer? Is it a fond heaven-facing feeling that I feel… or that I project devotion upward… is it a mental exercise?
Is it something I confess with my mouth?
This, I believe, is why Jesus continues on. He gives a bonus answer:
And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
What is our first step in loving God? Loving our neighbor.
Jesus, of course, unpacks this.
Who is our neighbor? Jesus’ answer to this is a bit confusing, actually. He tells the story of the “Good Samaritan”.. who was his neighbor? “The one who helped him.”
The answer to “who are we to love” is everyone. That’s so big and so large that it becomes SO scary that we kind of decide to do none of it.
No Samaritans here.
So another answer Jesus gives leads to more questions. How do we love people that way, everyone that way, how do we even get started?
Thank you, Jesus, He gives us a starting point for this kind of learn. A training ground and training partners.
He gives us “one another.”
There are 60 something “one another” verses in the New Testament. Awesome study to soak in, happy to give you the list. Spend time in these texts, how to live with one another, bear one another burden’s, encourage one another, forgive one another, greet one another with a holy kiss (but not in Corona)!
You know what shows up over and over and over again?
“Love” shows up in 31 times. That’s telling.
If you remember in our study through John, twice in the “Upper Room” Jesus gives his disciples a “new commandment.”
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. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
and again, two chapters later, but still in this same section of teaching, the “Upper Room Discourse.” The final teaching of Jesus as he unloads all the “most important stuff” before he goes to the cross. Again he reiterates, he repeats, he re-emphasizes:
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.
John writes, maybe decades later, to the churches, applying Jesus’ command.
But it is supposed to start here, in our fellowship, in the way we love one another.
It never ends there… but this is a workshop where we learn how to love. This is a community of commitment, of covenant, where we learn how to love radically and be risky and awkward in our love.
Really all of 1 John reads like an application of this command: love one another.
John 3:16 is good, try 1 John 3:16
By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.
Which commandments? Primarily?
And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.
So what is our primary way of loving God? Keep his commands. Which commands? Believe in the name of Jesus… and love one another.
Let’s be clearer. In fact, there is nothing I can say that could possibly improve or explain, let’s just sit before the Word of God and listen.
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.
Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.
In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
You think God is mysterious and distant or invisible, unknowable… how are we supposed to love Him and experience His love? Primary Way? If we love one another.
By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.
And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world.
Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.
So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.
By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world.
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.
Perfect love casts out fear. How many times have you heard that? What is the primary context? Yes, love of God, God’s love for us, but the primary context? Love for one another.
How is God manifested? How does He abide? If we love one another.
We love because he first loved us.
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.
And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.
Brothers and sisters. This is a place where “brother” is all encompassing, often translated “brother and sister” here. You and me and us together.
This is who we are
This is who we are
(Brother and sister).
This is so absolutely fundamental to WHO WE ARE!
This is the Command of Jesus to His disciples, it is the first application of the Second Greatest Commandment… which is itself the first application of the Greatest Commandment: to love God.
This is the model of Jesus. This is the model of the early church. This is our primary act of worship. This is our primary evangelistic method.
We are, as disciples of Jesus, absolutely committed to loving God and loving others… loving you, here.
So...
What do we do when we fail to love one another?
What does that mean? When we fail at that? When we fall short of that? Worse, when we don’t love and we justify it to ourselves as “normal”.
We aren’t called to “normal.” We are called to radical, extraordinary, miraculous, sacrificial, awkward, famous love.
We have liked one another often. Especially if we chose here and there.
We have loved one another often, actually. There are examples of great love among us…
But what do we do when love among us fails?
When we are divided and divisive?
When we hurt one another… or we hold on to those hurts.
Our church has been in a season of hurt and hurting for years now. And it isn’t just us. What church that you know of is “famous” for loving one another this way? Or are we famous for divisiveness, for bitterness, for bickering, for separating and splitting?
That makes it sound hopeless, doesn’t it?
I bet it sounded hopeless to the twelve…
Love Matthew over there? Like that? He cheated my family out of their taxes for years to give to the Roman occupiers! He’s a straight up traitor!
John and James, Sons of Thunder. The tempers on them!
Judas is in the room!
I bet it sounded hopeless to them.
They loved because??? He first loved them. Jesus taught them how to love like that. He modeled it. Then He sent a Helper, the very Spirit of Christ, to empower them to replicate Jesus’ greatest miracle: sacrificial love.
We can love this way, church. This is who we are. Jesus commands us to do it, he is already teaching us how, this is our training ground, this is our school, this is our discipline… and His Spirit is already working in us to create the fruit of the Holy Spirit: love.
Communion
Communion
This doesn’t happen in one week. Or two or three… we grow in this for a lifetime. But God is calling us to a special season of focus.
We are going to focus on this.
Starting next week… and continuing for awhile we are going to practice Communion together every week. Not just here in the building, in your homes. In your living room. At your table.
Not just you and your family in your jammies. I want you to start thinking about who you are inviting over to have communion with you next Sabbath. Or whose house are you crashing?
I get this is crazy in Corona time. Figure it out. Wear a mask, wear a plastic bubble, do it outside, do it 6 or 60 feet apart. We will figure it out.
Maybe you start with the people it is “easiest” to have communion with. But you can’t stay there. I believe God is calling you to have communion with those in the church you don’t know that well… or even those you might have the hardest time meeting over the table of Fellowship.
This is the context of Communion throughout the New Testament (more about that next week).
Starting next week we will be taking communion together with this focus:
This is how Jesus loved me… so this is how I love you.
Jesus sacrificed His life for me… I’m ready to go to the cross for you. Gene. Wendy. Mike.
Because Jesus loved us… and because we love God…
And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.
God teach us to actually love one another. Famously. Awkwardly. Sacrificially.