The Measure Is Love

Prayer

Love is the Measure

If you conducted a survey asking people what’s the most important thing in life, the greatest thing in life, what do you think they would say? What would you say?

I think most people would say that it’s love. To love and be loved. All you need is...love. Think about that, is there anything else we would say that for - all you need is...

In our culture we couldn’t imagine taking part in an arranged marriage - because we view the love aspect as so vital. You marry someone you love. And commit to love and honor that person until death do you part.

We recognize how vital love is for children, for anyone, really - no greater tragedy for a child to be unloved, unwanted.

This is exactly correct - it reflects God’s great truth, that the most important thing that we should be doing in life is to love. Someone once came up to Jesus and asked him this very question -listen to the interaction, Mark 12:28-31...

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”

Of all the things we should be doing in life, what’s the most important, what should absolutely be doing? According to Jesus, it’s love. These two are the greatest. There is nothing else more important. Every other commandment God gives us is simply a reflection of these two, a way for us to put love into practice.

Looking at the 10 commandments, the first is: You shall have no other gods before me. We love God by placing him first: We love God by how we speak about him, honor we give him, his name: You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God. The command to keep the Sabbath - is not just a command for our own good, we need rest, it’s a command to direct our attention to God: Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. The seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. We stop, we rest, we slow down in order to be with God.

The rest of the commandments teach us what it looks like to love our neighbors as ourselves. Honor your father and mother...Do not kill…Do not commit adultery…love your spouse by being faithful to them.

Which is why one of the fundamental aspects of moving toward deeper discipleship is to make love the true measure of our spiritual maturity. This is our main point this morning.

Participating in worship every Sunday, reading your Bible daily, praying to God regularly, serving those in need - these are all wonderful practices (and I highly recommend them) but they are not the marker of spiritual maturity. It is how well you love God and how well you love others.

We cannot be an emotional healthy disciple - we cannot be like Jesus - if we do not love well. If we do not live out the very thing that he plainly said is the greatest, most important - to love God with all our hearts and with all our souls and with all our minds and with all our strength and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

So...why are we so bad at it? Seriously, we’re bad at it. If we know love is the greatest thing, why do we not make it the highest priority of our lives?

We talked a moment ago about the fact that we emphasize love as the motivating factor for getting married. And yet, even as Christians, our success rate at marriage is no better than the culture at large. Which is to say, not very good. Which means we have not kept our vow to love and cherish one another in our marriage relationships.

It’s tragic that the political divisions that are ripe throughout our country exist in the church as well. It’s cost friendships, people have left churches as a result - or we learn to avoid the subject because we don’t know how to love each in the midst of strong disagreement.

I was watching a webinar about a nationwide campaign about Jesus that’s coming out (He Gets Us…maybe you’ve seen some of the ads), and they did a lot of research for this campaign. Two of things that came out of their polling of skeptics - many of them have had negative experiences with Christians or churches, and we’re often seen as hypocritical or judgmental.

Why is loving not the first thing that comes to mind when people think of followers of Jesus? When people think of you and I, would that be one of the first things that came to mind if they tried to describe us?

Framework of Love

This morning as we consider what it means to make love the true measure of spiritual mature, I want to offer a framework that I think really helps lay out what it looks like to love well.

I hope you really hear this this morning - this is so essential, if we really want to be like Jesus, to be his disciples, to take seriously how we love - this is it, this is the measure.

And I say this as a reminder of what I shared at the beginning of this series, this is hard. It’s painful. It’s going to take time, hard work, intention. It’s going to take willingness to make the time to slow down to be with Jesus, and to go beneath the surface of our lives in order to be deeply transformed by Jesus. So we can offer our lives a gift - gift of being people who love well - to the world.. To this community.

Framework comes courtesy of a Jewish theologian by the name of Martin Buber, who wrote a book in 1923 called “I and Thou” that spoke of the difference of how we relate to people, what genuine love looks like.

In 1914 Buber was a well known theologian and writer. But his primary concern at that time was religious experience, the ecstasy of being with God.

One morning he’d had a particularly profound experience, and later that day, a young man to visit him - he had some questions to ask Buber, and as far as Buber was concerned they had a friendly conversation.

Buber was mortified to find out later that the young man committed suicide. That event cause Buber to take a serious re-examination of his life, he felt as if this encounter was strong judgment on the way he was living - because he realized that he had not truly loved that young man. He had not been genuinely present to him. It had been more of a courteous but partial engagement.

Buber realized that a faith that only concerns love for God is a faith worth nothing - which is exactly what Paul writes about in 1 Corinthians 13. And the apostle John writes about in 1 John 4:7-8...

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.

Which is exactly what Jesus was teaching in Mark 12. Bible lays out a clear and direct link between our love for God and our love for others. Loving God necessarily involved loving others. You either love both or neither.

With this realization, Buber laid out this framework, describing relationships in category of I-it or I-Thou (or, I-You).

Amazingly simple but incredibly profound - the whole premise of Buber’s framework has to do with how seriously we take the otherness of people around us. What does that mean, otherness of others?

Based on primary biblical principle that every single person has been uniquely and wonderfully created by God in his image.

Each one of us has been gifted with individual sovereignty. Sovereignty means to rule, to reign. We all have our individual reign, our own self will, freedom to choose.

I-It versus I-You dynamic invites us to examine whether or not we are taking that seriously, loving others as they are, not as we want them to be or think they should be.

Which is exactly the way that God loves us. God never compels or manipulates how we think, choices we make. He honors our individual sovereignty (which really is incredibly, if you think about it).

It’s helpful to consider what “love” in an I-It relationship looks like

As it implies, it mean that we treat people more like an object or as a means to an end rather than as person gifted with individual sovereignty, an other.

