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Most people in the world have no experience of lasting joy in their lives. All of our resources exist to guide you toward everlasting joy in Jesus Christ. This new series of messages has been in my heart and on my mind for a long time—for several years, at least. I'll begin with the more biblical and theological reasons and move to the more experiential and personal. God Is Love 1 John 4: God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.
And we will have to come back to it in time to unpack it more fully. But it seems like the deepest starting place I could think of for a series of messages on love. In a word I think it means something like: God's absolute fullness of life and truth and beauty and goodness and all other perfections is such that he is not only self-sufficient, but also, in his very nature, overflowing.
God is so absolute, so perfect, so complete, so full, so inexhaustibly resourceful, so joyful, that he is by nature a Giver, a Worker for others, a Helper, a Protector. What it means to be God is to be full enough always to overflow and never to need—never murmur, never pout. The implications of this for the way we live are big. One time a lawyer asked Jesus Matthew Jesus answered, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.
This is the great and foremost commandment. He said in Matthew The two commandments are inseparable. We need to study that too. But for now just marvel at it, and let it motivate you to be engaged with this quest we are setting out on.
The great commandment is: Love God with all you are. The commandment to love your neighbor is "like it. In the very next verse, Matthew Whatever else there is in the Christian faith and in the life of obedience, it all hangs on this. But even more amazing is what Paul says in Romans We will need to ask why. But the point here is that love between humans is so crucial that Paul says, when it really happens, it is the fulfilling of all God's teachings.
Without love faith is dead. This is what James meant when he wrote, "Faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself" James 2: So the works of love are the evidence of living faith. Without them a church is dead and a heart is dead. Here's the way John put it in 1 John 3: He who does not love abides in death.
In the book of Acts Luke is eager to show that one of the first effects of salvation and community life in Christ is practical, costly care for one another. This is very God-like. Recall he is so full and content that he is by nature LOVE—giving, caring, helping, supporting, protecting. Love among Christians is the mark of Christ in the church. By this will all men know that you are my disciples.
In 1 Timothy 1: Yes, from a pure heart, and yes, from sincere faith in Christ no love without it! And that means the aim of all my preaching and the aim of all your study and reading and discussing must be love. The last four reasons become more contemporary and contextual and experiential and urgent and personal.
He described them in terms of hate and love. So it feels to me like there is a kind of end time urgency to this series of messages. Hate will be multiplied from the outside against the church. Hate will increase inside the church as one betrays another to the authorities. And love, everywhere, will grow cold. Now with all my heart I believe this dire prediction does not have to be your destiny, or the destiny of this church—or even this city.
That it is going to be true far and wide does not mean it has to be true for any particular person or church. But if it is not to be, we must know the forces against us. It will be like a spiritual glacier moving over the world and the church. Love will survive and thrive where we consciously torch the glacier with the power of Christ and the Holy Spirit with a view to loving each other rather than hating each other. It will be an uphill battle, against many forces. May God give us grace, partly through these messages, to torch the glacier of coldness and hate.
Our nation is permeated with a spirit of varying degrees of hatred and rancor and mean-spiritedness. It ranges from Nazi-like skinheads declaring open hatred for Jews and any non-whites, to children killing their parents, to gangs dealing almost entirely in a tone and atmosphere of anger, to radio talk-shows that capitalize on people's unseemly love for cutting cleverness, to politicians who know that the soundbite is not long enough for a fair consideration of the alternative view, and who, therefore, choose the most emotionally loaded phrase to demonize and undermine not only the viewpoint of the other side, but also the character of its proponent.
Every day the newspaper documents a nation of hate and meanness. Do you see the words that grip me: Our nation is in desperate need of another way to relate. I would like to encourage as many of you as possible to read two articles in the Christianity Today magazine dated March 6, in our library. It came as a strong affirmation from the Lord that this series of messages is appointed for this time. It raised the question of how Christians can show the whole biblical Christ to the world when aspects of our Christian morality have become so politicized that we tend to relate to the world almost entirely around "issues"—like abortion and homosexuality—and therefore in a very combative atmosphere, because the emotions run so high, when you are talking, for example, about the taking of the life of unborn children, and whether homosexual people may promote their practices in public schools.
And so we become defined in terms of issues that are volatile. And these so called "culture wars" are fast becoming more like war and less like culture—with real bullets and not just hard words. The other article I would love for you to read, even more than that one, is a reprint of Francis Schaeffer's "The Mark of a Christian" also in this same issue of Christianity Today from last week. Schaeffer's challenge was even more convicting to me than Woodbridge's.
The burden of his article was how Christians can disagree, when they must disagree, with visible, manifest, love. He posed a question that comes as close as anything to setting the agenda that I think we are called to in this series of messages.
Here's what he said:. We have conferences about everything else. Who has ever heard of a conference to consider how true Christians can exhibit in practice a fidelity to the holiness of God and yet simultaneously exhibit in practice a fidelity to the love of God before a watching world? Who ever heard of sermons or writings that carefully present the practice of two principles that at first seem to work against each other: This is what I want to struggle with and dig into and grow in.
I want us to have and to be a word from God for our nation concerning how disagreeing groups love each other. I have much to learn. I certainly do not have all the answers, especially in the politically loaded atmosphere of the culture wars of our society. But together I think God will guide us and grow us and humble us and make us strong with a kind of strength that combines the holiness and love of God in new ways that we have not known before.
Inside the church we have differences that call for deep and real and relentless love toward one another. Schaeffer, in that article on "The Mark of a Christian," said that this is our golden moment. It is in the midst of difference that we have our golden opportunity.
When everything is going well, and we are all standing around a nice little circle, there is not much to be seen by the world. But when we come to the place where there is a real difference and we exhibit uncompromised principles but at the same time observable love, then there is something that the world can see, something they can use to judge that these really are Christians and Jesus has indeed been sent by the Father. Let me mention three "golden opportunities" for us at Bethlehem—and I really do see them as that.
How easy it would be, as Schaeffer said, if we all thought the same on all these things. But as it is, in the real world, we have a golden opportunity for love. I hope I can be a good shepherd during these days of discovery and growth in love. Finally, the tenth reason for a series of messages on love is that I long personally to grow in love. I take heart from the apostle Paul that love is not an all-or-nothing affair.
It is something you can grow in. So he prays in Philippians 1: I am keenly aware that no man on his deathbed ever looked up into the eyes of his family and friends and said, "I wish I'd spent more time at the office. I ask for your prayers and I ask for your patience. Let me close with one illustration of my own struggle and what I am learning. For the past two weeks I have been isolated in my study working to finish the book, Living by Faith in Future Grace.
Hundreds of you were praying, and by the grace of God it is basically finished. As I put the finishing touches on it Friday night, the pressing question for me personally was, "Is this a work of love? Here's what I think the Lord showed me. That way of loving the church and the world will be authenticated or not by the other ways of loving people that I am called upon to perform as husband, father, friend, pastor, leader.