I got to tell you, we had a great time. Holly’s dad put together for Holly’s sister and her husband and their son and us to all meet them to go to a Royals game. And it was so cool seeing Salve hit a home run, seeing the team come together in that fifth inning where they scored six runs, and seeing no reliever give up any runs.
It was amazing. And it was a great night, and we were having so much fun. But in the middle of the game, I got to tell you, my phone started blowing up with notifications from a men’s group I’m in with Dr. Hawk’s son, Dr. Hawk, leading it, the young Dr. Hawk, Chadwick.
And they started talking about the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. Did anybody see that? And these pictures that were coming out of what happened on Twitter of twisting the Last Supper with every modern sexual perversion we have, including a child up there, for the Olympics. Thank you, France.
It was like, you know, we’re having so much fun, and then this is all coming in. And to see that, it’s just like, it is, now I’m just fending. It’s tough being a parent these days.
How do you even sit down and watch the Olympics and not be on edge with what’s going on in the world? And how they take love, which is such a beautiful gift from God, and transpose it into something it was never meant to be, into something that is horrific. To see all these things that are called love today is unbelievable. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re going to have to Google it.
Because I wasn’t going to show a slide of what they did during the Olympics. It was ironic timing, because we are working through this whole summer in this series on, we are the body of Christ. Who’s the body of Christ? Oh, yeah.
OK, we’re done. We’re good here. You guys know, we are the body of Christ.
Every one of us is a part of the body. We talked about gifts. We’ve talked about our contributions, as in we have those gifts, but we use those gifts for building up the body, for strengthening one another, for helping one another out, for lifting one another up, for the kingdom of God here on Earth.
And we’ve talked about the importance of not thinking someone with some gift is more important than someone else with another gift, that we all have gifts. And without one part and one person, the body is incomplete, like walking around without something on our bodies that’s, you know, you lose your big toe. You have to relearn how to walk completely.
Last week, we started talking in 1 Corinthians 13 about love, that Paul was saying, all these gifts are great, but without love, we are nothing. So today is simply called, what is love? If you watch the news, if you follow social media, if you watch movies, you might not get a biblical idea of love. Can anybody back me up on that? It’s tough, but it’s not, this is not the place where followers of Jesus Christ say, hey, I’m just back, I’m out, you know, I’m gonna separate myself from the world, and I am not going to deal with this because it’s just too hard.
This is where we dive in and we say, this is how we show that we are love, that love is behind everything, that we love people, even when we disagree with them, even when some things make us sick to our stomach, we are here to love and we love them to Jesus, instead of just trying to criticize and put down and hurt and shame and destroy, we love them to Jesus. We stand as you are able, our scripture today is just a few verses, 1 Corinthians 13, four through seven, but there’s a lot about it in here, what is love, what is not love? Love is patient and kind. Let’s do something different today, let’s read this together because I think this is just so huge.
I love doing 1 Corinthians 13 in weddings because it is so powerful for two people who are gonna share life together to do, to share, to hear these words in their wedding and build off of these, but Paul wrote these for the church. It is the core of who we are, if we are the body of Christ, to know what love is. Let’s read this together.
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. The word of God, inspired by God, for the people of God, thanks be to God, amen. You may be seated.
What is love? Paul gives very clear what love is, what love is not. When he works through this, he gives this great insight to knowing more and understanding more about agape. Now, agape is the Greek word, and I bet a lot of you know that they have words for love in Greek, like agape, eros, philio.
Philio is brotherly love. Eros is the romantic kind of love. And agape is the sacrificial love or unconditional love that is used mostly in the New Testament because that’s the kind of love that God pours into us, that we are to be as the body of Christ, that the agape love undergirds everything we do, or it’s not really building up the kingdom.
I don’t know how else to say that. It is the core of who we are, is agape love. Now, it might be a little bit difficult because we think of love.
In fact, if I was gonna go up to my brother in Christ and say, I love you, in the world today, it would be easier for me to go, love you, bro, yeah, to kind of not make it seem like something it shouldn’t be. But love is something we should say comfortably with each other, not just say it. There’s a lot more to love than saying it.
I mean, we say it in our household to one another a lot throughout the day, but it really means more when we show it to one another. When you say it and you back it up, that makes it a little more real. And when you say it and you don’t back it up, that’s gonna happen.
But we gotta pray for more love. We’re gonna talk more about that next week. But let’s put this slide up on the screen.
Let’s just walk through this. Yes, love is patient. How many of you like to pray for the fruit of the spirit of patience? Go ahead and pray for it.
God’ll give you something to be patient for. Patience. Patience is part of the heart of love to be patient with one another.
Now, a lot of these definitions can go to the point where we think of love, saying love, is being able to be taken advantage of. And we’ll get into that more with some of the other stuff. But patience just says, patience in my household means I’m patient with my boys, even when they aren’t listening.
