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Love
Love
I figured today would be a good day to talk about Love.
There are 4 descriptions of love in the bible
Eros- Sexual romantic love-Between husband and wife
Philo- Friendship type of love
Storge- Love of sweaters or favorite food
Agape- Divine love Characterized by sacrifice in the pursuit of another person’s good.
“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.
Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.
At first look God is boiling down love to obedience, but as you dissect what God is saying you begin to realize it’s more than just obedience, but rather sacrificial obedience. Meaning love requires something of us.
If we obey God because it is convenient than do we love God? Admittingly some commands are just easy to follow. Not to murder. Although you probably had thoughts the act of not taking someone’s life is relatively easy. It doesn’t require much restraint because to the average person killing would take more from them than not killing.
Not murdering our spouse is usually easy. Agape love-usually defined as God’s love is a pure sacrificial love. We see this love in people. For example when someone jumps in front of a bullet to save someone. When someone takes a severe deficit so that another person may advance.
For example. Christ’s love for us. He died for our sins. It was a sacrifice that only he could make and it had to be made willingly. He couldn’t have been dragged away against his flesh because love isn’t forced.
In order to best show this lets take a look at
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant
or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
This is probably the most known bible verse when someone is talking about Love. In fact I have heard people who don’t believe in God describe love by using this verse, but what does this verse mean?
Most English scholars if reading these verses through our own language would put these words into the Adjective category.
Go back to school—English was my worst language admittingly, but an adjective describes something.
In this case patient and kind would both describe love, but it isn’t a description. In Greek however this isn’t the case.
Im not going through a Greek lesson because it’s time consuming and honestly boring. But in Greek these words aren’t adjectives, but rather Verbs.
Verbs describe an action. If the Action you desire is love then the action would be patience. It isn’t describing it’s a call to action. When it comes to loving God or loving someone these aren’t qualities one should show-These are Characteristics one should Hav
The difference is a show is to put one mask a characteristic cannot be seperated from you.
Married couples: Your spouse shouldn’t have these on occasion. Rather this should be a regular display where they may occasionally mess up.
Single people: If you’re looking for a partner. The old saying watch how a person treats their mother/father and it’ll be how they treat you is very true. In rare cases this isn’t true, but in most cases this is the truth. If they developed habits of love than it isn’t just going to show while they are dating you, but it’ll be present in how they treat everyone around them. If they are rude to the waiter, if they are rude to those in authority, if they are mean to those who they are in charge of chances are the love you are looking for is not in them currently. It doesn’t mean they can’t change, but it isn’t in them currently.
Another theme worth pointing out:
Love rejoices with truth
How does one rejoice with truth?
The greek word for truth is defined as:
conformity to reality
Love doesn’t enjoy pretense. It doesn’t ask you to hide who you are so that they feel better about themselves.
Love doesn’t say you cannot be sad, but rather draws your true identity out of you. A few weeks ago we discussed identity and what that means to find our identity in God. Relationships and Friendships shouldn’t cause you to hide yourself, but rather to embrace who you are and encourage and foster who God wants you to become.
Rejoicing in truth is to not just allow someone to be sad when sad, but rather embrace their sadness with them.
For example. If my wife’s mother dies it isn’t love to ask her to hide her grieve because it kills my joy. But rather to sit with her in her sadness to protect her from interference while she is on the road to healing. It encourages her to heal but doesn’t force the process.
I was in a discussion the other day with someone and we discussing the need to guess how people are feeling. That people try to cover their true feelings. And I told her how there was a person in my life whom I greatly appreciated. When you ask them how they are they don’t tell you everything is fine then bite your head off later. This person tells you when they are cranky, sad, happy, angry.
I greatly appriciate this response because then I know how to appropriately relate to that person. We don’t condemn them for feeling how they feel, but respect their truth and act appropriately.
This is a major issue in today’s world. People are always putting on faces and then when you don’t act according to their feelings you aren’t loving them appropriately. They feel it you feel it and typically it makes matters worse.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
No this one is often the call of abusers because it’s taken out of context.
Bearing all things doesn’t mean you have to stay in an abusive relationship-Whether verbal, physical, psychological, or spiritual abuse you have the right to distance yourself from the abuser. I first want to make that abundantly clear.
In the Greek language all has two meanings: 1. All with distinction and all without exception.
When Jesus forgives all sins when we repent that is without exception. Even the most foulest of sins God will forgive if the person comes with a repentant heart.
This all is with distinction. There are ways in the language to tell the difference. Again we aren’t going to explore that this morning because it comes down to parsing the word.
We are to bear all things the Word of God says we can bear; we believe all things the Word instructs us to believe; we hope for all things that are not presently available but will be available in the future according to God’s Word; we endure all things that the Word says we are to endure.
Each one of these is limited to the confines of God’s word.
Bear- comes from the Greek word Stego meaning to cover like a roof- in other words to protect. Love provides shelter and protection. it’s like that photo that shows a Father and their child where the child is safe, but the fathers back is full of knives.
My call is to protect those whom I love from those who seek to do them harm. This includes protecting them from improper movies, media, beliefs, and people who seek to harm.
Believe: This doesn’t mean we are gullible. Nessi still isn’t real. It means we believe what the word of God says about a person not what our five sense says about them.
Hope: Elpizo -means to expect something. We hope and encourage that the ones we love will develop as the plan of God develops in their lives.
Endures-suffer misfortune- My wife had to endure my immaturity to wait for me to grow. It sometimes it bearing a little discomfort for the benefit of the person we love.
