Encourage and Equip to Love

What?

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At our recent Congregational Meeting, we agreed on the following statement of mission:

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Being witnesses, ambassadors and friends of Jesus, as we go in and to the world, we encourage and equip others to love God, love one another, and love our neighbours, making disciples who make disciples.

Today we will conclude this sermon series explaining our Vision and Mission statements by considering together the final aspects we have not yet considered,

At Narellan CCC, we encourage and equip others to love God, love one another, and love our neighbours.

"I Know What Love Is”

In this aspect of our Mission statement, the term “Love” is obviously a key concept. But there is a lot of confusion around just what this term means.

A favourite movie of mine that makes this confusion clear is the 1994 drama Forrest Gump.

Forrest and Jenny pic

If you have seen the movie, you will know the main character, Forrest Gump, has a low IQ and a low emotional response. This does not prevent him from doing some remarkable things and being involved in some significant moments of modern history. However, his character is vanilla, he simply ‘goes with the flow’, neither acting nor reacting in the situations in which he finds himself.

Forrest’s love interest, Jenny, had a troubled childhood and grows into a troubled adult. She hitchhike’s through life, from one abusive relationship to another, comforting herself with substance abuse and dreams of a musical career.

When Jenny visits Forrest at his home in Greenbow, Alabama, to rest and recover, he proposes to her after a couple of days. She turns down his proposal because like just about everyone else, she thinks he’s stupid —although, as both Forrest and his mother point out, “stupid is as stupid does”, and Forrest does not do stupid things.

Despite the evidence to the contrary, Jenny believes Forrest does not know what it means to love another person. To which Forrest exclaims, “I may not be a smart man but I know what love is!”

Sadly, I believe both Forrest and Jenny are wrong, that neither of them know what love is.

Running away from her troubles, Jenny is merely chasing her dream, focussed completely on her own needs and cares. Even when Forrest offers her all of himself, she can only offer him her body.

It is only when she later recognises the pain she caused him, which resulted in him running back and forth across the continental US for three years, only then does she finally agree to marry him.

Forrest, for his part, makes no decisions in his life. He finds himself, time and again, in the right place and the right time, an unconscious participant in significant moments of American history during the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Yet for his apparent altruism, he never actually makes a decision for himself or for anyone else. He makes good on his promises to his friends, Bubba and Lt Dan, but these were more expectations forced on him than promises he made deliberately. He is able to sacrifice his time and resources to Jenny and his son, Forrest Jr, only because he never actually claims anything for himself. Forrest is the feather blown about by the wind.

For the feel-good movie that it is, Forrest Gump, really never answers the question, “What is love?” Sadly, whether in the form of movies, books or music, etc, Pop Culture merely exposes the confusion.

Every once in a while Pop Culture does get love right. See if you can guess from the theme song the name of one movie that hits love ‘spot on’…

Up theme song

Up – Carl & Ellie pic

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Why?

Notwithstanding the exception of the 2009 Pixar movie, Up, Pop Culture gets usually love wrong because it promotes Radical Expressive Individualism, a worldview where the individual is at the centre making up truth and reality based on the whims of his or her own feelings and wants.[See “The Anthropology of Expressive Individualism” by O. Carter Snead, Church Life Journal, 1-Dec-2020, https://bityl.co/78uw (accessed 2-Jun-2020).]

Our Elders and Ministry Team, our Ministry Intern and myself, are all consciously aiming to set an example of faith and life, ministry and mission for our church. Yet it is up to all of us to own the vision and mission, so that together we might show the world our family, friends and neighbours a better way to live, which is God’s way of love demonstrated perfectly in and won for us by Jesus the Christ.

Let us together learn how to follow his commands and follow his example.

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So What?

In this sermon series I have been explaining our new Vision and Mission statements, why we have them, what purpose they serve for us. They remind us of God’s eternal Purpose and where we fit in that purpose —in other words, our purpose is aligned with God’s Purpose otherwise we have no reason for being a community of faith.

Bringing this sermon series to a close, we learned last week the preeminence of making disciples who make disciples. This involves helping each other within our community and others beyond our community to acknowledge the authority of Jesus, to belong to a community of faith, and to obey everything Jesus commanded.

So what did Jesus command? In a word, he commanded his friends to love.

Two Sides to Love

As is quite evident in Pop Culture, whether in movies, books or music, the concept of Love is very confusing because much is encompassed by this simple and singular term.

At its most basic, love has two sides: it is both a feeling and a behaviour, an attitude and an action.

To feel love for someone else is to have positive regard for them, to think well of them, to consider their needs, to want the best for that person.

To behave lovingly toward someone begins with some degree of that feeling, but then actually acts on that feeling, to place someone else’s needs above your own. For example, to lift someone up involves kneeling yourself down.