Extreme of this would be slavery. The chattel slavery practiced here in the United States was a complete rejection of the otherness of others. Slaves were considered property, owned - everything in their life dictated by their owners.

But the way it plays out in our lives is far more subtle than that, but still very much in vein of treated others more like objects.

If I, as pastor, am more concerned with the tasks that have to get done around church - which may be necessary and even good things - but if I value you based on whether you’re willing to help get those tasks done, I’m not loving you, I’m treating you more as an It.

If I want you here in worship because a fuller sanctuary reflects better on me, my leadership, I’m not loving you as a full other, a You made in image of God, but as an object that serves my purposes.

I struggle with this in regards to working with high school guys, I’m afraid I’ve been chiding them too much to do things that I know would be helpful for them in long run - rather than loving them freely, no matter what choices they make.

We do this stuff all time - enter into relationship because it alleviates my loneliness, or reflects well on my social status. Or vice versa, we avoid others because of that. Or because they make us feel uncomfortable.

That’s why Paul, in a section about loving one another in his letter to the Romans, writes, “Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position.” James, in his letter, warns against showing favoritism to the rich.

Or I engage with others because they think the way I do, right views or beliefs, they’re good people, according to my standards of acceptability.

Scazzero offers a list of some of the ways we judge others rather than loving them: We judge our spouses for not doing life our way. We judge our close friends when their politics differ from our own. We judge our coworkers for not doing their jobs as well as we’d like. We judge younger or older generations for making choices of which we don’t approve. We judge people for dressing up or dressing down, for the movies they watch, the cars they buy or the music they listen to.

An I-You dynamic looks very different. Love our neighbors as ourselves. We take their “otherness” seriously.

Scazzero: We recognize each person as unrepeatable, an inestimable treasure, an image-bearer of the living God. We treat each individual as sacred, as one created from the very breath of God. Most importantly, we welcome their otherness, acknowledging how different they are from us.

When we recognize others in this way, it changes how we engage them. We can be together with them, while letting them be other, different from us.

See them as God does, loving them for the treasures they truly are - and therefore, worthy of our time and attention and care.

And at the same time, allow them to hope, think, believe, feel other than we do.

Move into another’s world, to be present to them, unrushed, undistracted. We give them our full and undivided attention, letting go of our agenda, our need to be right, our self-importance.

I hope you’re beginning to see why we don’t do this well, tall order to genuinely love others.

Remember command is to love our neighbors as ourselves, which means we don’t lose ourselves in this. We recognize and honor the otherness of others, but our individual sovereignty as well. Otherwise, we simply become chameleons (changing colors), agree to be agreeable.

This mean, however, a willingness to disappoint others - which, if you tend towards being a people pleaser (like me), is a challenge.

Scazzero shares some wisdom here that was passed on to him: The degree to which you love and value yourself is the degree to which you will be able to love and value others. Love your neighbor as yourself. More you live in and receive the fullness of God’s love, more you are able to fully love others - for who they are.

Here is where tension lies, real difficulty, challenge - because loving people who agree with you, share values, believe same, act in ways you think they should, that’s easy. It’s where there’s conflict, significant difference - this is where it’s really challenging.

Notice what Jesus teaches in Matthew 5:43-48...

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

Do you see what Jesus is teaching here about loving others? Virtually everybody loves those who love them. Are good to “their people”. That’s no big deal. But if you want to love like the Father loves, you must be willing to love your enemy.

You must be willing to grow in love whose “otherness” is really other. Who believe differently, who never holds the “right” political opinion. Whose work habits you can’t stand.

This is where true measure of spiritual maturity comes out, learning how to love others well, especially when under stress or in the midst of conflict. When you’re in conflict, isn’t that when we’re most tempted to treat that other person as object - wound them, making that cutting comment, judge them - or just avoid them altogether - forget them!

Have you ever heard of the story of Daryl Davis. Davis attends Ku Klux Klan rallies and neo-Nazi gathering - has been, for over 30 years. Here’s thing, Davis is black. He goes to those gatherings for one reason, to engage those men. What started as a quest to simply understand why someone could hate someone else without ever even knowing them has led to a mission. A mission to befriend. He listens to their stories, and he shares his. He visits them at their homes, and eventually they’ll come to his. They share meals together, talking. Over those 30 years, 200 of those men have given up their Klan robes.

All because Davis engaged them as an I to a You, rather than an I to an It.

This is the love God is calling us to, when he calls us to love our neighbors as ourselves. And it is the true measure of spiritual maturity.

Spiritual Disciplines - Jesus gives us these as commandments (greatest commandments, the most important). One of our core convictions as a church is Lived Obedience to God. Make the commitment to put this into practice.

Peter Scazzero, three questions when engaging with others

Am I fully present or distracted?

Am I loving or judging?

Am I open or closed to being changed?

Jesus as our model, who showed us best what it looks like to love others, to love our enemies.

As you engage Scriptures, do so with this question in mind: How do I see Jesus loving others?

Rich young ruler - he looked at him and loved him

Blind Bartimaeus - bring him over to me. What do you want me to do for you?

Cross! Season of Lent

Let Jesus be the one who teaches you how to love others. Let his love fill your heart, giving you capacity to love others.

Inspiration - Danielle Strickland, ECO National Gathering

Danielle spoke on Acts 27 and 28, what struck me was how authentically amazed she was about God, way God acted. She delighted in who God was and how he acts in our lives.

Link between loving God and others, it became evident that was true for Danielle, that she has learned to love the other

Story of the wedding in the alleyway, man in dumpster, invited to the wedding reception - The Kingdom is real, and you’re invited!

Going into brothels to show love to those women

OK, so maybe that’s way beyond what you can even imagine doing right now. But can we start here, with one another? With your family members? Guy living next door? Co-worker?

Best lovers on the face of the earth.