Download Does it sound like Jesus is feeling warm fuzzies? Do you think our

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What is Love?
Poets, songwriters and philosophers have been debating this
question for centuries. However, the Apostle John answers
the question straightforwardly in one verse 1 John 4:8
Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is
love.
The shortest sermon in the world could be, if you want to
know what love is, know what God is. Please don't get your
hopes up too high, because the longest sermon in the world
is knowing all of what God is. It might even take an eternity.
Love as a word is often overused and perhaps even abused in
today's society. Think about it. I could easily contrive one
sentence where I state that I love Angie and that I love pizza, and
most people would just take it in stride. Well, maybe not Angie.
The fact is however, many of us maintain that we love Jesus, we
love our country, we love our spouses, children, our friends, the
red team or the blue team, our pet, pizza, fried pickles and ice
cream, and expect others to understand what we mean. True?
Yet I am not sure that we convey any meaning at all. I suppose
the reason is that while we may indeed say or think we love these
things, we simply don't love them in the same way.
The situation only gets worse when we try to describe the
emotion we call love. I will never know this side of heaven
whether the emotion that I call love is the same feeling that
others get. Worse, I never feel the same way about two
different things. I love both my children equally, but never
the same, simply because they are different. The two things I
know about the emotional love that I refer to as warm fuzzies
are that I like the feeling and very often they make my life
worth living.
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The Greeks had a partial solution for this love dilemma. They
had four words for love: Agape', Eros, philio, and storge'.
Without trying to describe the feelings that might be
involved, I will say that Eros describes physical love, philio is
the love of friendship, and storge' describes the love among
family members.
The Apostle Paul is describing the Agape' kind of love in the very
familiar passage of scripture found in 1 Corinthians 13. I'll begin
with verse 4,
"4 Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love
does not parade itself, is not puffed up; 5 does not behave
rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no
evil; 6 does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the
truth;7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things,
endures all things. 8 Love never fails".
One of the most interesting points in this scripture is that I get no
sense that Paul is describing feelings here. I see no implication
that Love bears all things, believes all things and hopes all things,
but only if it feels like it. In fact I get the impression that Agape'
love does these things especially when it doesn't feel like it.
We were created to feel and we were created to love. Loving
feelings make loving behaviors easier and more natural, but
Agape' love is called for even in spite of our feelings
whatever they may be. Regardless of our feelings, we Love
with Agape' love when our spouse has told us in any number
of ways how inadequate we are. We Love with Agape' Love
regardless of our feelings when our children have torn our
hearts out reminding us of our single digit IQ's. We are even
to extend Agape' Love to the Schmucks at Church! The truth
is, Love is very often the loving things we say and do when
we feel like doing quite the opposite or doing nothing at all.
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The Scriptures tell us that God is always at work, and therefore
active. If God is Love, then He is actively doing the loving thing,
thinking the loving thing, planning the loving thing. He is never
passive. But how does He feel? He loves us with a deep and
abiding emotional love, but to me at times, it certainly doesn't
sound like it.
Let me pose a couple of examples. This is Jesus Himself
speaking to the Scribes and Pharisees:
Matthew 23:32-33 (NIV) 32 "Go ahead, then, and complete what
your ancestors started!33 “You snakes! You brood of vipers!
How will you escape being condemned to hell?"
Does it sound like Jesus is feeling warm fuzzies? Do you
think our world would call His speech politically correct?
Regardless of His tone of speech, doesn't the Bible tell us
that Jesus loves everyone, including the Scribes and
Pharisees?
The second example finds Jesus just coming from the mount
of Transfiguration. In Matthew 17:16-18 (NIV) it describes this
scene where a father has brought his son for healing. The
father says,
"16 I brought him to your disciples, but they could not heal
him.”17 “You unbelieving and perverse generation,” Jesus
replied, “how long shall I stay with you? How long shall I put
up with you? Bring the boy here to me.” 18
Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of the boy, and he was
healed at that moment.
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Does this sound warm and fuzzy? Would you necessarily feel
all cuddly after hearing these words? Regardless of the
feeling that may be involved, did Jesus love the father, the
child and the Disciples? Yes He did.
Now, without the use of drugs, let me invite you to expand your
thinking a bit. We have come to think of the stone tablets that
Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai as the 10 commandments. If I
understand it correctly, the translation from Hebrew is actually the
ten Words. If God is Love, then perhaps it is safe to presume that
the thought, the idea, and the motivation behind the ten Words is
love. Reasonable? Anyway, for the past year or so I have been
telling the Sunday School class that I teach that I have come to
think of the ten Words as the ten love languages.
With sincere apologizes to Dr. Gary Chapman from whom I
borrowed the concept of love languages,
I believe that the first four Words describe what we must
actively do or refrain from doing to show we love God, and
the following six are what we must actively do or refrain from
doing to show we love one another.
If you follow my thinking, the same can be said of the entire
writings called the Law found in the Old Testament. The God
of Love has shown us the Way of Love. The New Testament
states emphatically that Jesus did not sin. He lived perfectly
in the Way of Love. He never stumbled or faltered from that
way.