And when I raise my voice, because I assume they didn’t hear me the first 50 times, that often doesn’t come out of love. Does that make sense? That comes out of my own impatience and my own desires and my own wanting them to just do what I ask them to do, which they should do anyway, because I like to remind them of the commandment that honor your parents. That’s the favorite commandment to bring up.
The first one we taught them to memorize when they were kids. But sometimes love doesn’t come out of my mouth when I get upset. But it’s the patience that helps us love more.
So the fruit of the spirit. What are you smirking at there, Collin? The fruit of the spirit is what undergirds all the gifts of the spirit to make them powerful. If we go back to the slide, kind, love is patient, love is kind.
Love does not just look for opportunities to rip people apart. It looks for opportunities to bless someone. How many of you think, man, I am so excited to be a blessing to someone today who is a pain in my neck? That is the kindness.
Kindness, to tell you the truth, love kindness is not, hey, you were really good to me, so now I’m gonna be really good to you. Kindness says, even when you treat me like an animal or you seem to put me down or hurt me or ignore me, I’m still gonna be kind to you. I’m gonna treat you with respect, even when it doesn’t seem like you deserve it.
Kindness is huge. Love is patient and kind. It rejoices with truth, rejoices with truth, as in when there is truth, when there is honesty, when there is integrity, when something is truly of God, love rejoices.
If you were truly blessed, remember Paul said that as the body of Christ, we rejoice with those who are blessed and we hurt with those who hurt. We rejoice with the truth. When God is in the, we lift each other up, we encourage each other up, we rejoice for anyone who has experienced something awesome and we weep with those who weep.
I mean, that’s the core of the body right there. Rejoice with those who experience something great and weep with those who weep. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
That’s pretty all-encompassing. And when I read that, I actually am like, whoa, what does that mean to believe all things? Because it doesn’t fit with other things we read that you believe and love God, not everything everybody else comes up with. What does it mean to hope all things? Well, our hope, we have one hope.
That’s, that changes the whole name of in church, of our church. If we went from one hope to hope in whatever, but each of these has something that is a little deeper than what we may see on the surface. One of the neatest definitions of this is what I see in Got Questions.
It’s a Got Questions ministry that, there’s a gotquestions.com and more people check this out and they’ve got some good answers. But it says, first we should understand that this description of love does not, what it does not mean. The fact that love believes all things does not make a loving person a dupe or a naive, neither does it make that, mean that love is naive, undiscerning or credulous.
We’re not talking about gullibility here and a foolish lack of skepticism is not a part of love. The Greek word translated as believes is a form of the verb pistuio, which means to believe, to place faith in or to trust. The word is a common one.
Used 248 times in the New Testament. Many times this word is found in contexts in which belief has an expression of love. Those who love will always, now we say love believes all things.
The NIV says love always trusts. Do you have anybody in your life you’ve met that is not trustworthy? That you gotta, we’re not just talking about political candidates here. What, when it says love always trusts or believes all things goes on to say those who love will always believe in the other person, believe in them.
There is no second guessing or questioning of whether the person should be loved. Did you hear that? There is no second questioning or guessing of whether the person should be loved. Love is simply given.
It is unconditional. The love one does does not need to perform anything or achieve a certain goal in order to be loved. Just as Christ loved his children unconditionally calls us to love others.
Love is based on one, on who he is, who he is, capital H, who he is, who Jesus is, not on what others do. Some scholars suggest this teaching of love always trusts is directly connected to Paul’s rebuke of lawsuits earlier in his letter. In chapter six, we read of believers bringing lawsuits against one another in the local courts.
Love always trusts would not do such a thing. A person with God’s type of love will always trust. That is, he will not be suspicious of the one he loves.
He will be slow to believe any damaging news concerning the loved one and will always give the benefit of the doubt. That’s sometimes tough to do. Whatever the situation, love is ready to trust.
To trust someone means you are ever ready to believe the best of him or her. To the loved one may have checkered past or be some other way undeserving of trust, yet true love is able to look past that and meet the need of the individual. Mistrust, caginess, and suspicion are at odds with godly love.
How many times did Jesus say we need to forgive? 70 times seven. Not just three strikes and you’re out. If a brother or sister in Christ would believe in one another, setting suspicion aside and extending unconditional love, what a difference it would make in the church.
When our focus is on Christ, we can show his love to meet the needs of others. Let’s look at what love is not. Love does not envy.
If you ever feel envious of someone else, it’s not love. It’s love of self, but it’s not love of God. Boast, love does not boast.
Paul says if I’m gonna boast, I’m gonna boast on my weaknesses. Sometimes it’s hard to even talk about your weaknesses because people want to exploit them. But if you just look around the room a little bit, we all have weaknesses.
We all have things where we need Jesus to strengthen us and guide us and help us to overcome. We all have things that have hurt us in the past that might make us squeamish of certain things in a deeper bond with another church member. Love does not envious.
Love does not boast. Love is not arrogant. I believe it’s the NIV that says love is not proud, or it’s the NLT that said love is not proud.
