Love Is... Where We Place It

Then we discussed that God’s love is real and the worlds love is cheap. When we are struggling with being able to accept the real love of God because we are comparing we need to

Reflect, Reject and Rely

We need to reflect on what it is that is causing me to think about God in an unhealthy light, Reject that un-truth and rely on the truth that is in scripture.

Intro into this evening

Last night we talked about the love that we receive, and tonight we are going to be talking about the love that we give, and what it is that we give our love too.

Love Is… Where we place it.

The thing that you need to understand is that the love that you have in your heart, in your center of being, the you that you give, is special and exclusive. That’s why it hurts when you give love and you don’t get anything back. That’s why cheating is such a big deal, that’s why its so destructive when the people that are supposed to love you, hurt you.

Love is a currency. You have a limited amount, and it’s more valuable than anything on this earth. So the question we want to interact with this evening is: Are you giving your love to things that matter? Or are you giving your love to worthless or destructive things. Lets get into God’s word this evening!

I want to start with:

1 John 2:16–17 ESV

For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

Let’s Pray:

So, to our question: What are you placing Love in?

If we remember last night, the book of 1 John is a letter to the churches of Asia Minor and the purpose of this letter is to encourage, direct and admonish, or call out sin. So if we read this text in that context we can understand that John is trying to help these people understand the same thing we are speaking about tonight. In the beginning of this verse, John starts out with just “the world”. Now you may be thinking here “does that mean I am not allowed to love this water bottle? Well no - John is talking about the

0iothe morally evil system that is opposed to all that God is

Osborne, G., Philip W. Comfort. (2007). Cornerstone biblical commentary, Vol 13: John and 1, 2, and 3 John (p. 341). Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers.

Then John hones in and gives us 3 examples of things in this world that we, as humans are prone to giving our love to. The theologian C.H. Dodd called them “the essential marks of the pagen way of life”

#1 The Desires of the Flesh

to say “the desires of the flesh” sounds super churchy doesn’t it? But what it is talking about isn’t churchy at all. It’s talking specifically about the “craving of physical pleasure” or in other words “lust”

We are going to be real in here for about 5 minutes.

Lust is something that I think if we we were honest we’ve all experienced at one point in time. It’s something that some of us in this room are likely dealing with now. I’m about to read you some stats that I hope you will be able to take away so that you understand that this struggle is normal, it’s not okay, but it’s normal and nothing to hide because of shame. Sin is like mold, it likes darkness to grow. Let’s just get some of this funk in the light of the word of God to kill it.

90% of Boys and 60% of Girls have been exposed to explicit material online before 18.

20% of 16-year-olds and 30% of 17-year-olds have received an inappropriate text

These stats were from 2015, when only 33% of highschool students had a smart phone. Now 83% of you have a smartphone so those stats are likely much higher.

I think it’s safe to say that lust is something we have all interacted with. Lust is a destroyer and it’s one of the things that we sadly give our love too.

Giving our love to lust looks like - Watching stuff online, doing everything you can to be with a person you desire in an unhealthy and ungodly way. Watching movies and listening to music that fuel that part of our mind. Dwelling on things that you have seen. When we give our love, we devote our time and the “desires of the flesh” are not anything we should devote anything too.

These desires are normal, but built for our husband or wife when we are married. Song of Solomon says “do not awaken love before it’s time” If you’re not married, it’s not time. Not just Guys, Girls too!

#2 Desires of the Eyes

John moves onto something else we’ve all probably experienced. Jealousy.

When I was a student, I had just moved back to America from Australia. When we moved back into the country, the plan was for us to only be in the states for a few months. We thought we were going back, so when it came time for us to go to the mall to get mobile phones, we didn’t want to get anything expensive, because back in 08, each country had a specific tech to make the phones work so our American cell phones wouldn't work in Aus. So I had my short shorts, my aussie haircut and a butthisphone.

I remember going to school and people pulling out the freaking coolest phones ever and me having like a Nokia 225. Which isn’t cool.

See you guys think that you have it great because of iPhones and a lot of cool stuff comes from Samung, but you don’t even know. We had so many cool phones when I was in highschool. We had sliders, we had keyboards, we had a phone that was afull screen touch screen, but the screen would click to make it feel like it was buttons. We had flippy outty stuff. It was nuts. AT&T, Verizon stores used to be huge because there were literally 35-40 options.

