Who do you love
Who Do You Love?
-Intro/welcome
Mike shared passage last week: Luke 11:42- Woe to you Pharisees, because you give God a tenth of your mint, rue and all other kinds of garden herbs, but you neglect justice and the love of God. You should have practiced the latter without leaving the former undone
Kind of like someone who provides for family-food, shelter, clothing, money-but then comes hoe and beats them. Or maybe he just doesn’t come home much. He may be meeting their basic needs, but there is no love there. We all need love.
So I wanted to take a look at what the love of God is like. This is a key point that we always want to come back to at True North. We’ve all got our own ideas about what love is. What is should & shouldn't look like. At True North we firmly believe that if we are going to call ourselves followers of Christ we need to ask ourselves what God says. We all know that none of us is living up to God’s standards in every area of life, but at least we know what God wants and what we should be shooting for.
When I think of God’s love, the first thought that comes to mind is what Jesus had to say when asked what the most important commandment was. He summed up all of God’s commands for us in just two statements. Find this is Matthew 22:36-39
"Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus replied: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.”
He also further defined love in at another time after commanding His followers to love one another. In John 15:13 he said, No greater love has man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”
When I sat down earlier this week to being preparing for today, I was planning on encouraging us all to invest our lives in to other people. To be willing to lay down our own lives for one another… But when I began thinking and praying about that statement “Love your neighbor as yourself” something about it hit me that never really occurred to me before.
“Love your neighbor as yourself….love them the way you love yourself…” I began to wonder if we already are doing that. Maybe people already are concerned about their neighbors and want to love them and care for them. Maybe the issue we need to deal with…the reason we don’t see people caring for one another more…and the reason we as Christians-or followers of Jesus Christ-aren’t having more of an impact in the lives of the people around us…is more about how we love ourselves than about our desire to love others.
Think about that…how well do we really love ourselves? I mean really deep down. One of the things I love to do in life is just observe what’s going on around me and try to figure things out. If you’ve been here for a while, you’ve heard me say this before, but I was born a scientist. As a scientist I love to look closely at things, pull them apart and try to make sense of them. For me, the most fascinating thing to study is the human being. That’s why I ended up going to graduate school and getting a degree in human genetics. Whether I am looking at a person from the outside or under a microscope, I love to try to make send of things physically, emotionally spiritually. One of the things I’ve noticed in pretty much every person I’ve ever met is that we all have some things we don’t like about ourselves, and we tend to think that we don’t measure up to some standard that we are supposed to compare ourselves to. It shows up in different ways and at different levels with different people, but we’ve all got it. I’ve found this even in the most prideful of people I’ve ever know. Their pride is their way of dealing with their own feelings of inadequacy. It is much easier for us to believe we are failing at something than it is to accept a compliment and really feel good about ourselves. There is a difference between being humble and just getting down on ourselves.
What do you see when you look in the mirror and take a close look at yourself. What do you not want anyone else to find out about? What makes you go, “You really suck as a person sometimes.”
We’ve all got stuff like this…let’s admit it. One of the problems with all this is that we tend to think we’re the only one’s. Guess what…you’re not!
So before ever getting into loving your neighbor, I think we need to consider the ..as you love yourself part. This can take a while to figure out sometimes. I just turned 37 last year and it really wasn’t until I was about 31 that God really showed me some things that helped me deal with how I felt about myself. Before that I really had a pretty bad image of myself.
What up with this. Why do we have such bad images of ourselves? Where do these thoughts come from:
-First thing that comes to mind is our expectations of what our lives should be like.
-Look at lives of others. They seem to have a great life-should be like them
-Take in things we’ve been taught-parents, teachers, friends, bible!
-Realize not living up to those things.
-add in comments of others. Ever notices how east it is to believe the negative comments people make?
Which of these statements has a stronger impact on you:
You are an incredible person. I really admire you
Or…have you considered going on a diet?
You are a great dad!
Or…what were you thinking when you dressed those kids this morning?
See how much more those things affect us? Those comments will sometimes hit on things that we’ve already labeled as flaws in our lives. We say, “I know I’m a screw up in this. Now look…so-and-so just pointed it out. I AM a failure. I AM ugly. I AM a pain in the neck.