Pride is the opposite of love. Love is not rude. Love does not insist on its own way.
Irritable, resentful, rejoice in wrongdoing. There’s the kicker. Love, if someone says you’re not using love, so you need to rejoice in this wrongdoing, then we know we’re getting off track.
Does that make sense? Let’s go to this next slide. This is my interpretation of what it says. What is love? Yes, love is powerful, endures all things.
Patience, persistence, pushes through. Love is not soft. See that? Love is not soft.
Love is not weak. Paul Reiss says in Leadership Magazine, God’s love is never measured by our comfort. Love is not soft.
Love is strong. Love doesn’t keep us weak, but strengthens us. Love is not something where we make others feel bad if they don’t treat us like we wanna be treated.
Love is powerful. Love is powerful enough to carry us through the biggest hardships of life. God’s love is that amazing.
Love is steadfast. It doesn’t give up. It doesn’t slow down.
It pushes through. Love is forgiving. Love is righteous.
Love is on the side of right. You know, good versus evil. Love is on the side of right.
Love is sacrificial. Love is truthful. Love comes from God.
No, love is not soft. Love is not some flimsy, fleeting, feeling, squirmy thing. Nah, I don’t really feel like loving you today.
I’m kinda tired, and I’m kinda tired of you. Well, that wasn’t love anyway. Love is not soft.
Love is not contextual. Love does not change based on your surroundings. Love is not inconsistent.
It is steadfast. Love is not inconsistent or circumstantial or however I feel right now. So love is not a feeling per se.
Okay? If it’s something that’s fleeting, then it wasn’t love. Love is not selfish. That doesn’t insist on its own way.
Love is selfless. Sacrificial. Love is not fearful.
Love is strong enough to do what needs to be done, to push through even when it’s hard. Love is not deflective, which means love doesn’t say, I blame you for my problems. Love says, I’m here for you, even if you have caused problems for me.
Love takes responsibility. I’ll just let that one sink in for a while. That’s a tough one to do today.
If I take responsibility, I might get sued, so I don’t know. Love is not short-fused. Clark Cotherton tells this story.
He said, I once invited a friend, Gavin, to help me, and the two of us helped the pastor guide me with 30 lively teens for an all-night lock-in at my church. Who has ever volunteered for an all-night lock-in? Why is that number so low? It’s pure joy. Because you were stupid.
Because you were using the gullible side of love. He said, early in the evening, Gavin challenged him to a game of table tennis in the Fellowship Hall. Our game quickly grew into a heated competition as a small crowd gathered to watch us battle it out.
With the score tied and only three points left to go before the end of the game, Tracy, an eighth grader, grabbed the ball and tried to play keep away from us. Middle schoolers. My first impulse was irritation.
But then a scripture, a passage that our group had read aloud that afternoon came streaking across my mind. Love is patient, love is kind, and it’s not jealous. Love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly, it does not seek its own, it is not provoked.
I politely asked Tracy to return the ball and then Gavin and I joked with her until she finally tossed the ball back on the table. We thanked her and finished the game. He doesn’t say who won, so I think we know he didn’t win.
Hours later, after an evangelistic film, we were pleasantly surprised to see Tracy walking down the aisle with a group of six others to receive Christ as her savior. Later that night, when we gathered our testimony, Tracy told us this. I grew up in a family where nobody goes to church.
I’ve learned the only way I can get others’ attention is by making people mad at me. But earlier this evening, I saw something different. Clark says Gavin and I exchanged glances at each other and raised our eyebrows and she goes on to say, when I stole the ball from those guys, Tracy said pointing to us, they didn’t get mad at me.
They didn’t fight back. I saw something different in those guys. And I decided then and there, I wanted whatever it was they have.
If the world sees the church loving one another, if the world sees a church who understands the definition of love that we spent quite a bit of time on today, if the world sees that in us, they’re gonna want it. Because they’re not gonna get it from all the things that they have outside of God today. They’re not gonna get that love from a family who doesn’t know Jesus.
They’re not gonna get that kind of love from their job or from money. They’re not gonna get that kind of love from any group or any chat room or any social media. They’re only gonna get that kind of love from someone who really loves Jesus.
If we wanna be the body of Christ, then let’s love one another as he has loved us. Let’s pray. Almighty God, thank you for the example of love in Jesus Christ.
We’re imperfect. Sometimes we have a short fuse. Sometimes we get irritated, like those guys were with Tracy.
Help us, God, to love. Help us, God, to show Jesus in every situation, even when people seem to be far from God, even when it seems to us that there is no way they’re gonna love Jesus. Help us to believe the best in them because you believe the best in us.
You took our imperfect selves to use us for kingdom glory. Fill us with your love. Help us to be patient and kind, to rejoice in right, not to rejoice in wrongdoing, not to be arrogant or rude, not to insist on our own way, but to rejoice in Christ.