All you need is Love

Love powers Hope,Peace, and Joy

The primise of the message this morning is this...In general the mind continually pursues the object of its choice.

If you will, let me illustrate this truth! When you have a choice between who you love and what you want, which one wins?

Many would immediately answer who I love!

That sounds noble…

But I am not so persuaded that is what really happens!

For many years I have worked with, counseled, advised and encourage many people church and from my personal observations, what I want usually wins. I have become convinced that this is why it is hard to look someone in the face who loves you, when desire is in control of your choice..

I have sat with women and men who in their past had made a committed to a covenant marriage relationship…the reason for their visit is because one or the other has chosen to abandon all to pursuit an adulterous affair. They committed to love but the object of their choice prevailed. They have the hardest time just looking at their Spouse.

Why is it that we want children to look at us when they are caught doing wrong?

Notice that they lower their head or look another direction, they chose to do what they desired to do and now they have a hard time looking into the eyes of someone who loves them. We see it as disrespect toward us or explain it away as shame, but in essence it is an issue of choice about love what is loved most.

Lets consider

Desirous Love. Rooted in immorality.

Lust, fantasy, conquest, self gratification, passion or self-identification. It leaves behind destroyed marriages, broken homes, dysfunctional families, damaged children and ruined lives; and yet it is the most pursued type of love as evidenced in the television programming, advertisements,

Benevolent Love.

Love that promotes a salvation without Christ provides for attention to all the needs of the body, while ignoring the soul. Today in the name of Jesus we are asked to believe that the truest way to carry out His intentions is to ignore men’s souls and care only for their bodies creating a sort of material salvation that practically gets rid of all serious soul-need.

More concerned on how we treat other than how we treat God.

Self-Love

The First Scheme of salvation without a Christ provides for attention to all the needs of the body, ignoring the soul.[2]

1. Educate them- What a mockery of mankind to suppose or to teach that mere information can satisfy its wants, when the more information men get, the more clearly we see the reign of evil in the world, and the hopelessness of attaining to righteousness, so far as human power is concerned.[3]

2. Build them a house. Consider that all will be well when the people are better housed, shutting their eyes to the condition of multitudes who may be seen to-day living in the greatest sin and misery in well-built modern dwellings.[4]

3. Deliver Them- what one evil in society, do you think if eradicated would cure or heal our society. Prohibition, Smoking, Dancing, Sex, Over-eating, drugs, abortion, Gambling, politics, law-enforcement, bigotry

Problem If the world were devoid of all these evils would they be any nearer to God?

Sacrificial Love

No doubt the Saviour’s heart ached in sympathy with the mass of human sorrow, sickness, and poverty brought before Him. Where we have only a glimpse of men’s troubles as we move hurriedly up and down among them, He had the whole sad story unfolded to Him, and His keen love responded tenderly to every cry for help. Nevertheless, He was never diverted from the great central danger. To Him the sorrowful troubled crowd were not merely poor and suffering, not merely oppressed by unjust laws, and crowded into badly constructed dwellings, not merely hungry, hard-worked, and comfortless; these were incidents which He sometimes alleviated and more often shared, but the crowning peril, the absolutely certain woe which eclipsed, in His sight, every other, was the loss of the soul.[5]

What! Could it be Christ who talked about a man in fire, a man crying for a drop of water, and denied even this small boon? Could it be Christ who talked about torment, and showed this vision of despair; the tender, loving, merciful Christ? Ah, He showed it, because He SAW IT; because this was the real danger, from which He had come to deliver. Because He knew that the sick beggar, covered with undressed wounds, and with scarce an alleviating circumstance to assuage his sufferings, might have the eternal compensation which should make his earthly troubles seem like a dream, if only his soul was right, if only he was “rich towards God.” Christ showed this, because it was the one thing which no one else saw. The human needs of men were apparent enough to many benevolent people in His day, including the rich giver who was going to hell, but the crying soul needs, which had brought him out of heaven, the hopeless woe to which even the rich and happy were drifting—the undying worm, the quenchless fire, were the visions of sorrow which He only saw, and which His tenderest compassion betrayed itself in seeking to relieve. “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” may be taken as indicating the foundation principle of His entire scheme of redemption.[6]

Imagine Christ giving an entertainment, and spending the evening in frivolous talk, in order that He might humour sinners and attract them to Himself. Imagine Him allowing His little band of disciples to sing current songs and read “amusing selections” for a couple of hours at a time to keep people out of worse company! No, He was too tenderly compassionate for souls, who He knew might end their time on earth at any moment, thus to fool away His chance. He never lost an opportunity of talking straight to them about their sins, the interests of their souls, and the claims of His Father’s law. The young ruler comes to Him, and he is so lovable, so moral, so good, might he not have been allowed to join the little band of disciples, and to have gained light gradually? “Yet lackest thou one thing” was pronounced all the more clearly because “He loved him.” “Sell that thou hast, and follow Me” rang out all the more distinctly because He could offer treasures for the soul.