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I am not speaking of walking in the way of dos and don'ts. I
am not speaking of the way of a rulebook. I am not speaking
of the way of putting the behavior ahead of the value of a
person. I am speaking of walking in the way that Love was
created to be- naturally, without coercion or driven by guilt. I
am speaking of loving God and each other the way that God
said it should be. What kind of Father would command His
children to love Him and each other, and then not instruct us
how to or deny us what we need to obey?
If God is Love, then the Kingdom of God would reflect that Love.
The very best mind picture that I can conjure of the fulfillment of
the Kingdom of God on earth is a time and place when we are all
actively doing what is loving and are refraining from doing the
unloving according to God's Word. In other words, the Kingdom of
God in its fulfillment will be a world without sin as God defines it,
not as the world, pop-culture or political correctness defines it.
Every single sin is virtually our perversion of something that God
created as good and declared it so in the Scriptures.
While the definition of Love is far more important, honestly,
how do we define sin (yes I said the word sin again) unless
we define it by the written word of God? What else would we
use- public opinion or popular vote? We are doing this in our
Country at a fabulous rate. And what if we vote there is no
sin- have we removed the need for a Savior? I hardly think
so. The Savior removes the sin, not the other way around.
I categorize scripture in two buckets rather than three. The first is
described in 2 Timothy 3:16-17 (NIV) 16 All Scripture is Godbreathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and
training in righteousness, 17 so that the servant of God[a] may
be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
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The second I describe as the highest and best. To illustrate the
difference, I'll use Pastor Greg's example. The all scripture bucket
contains the scripture that says women should remain silent in
Church. The highest and best bucket contains Galatians 3:2729(NKJV) 27 For as many of you as were baptized into Christ
have put on Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is
neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for
you are all one in Christ Jesus.
I truly believe that being one in Christ Jesus is the highest and
best, even if I have experienced a couple of times when a woman
was talking in Church when she should have been listening. Did I
really say that?
I trust Pastor Greg's teaching that there are over two hundred
Scriptures that could be interpreted as God's approving of
slavery. However, the highest and best is found in Luke
chapter 4 where Jesus quotes from Isaiah in commissioning
His own ministry. The paraphrased version is that Jesus has
come to remove all oppression to every form of slavery
wherever it is found. The fact that the Scriptures deal with
the reality of different forms of slavery does not make it
God's endorsement.
Finding clear examples of highest and best does not justify
my wantonly ignoring other scripture. Even in the case of
slavery that God abhors, the New Testament spells out
loving conduct for both masters and slaves who find
themselves in that situation. To me, relegating certain
Scriptures as not worthy of any notice at all is a potential
opening for relegating all scripture as not worthy. I wonder
how many times people have found a scripture that is
inconvenient, hard to understand, or just seemingly hard,
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and allow that circumstance to declare the entire Bible
unworthy of notice?
Here's an eye opener for you. What right do we as Christians
have to expect the world to behave in any way other than worldly?
I repeat, how can we expect the world to act as anything but
worldly? The world will define sin to its liking, or ignore it
altogether. The world will define love to its liking, and only the
prevenient grace of God can interfere. God leaves the world free
to do as it wills, and I can do no less. We in the Church are no
less free, but when the Church adapts or bows down to the ways
of the world, I wonder what possible good we will be.
The world says Christians are stupid, hard-hearted, mean,
mean spirited, judgmental and condemning, and at times
they are right. But they are not always right. Our very
presence in this world is a hateful reminder to them that
there is a loving Way that God has prescribed- loving
behaviors springing from the source of Love to embrace and
unloving behaviors to avoid. It is certainly not our fault that
this world finds the message hateful, because quite frankly,
we did not write the book. Remember Jesus said we were the
salt of the earth, not the sugar.
There are those who are gifted at speaking the Truth in Love.
Perhaps I am not one of them. The world demands on its terms
that if I am to be a loving person, I have to accept all the
behaviors it defines as loving. So for example, an adultery might
be acceptable in theory because the participants are in love. Well
they can call me unloving and all the ugly names in the book, but I
refuse to submit myself to that kind of insidious blackmail. I have
learned to love the sinner and hate the sin simply by dealing with
myself on a daily basis.
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I have been a miserable failure at walking in the Way of Love
under my own power. I get in the most trouble when I try to
map out the way of love on my own terms. Today's GOOD
NEWS is that we don't have to draw the map or to walk the
Way on our own. Jesus has already fulfilled the law of Love,
and walked the Way of Love before us. Our task as a Child of
God is to be led by the Spirit of God in the loving Way lighted
for us by the Lamp of His Word.
The unmistakable message of God's Word is that He loves us,
whether we know it or not, whether we feel it or not, whether we
embrace it or not. He loves us so much that He gave what was
most precious to Him in order for us to be able to share a loving
relationship with Him. He embraces us, comforts us, shares with
us, cries with us, and celebrates with us. Just maybe, if we can
possibly learn to truly rest in that Love, we can quit trying to cut
and paste, edit in or out, or simply ignore the written word of God.
Rather than deny our sinfulness, we can allow His love to conquer
it. Thank you.