Of course, it requires thought and will for one to move from feeling to action, and from action to feeling.

In both cases, love is necessarily directed toward another, whether on the feeling side or the behaviour side. If you want or need to feel good about yourself, do something nice for someone else!

I would even go so far as to say feeling love is insufficient, one must act lovingly as proof. The apostle James noted this distinction when he wrote,

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James 2:15–16 CSB

If a brother or sister is without clothes and lacks daily food and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, stay warm, and be well fed,” but you don’t give them what the body needs, what good is it?

The priority of love-as-action over love-as-feeling, I believe, is at the heart of Jesus’ commands.

The Commands to Love

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Luke 10:25–27 CSB

Then an expert in the law stood up to test him, saying, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” “What is written in the law?” he asked him. “How do you read it?” He answered, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,” and “your neighbor as yourself.”

For the friends of Jesus, the heart of obedience is found in these two principles: Love God and love your neighbour.

Love God

When we recognise God is our Creator and Jesus is our Lord, everything changes for us. We begin especially to realise this is a good thing, that our life is enhanced by this knowledge, and our attitude toward God, our affection, grows.

As a result, we begin to perform spiritual disciplines —prayer, Bible reading, confession, worship, etc— to strengthen our knowledge and build that relationship.

Love Your Neighbour

One important result of a growing awareness of and relationship with God is that we begin to see ourselves, our world and our neighbour with his eyes. We develop a compassion for our neighbour that compels us to act on behalf of the least, the lost and the lonely.

Love One Another

To love God and love our neighbour, in both feeling and action, are the greatest commandments. Yet Jesus introduced also a new commandment:

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John 13:34–35 CSB

“I give you a new command: Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you are also to love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

Of course, as our love for God and our neighbours grows, we will naturally gravitate toward those with a similar worldview and with similar values. We will gather with our brothers and sisters-in-faith and form communities, sharing resources and working together on mutually enhancing projects and in service to our neighbourhoods.

It is right this too is an important command, yet why is it a forgotten or even maligned command?

Because of negative experiences, some accuse Christians of being hypocrites. Some Christians then lose faith and claim they do not need the Church.

Yet Jesus argued it is our love for one another that is the proof of our discipleship to him. There are over 50 “one another” instructions in the New Testament, so it was clearly important to the early Church.

Our greatest witness is shown by how we love one another even when we don’t like each other, when our community falls on hard times and picks itself back up again. Those mistakes and lessons show the worth of community and the quality of our community. This will draw people to consider the claims of Christ and they will become disciples too.

We become disciples and friends of Jesus by allowing our thoughts to be transformed (Rom 12-1-2) and our feelings elevated (Ps 100), yet it is our actions and behaviours that count the most, for as the apostle Paul wrote,

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1 Corinthians 13:13 CSB

Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love—but the greatest of these is love.

Now What?

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If you agree with me, then you might then notice a contradiction, of sorts: If our love of God leads to a love for one another, which then leads to a love for our neighbour, why is there so little attention paid to the love of neighbour in the New Testament?

Look for it! It’s not there. The Gospels notwithstanding, there is very little to suggest the early Church cared much for their neighbours beyond evangelism. The vast majority of the writings of the NT are concerned with the communities of faith and their internal conduct.

It is a mystery.

The fact of the matter is the early Church did care for its members deeply, they shared their resources generously, and bore each others burdens gladly. Yet the secret of the early Church is this spirit and abundance truly overflowed.

It is a fact the early Church:

encouraged celibacy in singleness and faithfulness in marriage

opposed abortion

opposed infanticide, even to the point of rescuing exposed newborns

promoted the equality of women

elevated women to positions of leadership

promoted egalitarianism among its members

when plague struck a city, and the well-to-do evacuated, the Christians were encouraged to remain behind to care for the sick

Because of such values and actions, the early Church grew from 500 believers at Jesus’ ascension to an estimated 6,000,000 (a majority in the Roman Empire) within 300 years.[see Rodney Stark, “The Rise of Christianity” (HarperCollins, 1997).]

This situation so infuriated the pagan emperor Julian in 361 a.d., he wrote to his priests,

[I]t is disgraceful that, when no Jew ever has to beg, and the impious Galilaeans [Christians] support not only their own poor but ours as well, all men see that our people lack aid from us. Teach those of the Hellenic faith to contribute to public service of this sort, and the Hellenic villages to offer their first fruits to the gods; and accustom those who love the Hellenic religion to these good works by teaching them that this was our practice of old.

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As we own our Vision and Mission statements, and commit together to a better way of life together, our love for God, one another AND for our neighbours will be a vivid and practical demonstration of God’s way of love. And isn’t this world in sore need of love?

*If you have any questions about these reflections on our Vision Statement, or would like prayer for any concern or point of praise, then join with me and the Prayer Team to the right side of the platform after the service.