The compassion of Jesus was not of the maudlin kind which leaves men their “little indulgences,” and shrinks from being “too hard” on them, where hardness is the indispensable condition of salvation. “If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off; if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out,” He mercilessly prescribes; better, He decides, be maimed and suffering here, than be cast into “eternal fire.”

As to the religious ideas of His day, He walked straight across them with a cutting “Woe unto you! Woe! woe!” was the one cry with which He met the teachers and professors of His time, provoking their bitterest hate and animosity. “Making clean the outside platter, while within are dead men’s bones,” was His short description of them and their doings. He upset the nice little fashions which had sprang up around the temple worship with a whip of cords. “Publicans and harlots shall enter the kingdom before you,” He told the grand professors who listened to Him. He inflicted the faithful wounds of a friend, in order that He might awaken them to their danger and lead them to seek the only remedy.

THIRD: CHRIST’S COMPASSION WAS IN DIRECT CONTRAST WITH ALL MERE HUMAN BENEVOLENCE IN ITS “OTHER WORLDLINESS”

No one will dispute that He possessed the power to elevate the masses in a temporal sense, by bestowing on them all those benefits at which modern philanthropy aims. He could have fed them by a miracle every day, as easily as on the two occasions when He multiplied the bread; and who could have lectured on science, or history, or invention, so clearly, so perfectly, as He to whom all knowledge must be as an open book? He could have brought into His services those twelve legions of angels, and taken an earthly kingdom, from which He could have dispensed wealth and prosperity to all around; but He indicated His scheme for elevating and saving the people when He said, “I am the Way”—to another sphere, another realm, not of earthly good, but of heavenly. When He was asked for the posts of honour in His kingdom, He made it clear that He was leading to another and higher world through a “baptism” and with a “cup” of suffering and poverty in this.

FOURTH: CHRIST’S COMPASSION STANDS OUT IN ITS SPIRITUAL FELLOWSHIP

The King of kings makes eternal friends of the fishermen. “He did not visit the poor,” “He did not elevate their sad lot,” and walk on in His own high path, having His fellowship, His joys, His sorrows apart from them; but He shared His life with them in a holy comradeship. He did not live in the style and companionship of the worldly Pharisee, and occasionally visit Peter, James, and John, and hold meetings for the working classes; no, He lived with them and became education, elevation, salvation, and all to them by His blessed fellowship. “Ye are my friends,” said He, and “all things that I have heard of My Father, I have made known unto you.” His heart had no reserves from these men. John’s head could lean on His breast, and Mary could sit at His feet, with the consciousness that they were taken into His confidence, and were indeed as brethren.

That they could not always understand Him was their fault, not His; but their slowness and dulness never wearied His compassion, nor caused Him to seek friends elsewhere. He called His three fishermen to Him when He was about to put forth any wonderful exercise of power. He wanted Peter, James, and John when He was raising the dead, and took them to share His joy on the mount of transfiguration. He craved for their presence in His last agony, and desired no better provision for His mother, when He hung upon the cross, than the home that one of them could afford.

FIFTH: THE COMPASSION OF JESUS IS YET FURTHER DISTINGUISHED BY ITS DIVINE FAITH, AND HOPE, AND ACTION

He had faith in the possibilities of these people, which possibilities would not have been very apparent to any other eye. He believed in the transforming power of the Spirit which He could send them. His hope was not chilled by stupidity, or foolishness, or noncomprehension on the part of disciples or outsiders. Mighty compassion must that have been that could live thirty years on such terms with such men, and never falter or turn back. Many a fine scheme of modern benevolence dies and goes out when the people who are to be benefited get to be known! “Such wretches,” “so ungrateful,” “so presuming,” “so hopeless.” But Christ hoped all things, believed all things, until the Peter who was afraid of a servant girl stood triumphant before the three thousand converts. Christ kept His little band together, although He knew there was a traitor amongst them, the traitor who would betray Him, and sell Him for money into the hands of His enemies. Christ forbore and worked with John until the man who wanted fire from heaven to burn up sinners became the apostle of love. Christ made the Samaritan harlot woman into His ambassador on the spot; Christ made sound men of the lepers, and sane divines of the mad. He called the devils out of those whom they tormented, and then let loose the whole strange flock of ex-harlots, maniacs, and lepers, to tell His praises and to gather others to His presence. Christ went up to Calvary undismayed by His perfect knowledge of sinful, perverse, opposing men, to die for the whole ungrateful race. Christ hoped and believed in His own blackest hour for the dying blackguard at His side, and saved him as he hung there. Talk about eternal hope! Is not this the eternal hope which saves to the uttermost now and here?

SIXTH: THE COMPASSION OF JESUS IS FURTHER DISTINGUISHED BY HIS EVER GOING STRAIGHT TO THE ONE END

The whole work of Christ was aimed at the salvation of men’s souls. And this is not the less true because He also benefited their bodies by healing their diseases and sympathising with their sorrows.

