Love is On the Way

Introduction

Last week - Joy.

Joy - Anticipation of something good.

Joy for many of us doesn’t come naturally. Where’s the good and when will it get here?

Anxious Care/Anxiousness - for myself. Happens when we are having a hard time trusting.

Need to order and control our situations

Protect or manipulate things for our purposes

Mary and Elizabeth: At times we need someone who understands and relates to our situation to come alongside us.

Not to make us feel better but help us see the purpose God would have for us in the midst of it for the good of others .

That in this time, in this situation, God favors you - you’re right where you need to be.

While it seems bad, it’s about to get good

Because God continues to choose - and if you are listening, he is choosing you to be God’s people for others.

To Love in remarkable ways.

And yet...Divided. What does it look like to love in remarkable ways when relationships are strained or fall apart over disagreements about politics, pandemic, our thoughts about it, how we should respond

Families

Friends

Church

Avoid? Confront?

What is Love And How Do We Know?

1 John

John -writes to Groups of house churches who were having a disagreement. You aren’t practicing love as you work out your theological disagreements.

1 John 4:7–16 ESV

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. 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.

Hostility, etc

The body is breaking

Were you ever our friends?

Where do we go from here?

I thought we loved each other; maybe we were wrong…or wrong about what love is

Foreigner, 1984 "I Want To Know What Love Is"

Mick Jones: I Want To Know What Love Is came up at three in the morning sometime in 1984. I don’t know where it came from. I consider it a gift that was sent through me. I think there was something bigger than me behind it. I’d say it was probably written entirely by a higher force.”

“The song was an expression of my tempestuous private life over the three years before,” he says. “I’d been through a divorce, and met someone else who I was going to marry. There’d been turmoil in the band through the huge pressure of selling millions of albums, and me and Lou [Gramm, vocals] were entering a cold-war situation.

Shared the song with the band yet I was still looking for ways to enhance it in a spiritual way.

having lunch with a guy who ran a gospel music label. He sent me a bunch of albums, and one was by the New Jersey Mass Choir.

In studio, recording was tentative. The choir pulled in and prayed - surrendering themselves. One take.

I gotta take a little time

A little time to think things over

I better read between the lines

In case I need it when I'm older

Now this mountain I must climb

Feels like a world upon my shoulders

Through the clouds I see love shine

It keeps me warm as life grows colder

In my life there's been heartache and pain

I don't know if I can face it again

Can't stop now, I've traveled so far

To change this lonely life

In my life there's been heartache and pain

I don't know if I can face it again

I can't stop now, I've traveled so far

To change this lonely life

I wanna know what love is

I want you to show me

I wanna feel what love is

I know you can show me

I wanna know what love is

I want you to show me

Love is On The Way

J.I. Packer: Agape is a Christian invention; a new word for a new thing; almost non-existent before the NT.

Love is Sent

The Father sent me...

“sending forth to serve God with God’s own authority to represent him”

To show the world what love is because God is love

The self-sacrificial seeking of another’s positive good at one’s own cost.

Jesus is the definition and the demonstration of it.

Jesus: Love Walks In

Culture of John’s audience: it was appropriate to love only those who were regarded as worthy of being loved.

Beauty and the Best: The wonder of the gospel is not the love of the beautiful, the worthy; it’s when Beauty kisses the Beast.

The Beast isn’t loved because he has changed; the Beast is changed when he is loved.

Love’s Purpose

Rescue and Give Life

When someone betrays you…anger, revenge, never again...

God loved those far from him (unworthy) and sent Jesus - the lamb of God - to rescue us because he is love (not because we are lovable).

God shows/sent love to give us life - to remove what has damaged our relationship with God (sin).

Tim Keller: In every other religion, the founder points to eternal life, but because Jesus is God come in the flesh, he is eternal life. To unite with him by faith, to know him in love, is to have this life. Period. Full stop.

To know what love is: It is one of the NT’s resounding paradoxes that it is God’s love that draws us toward him. Rather than being justified in anger and never again, in the self-sacrifice of Jesus - we see what real love is.

Life in Jesus

Pisteuo - to trust; obey; rely on. John: Trusting the love that God has for us rather than living in anxious care for ourselves.

Followers of Jesus are identified as followers of Jesus by our love for one another.

allelon (one another). Noun: foreigner; someone who doesn't speak the same language; someone of another race., enemies. Sacrificial. Mutually.

In the parable of the good Samaritan, “neighbor” is shown to mean anyone near enough to help, and love involves whatever service the neighbor’s situation demands.

Love for one’s neighbor is nowhere defined but everywhere illustrated.

Affection, friendship, loyalty, attachmentCommunion says, “I will walk with you.” Community says, “I will live with you.” You are a stranger but I want to be your neighbor.

The calling of God is to embrace the truth of God's promise and allow him to live in you and through you.

Let the love of Christ work through us and empower us to love like our Father.

Loving reveals God's love in us - that God sent Jesus to give life (we may live through him) and loved us first.

Our responsibility as ones loved by God (loved first) is to be the first to love - we owe it to one another. It is evidence that we are in relationship with God. It is our witness that:

-Jesus is the sent son of God (demonstration of God's reality)

To love God is to Be Sent to Love Others

Bob Goff: “Jesus talked to His friends a lot about how we should identify ourselves. He said it wouldn’t be what we said we believed or all the good we hoped to do someday. Nope, He said we would identify ourselves simply by how we loved people. It’s tempting to think there is more to it, but there’s not. Love isn’t something we fall into; love is some one we become.” 

Living in God and God in us: The loved have the responsibility to love in the same way - spirit empowered

To love is to show the world who God is, what he’s like, the nature of His Kingdom and that it is real and present socially and ethically.

It is a public statement that God sent Jesus to restore what was lost.

Henri Nouwen: In our world of loneliness and despair, there is an enormous need for men and women who know the heart of God, a heart that forgives, cares, reaches out and wants to heal [and sacrifices].

It is a heart that wants only to give love and receive love in response. It is a heart that suffers immensely because it sees the magnitude of human pain and the great resistance to trusting the heart of God who wants to offer hope.

In the Name of Jesus.

Are you a Christian? Ask my neighbor.