I was constantly jealous because my phone was THE WORST and my friends had some cool stuff.

Have you ever experienced Jealousy?

It’s just as damaging to friendships, and your thought life. It can consume you and your thoughts. It’s really hard to do what God is calling you to do if you’re giving all your time to thinking about what you want, why you want it and how you can get it. Jealousy has gripped me many times. Is it a car, a girlfriend, a boyfriend, a phone, a school, a lifestyle, a house, a fill in the blank. Is there something that you are devoting your love to that isn’t God? Let’s get that out into the light!

#3 Pride of Life

I used to think that I was literally the coolest person in the whole world. I grew up in another country, I played unique sports, I was good at computers, I was the first person I knew that owned an iPad - will cellular because I wasn’t a pleb. But really if you ever wanted to know how cool I was all you had to do was ask me. It was a mess.

My acting like this didn’t allow me to be truely honest with anyone because I didn’t want them to see the real me. I wanted them to see the perfect me that I brought to school, or to work. I didn’t want anyone to know that I was a mess inside and i just wanted someone to love me for me, but how could they, they never saw the real me.

Are you full of pride? Are you a show off? When you get a new phone, or the new Apple Watch do you make it a point to show it off? When you got your first car after getting your licence did you make sure that EVERYONE KNEW IT?

This devotion gets you no where except loneliness, frustration and broke.

These three are the three main issues that our world deals with, certainly the ones that John saw the church dealing with all those years ago, that’s why we wrote about them.

John goes on then to say that to love these things is to love the world and all the things in it and the world is going to parish anyway so you’re loving something that’s worthless.

Your love is priceless and not something that you can get back, do not devote it to something worthless. so it’s easy then to ask the question - if I shouldn’t love worthless things, what should I love?

John says

but whoever does the will of God abides forever

Okay cool - What is the will of God?

That’s a big question, but for our purposes this evening,

1 John 3:23 CSB

Now this is his command: that we believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another as he commanded us.

Believe in Jesus

The Bible says to accept Jesus as your saviour all you have to do is Believe in your heart and confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and you’ve done it, you’ve accepted Christ as Saviour and You’re a christian. God does not perish, God isn’t going to be destroyed, God is eternal, giving God your love is a great investment, it has good returns! God changes you and makes you better, he protects, provides gives purpose!

Love One Another

The love we are talking about here isn’t romantic love. It’s sacrificial, difficult love that was modeled by Jesus. I want to preface this, we won’t always get it right, but we are asked to give it our best effort.

How did Jesus love?

He Sacrificed

Jesus was in heaven, he came to earth!

He Served

He Died

We are called to do all these things. Its going to be hard, and expensive and confusing and it’s going to cause a lot of personal hurt, but it’s just what we’ve been called to do.

Our love is a currency. We have a choice where to spend it.

Either with Lust, Stuff and pride - or Jesus and his people. One will die, one is going to be around for eternity. Both are going to require hard work, with one first, the reward is now. Pleasure now, stuff now, glory now or Jesus now, Reward and Glory in Heaven.

This seems easy on paper but will be a daily battle! SO

How do we know if we are doing what we should, how do we know that we are giving our love to the right things? The bible says

“let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth”

Then it goes on to our scripture for the day:

1 John 3:19–21 CSB

This is how we will know that we belong to the truth and will reassure our hearts before him whenever our hearts condemn us; for God is greater than our hearts, and he knows all things. Dear friends, if our hearts don’t condemn us, we have confidence before God

By heart here he isn’t saying “thing that I love” he is using the root greek word for “center of being” or “internal monologue” or “feeling” so in other words.

When I condemn myself because I think that I may not be a christian because I am giving my love to stuff and I am not sure, but I am trying but I don’t know - Scripture says - God is greater that your heart and he knows who you are! You are his CHILD. You know in your mind that you are loving God and his people sacrificially with a servants heart in deed, because you remember all the times you did that. Because you know with your head, you can quiet your heart!

So as we close this evening my question is this - What are you giving your love too? The world that will perish and bring our hearts to ruin? Or God, the creator of everything that will take your investment of love, protect it, cherish it and build up your life?