In fact, let’s see this in action right now. I’ve got a video clip from the movie “Chicken Little.” You know the story right? Chicken Little has messed up-he told the whole town the sky was falling..now he’s having trouble living it down. In this scene he’s with his dad talking about some ways he can make up for his mistake…take a look
(scene in car with dad-wants to go out for baseball, dad discgourages him…later dad wished wife was there-she’d know what to do. Little prays for just one chance to make up for mistake.)
See what was happening there?
-Little sees himself as failure…wants to make up for it. Dad doesn’t want son to get hurt again…discourages him. Dad himself feels like a failure…wishes wife was there to tell him what to do.
One thing we need to realize when people make comments that hurt us is that they themselves have self-images issues they are dealing with. Whether they make comments because they are lashing out at you or simply because they messed up (again!) when they said it…it’s a fact that hurting people hurt people-whether they mean to or not. And most people…at one time or another..depending on what’s happening in their lives at the time…are hurting people.
We’ve got to try not to let their comments affect us so much.
For some people I think this negative self-image is reinforced by the fact that they simply haven’t been shown much love. Some people grow up never hearing their parents tell them “I love you”. When you don’t ever hear that, it causes you to think you are the reason. You think you are unworthy of being loved.
It’s the same situation again…hurting people hurt people. The parents unable to express love because of their own stuff, end up unintentionally hurting their kids.
I also think that there is a spiritual side to all this. I think about this when I look at some of the ways my own kids have responded to situations in life even at a very young age.
-One son-probably 1-2 years old, when upset and about to cry would grab his lips to try to force them not to frown. Thought there was something wrong with getting upset and didn’t want to cry just because he thought it was wrong.
-I really believe that Satan takes every opportunity he can to tell us that we are not living up to those expectations we have for ourselves.
So now the question us how to deal with all this.
-First need to deal with our expectations. Some of those things may be unreasonable…some of them-like the biblical standards-are good for us and we should pursue them, but we need to accept the reality that noone is able to live up to those expectations. We should not spend our lives focused on the ways we have failed to live up to them. You are human! God knows we mess up-that’s why He sent Jesus in the first place. He knows we can’t earn our way to Him, so he provided a way through Jesus.
-We are also not meant to be like everyone else. God made you the way you are for a reason. He loves you just the way you are. God made us all to have different strengths and weaknesses so that we would all work together to help one another.
-1 Cor. 12:14-18: Now the body is not made up of one part but of many. If the foot should say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be.
Focus on your strengths, accept your weaknesses. Maybe God wants someone else to support you in that area. This is the reason we have team leadership here and why we want everyone who is part of True North to be part of a small group outside of Sunday morning. That is where you get to know other people who can help support your strengths and fill in your weak areas. Or look at it another way…the people in that group are probably weak in an area you are strong in –they need you!
Also consider this verse:1 Cor. 1:27: God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.
God’s strength is all the more visible when He works through our weaknesses. He made us to have weaknesses so that He can be glorified all the more!
So put aside your expectations. God made you the way you are for a reason. Be happy with the unique design and plan he gave you.
God loves you the way you are-mistakes and all.
-Romans 5:8- “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
We’ve got to learn to let God’s image of us be more important that the image others might have of us. When someone else puts us down, or reminds us of an area we are not living up to, we’ve got to remember that God loves us anyway and not let other people determine our self-image. Other people may even be right about something we’ve messed up on-and maybe we do need to make a change in our behavior, but that doesn’t have anything to do with who we are or our worthiness to be loved by God and others.
If you can accept what Jesus did and let God’s Spirit work in you to correct your false seld impressions, you will discover a new love for yourself. Once you do that, you will begin to see others from God’s perspective and will want to contin ue loving them as you love yourself. Only this time, you have a much greater love for yourself.
Accept this truth. God loves you…He loves you just the way you are. He loves you even if you’ve messed up. He loves you even if you think you’re ugly. Loves you even if you think you’re a failure…….And because I now God loves me….I am able to tell you today…I love you. There are a bunch of us around here…the whole reason we started this thing and continue to work at this every day is because we love you and want you to see what God thinks of you and equip you to love yourself more…and in turn love others more and help them to discover God’s love, too! When that happens, lives will be changed and God’s love and blessings will be poured out all over this place!