This latter side of His work is much dwelt upon in these days, and yet it was a merely incidental part. If He had come to remove earthly suffering, poverty, oppression, and distress, He would, as I have pointed out, certainly have gone about it in a different way. He would have aimed at riches and position and ease, in order that He might have shared them with His own chosen ones. He would have sought to build up an earthly kingdom, where men should neither hunger nor thirst, nor be sick, nor die; and it would have been a far easier task than the founding of that new invisible kingdom which we have already tried to describe, where only the spiritual and eternal should be of much importance. In comparison, how much easier to have drawn crowds if He had always given them their dinner, than to hold followers who should enter into the mysterious doctrine, “I am the Bread of life;” “ye must be born again!”

But He did feed the multitudes, and He did heal the sick. Yes, but He gave up the former when He found that they followed Him for that only, and His acts of healing were flashes of the Divine power within Him, rather than the “work given Him to do.” “I came to call sinners to repentance,” “I am come to set the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.” “I came to bring fire on earth.” “I came not to send peace, but a sword.” These sayings, and multitudes of others, were descriptive of a spiritual mission, and yet He was most tender, as we readily trace, to every suffering, needy creature who came in contact with Him. His pity was boundless for the lame, the blind, and the deaf, and His loving heart must have grieved over much in the sea of human misery brought before Him, of which we never hear. The truest love must ever seek the highest good of its object, sometimes even with forgetfulness of important lesser advantages.

He gave the great rule by which His compassion for men’s necessities was guided, when He said, “Seek first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all other things shall be added unto you.”

SEVENTH: THE COMPASSION OF JESUS STANDS OUT IN CONTRAST WITH ALL OTHER IN ITS DEVOTION UNTO DEATH

He was too merciful to men to spare them the bitter truths of hell, or to conceal from them the punishments due to transgression; but on Himself he had no compassion.

If the penalty was indeed so awful, He would share it. He too would bear the curse, the shame, the agony of dying for sin, so far as could for the sinless One be possible.

How brightly this compassion shines out against that of many who profess so much for the suffering and the lost. Watch the people who talk the most loudly of their tenderness, and will not say one word of the “outer darkness” and the hell fire of which He said so much. Where is there any dying love amongst them? Where are their Calvarys? Are they remarkable for cross bearing? Are they noted for self-denial, or is it in word only, and not in deed, that they are more compassionate than Jesus? They do not like to repeat to the poor His terrible words of warning. May it not be because they are unwilling to act toward the poor as He did?

No rough living, no fishermen friends, no hungry, weary days, no homeless nights, no persecution and contempt—above all, no scourge, no crown of thorns, no march up to Golgotha, no nailing to the cross, no agony, no dying for the salvation of men. There can be no other dying love than that which causes the real dying. Do settle that in your minds, for without a dying, a real, complete, and eternal separation between your old self and the new self, which means to live and die for others, you cannot be a true disciple of Jesus Christ, or an eternal benefactor to your race. You may not come to any such terrible end as your Master did, for as a rule in outward things the servant is above his Lord, but in some way or another you are doubtless called to follow Him in a path fall of suffering and self-denial, in a road of shame in which you will find yourself completely out off, alas, from the rest of mankind; but without this daily dying, this true following of Him, do not expect to be able to do any lasting good to those who are perishing around you.

Let no benevolent projects, no magnificent phrases deceive you. The good done to mankind by the poor fishermen who spoke the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, has surpassed all the achievements of modern philanthropy as far as the noon-day sun surpasses the rushlight.

If you want to elevate the masses, go and ask HIM how to do it, and if the answer comes, “Take up thy cross and follow Me,” OBEY.[7]

Orphans/children

I should infinitely prefer that their bodies should lack necessary food and attention, rather than that their poor little hearts and souls should be crushed and famished for want of love, both human and Divine. Children brought up without love are like plants brought up without the sun.[8]

[1] Catherine Booth, “Sham Compassion and the Dying Love of Christ,” in Popular Christianity (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife Corporation, 2016).

[2] Catherine Booth, “Sham Compassion and the Dying Love of Christ,” in Popular Christianity (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife Corporation, 2016).

[3] Catherine Booth, “Sham Compassion and the Dying Love of Christ,” in Popular Christianity (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife Corporation, 2016).

[4] Catherine Booth, “Sham Compassion and the Dying Love of Christ,” in Popular Christianity (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife Corporation, 2016).

[5] Catherine Booth, “Sham Compassion and the Dying Love of Christ,” in Popular Christianity (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife Corporation, 2016).

[6] Catherine Booth, “Sham Compassion and the Dying Love of Christ,” in Popular Christianity (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife Corporation, 2016).

[7] Catherine Booth, “Sham Compassion and the Dying Love of Christ,” in Popular Christianity (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife Corporation, 2016).

[8] Catherine Booth, “Sham Compassion and the Dying Love of Christ,” in Popular Christianity (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife Corporation, 2016).