Epiphany 4 - God Works with Us - The Shape of Our Work

1 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. 4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

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The Shape of Our Work is Love

From our beginning to our end, we are shaped by love. God creates us out of love and as we grow, the love that fills our lives changes our shape. How we receive and share that love determines who we are at our end.

Even in our world filled with many different opinions about what and how to live a good life, it is hard to find someone who will argue against love as a guiding factor. The world has not always promoted love as a prime value, and there are still places today that do not. The Roman Empire valued honor, duty, and profit. Other cultures have valued creativity and industry. Many have valued physical strength, military might, and competition.

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Any one of these values could be our primary guide in life, but after introducing spiritual gifts and the roles of the church in which we use those gifts, Paul tells us that there is one value that reigns over them all: Love. The shape of all our work together is love.

Without Love

All those gifts and abilities we have are misguided and misused when not shaped by love.

There are over 170,000 words in use in the English language and we choose how we put them together every time we speak. Our actions form another layer above those words that either support or contradict those words so that the writer of Proverbs 27:4 tells us that:

"A loud and cheerful greeting early in the morning will be taken as a curse!"

Then all those words and actions are measured over time. They become a relationship, an investment in people. There are millions of options of how those investments can go, how we can build those relationships. Without love, we may have a good idea but get the wrong time, place, or way of sharing it.

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Some of you have children that took music lessons. You remember the hours they spent practicing their violin, clarinet, piano, or trombone at home, and, out of love you encouraged it. There were days when the dog was howling in response to the attempts at making beautiful music. Even with years of practice though, a clanging gong is not beautiful music at bedtime. My brother took up bagpipes briefly in college and I think Paul could have used that as an example as well. Bagpipes can sound beautiful in a parade or out on a hillside, but they do not work everywhere all the time. Nothing does, and without love, we miss the mark every time. None of the other values will help us live a life worthy of God.

What is Love?

As I mentioned earlier, most people today would say that they are motivated by love, both in word and in action. However, you and I know that we do not always succeed in that endeavor. For many of us the problem is not choosing love, it is defining it. Unlike the language of the New Testament, which has at least three different words for love, we have one, and it can mean a lot of different things. So, when the Bible uses the word love, what does it mean?

You may know this one... Love is patient. Love is kind. But it is much more than words, more than even these words from Paul. The love that Paul tells us to embody in all we do is the kind of love that comes from God and that we see modeled in Jesus. We see it in the way Jesus speaks and acts. We see it in the way Jesus invested His very life in people around Him. We experience it in the way Jesus has loved us.

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As Christians, as followers of Jesus, we define love by Who Jesus is and everything He does. When we think of our definition of love we think of Jesus.

"Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." - 1 Corinthians 13:4-7

Re-Shaped by Love

And then we remember the call that Jesus has on our lives.

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.- John 13:34

"If anyone would come after me, let him deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” - Matthew 16:24

We are lumps of clay in our master's hands, shaped by His love and showing that love to one another. We bear each other's burdens as the crosses that Jesus calls us to bear. Are you allowing God to shape you with His love?

As we allow God to shape us - (our words, our actions, and our relationships with others) - by His love, we take on God's shape together. We form the Body of Christ together. We show the world the image of God.

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That is the vision of who we are as a Church. That is what it means to be NUMC. The Body of Christ, showing the Image of God to Nicholasville, to Kentucky, and to the ends of the earth. That is what it looks like when we are the people God called us to be: the people that are the love of God, alive and pouring ourselves out for each other and beyond. It is both a tall order and the fulfillment of what Christ calls us to be together, overwhelmingly simple: We share the love God gives us with each other.

We will spend the rest of the year discovering ways to live that out. Today I want to challenge you all to start with prayer.

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Prayer

Prayer is not the culmination of our work together, but it is one of the first steps we take in responding to God's love and sharing it with God and each other. For some of you, it was your first intentional step into a relationship with God. For many of you, praying together redefined what you considered church family to mean. Prayer is one form of relationship investment, and if we are a people who truly care about prayer we will pray with each other.

There is a time for prayer closets and praying in secret. There is also a time of praying in the living room. Jesus taught that prayer is both to be humble, but also to be shared with others, because praying with others is a way that we serve in the shape of God's love. Today, we are going to close in prayer together, praying the prayer that Jesus taught us, but I challenge you this week to pray with someone: in person, on the phone, through a letter or email... whatever way the Love of God leads you.

And now, let us join together as God's people and pray the prayer Jesus taught us:

Close with Lord's Prayer

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