It's on. Where do I point it? It's on. What am I doing wrong, Matt?
You said forward back. I just want to make sure I got forward back. Button. We'll take it forward.
I missed the second word. I was trying that one. No, it doesn't like me. It equally dislikes me.
Maybe it needs more voltage. I know this one. I can use this one. Thank you.
Sorry about that delay. Shall we pray? Father, as we come to your word this morning, we pray that our minds would be attentive and our hearts would be receptive to the principles that are in your word. We confess that we are needy people, that we are often stiff-necked and slow to learn what your spirit would teach us.
We pray for mercy and grace to grow and to appropriate the things that you would have us appropriate. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. It's often been said from pulpit that the Lord gives a word to the speaker because it applies to him more than anybody else in the room.
And as I studied this, I would say that it shook me up. I would say that I became extremely conscious of my... I became extremely conscious of my sort of persistent failure, perennial deficiency and failure to exhibit and to understand and to live love, the love of God. So that's good.
That's good to have that experience. And I trust that you will go away and look into the word yourself and allow yourself to be challenged. The last time I spoke, I spoke on personhood. And without the idea of personhood, there's actually a lot of trouble, I think, with the idea of love.
One individual pointed out that according to modern naturalistic materialistic Darwinian influenced thinking and theory, you and I are rearranged mud. We are material things and it is quite difficult to explain what personhood and what consciousness are. But fundamentally, unless you have appropriated the principle and the idea and the fact that you and I and everyone were created in the image of God, in the image of God, then you don't have that. I don't know where the starting point is for love.
A very important foundational principle for love is to understand, believe it or not, that the individual with whom you are interacting was created in the image of God. That is what I call our equipment. That is a very important piece of intellectual equipment that we need to carry with us to understand that everyone is created in the image of God and then inherently, inherently deserves to be treated as such. That should affect our attitudes and the fact of the personhood being in the image of God should affect how we spend our time.
Because eternal souls among whom we walk and with whom we interact are eternal souls created in the image of God. How should you invest your life? What should you put your energy into? This should affect where we put our effort.
I have a message that is in three parts, but before I get into it, a little bit of perhaps a secular introduction, the world, I mean, the world is fascinated with this idea. If you think about all the, or don't, the movies, books, ballads, poems, art, visual art, musical art devoted to love. My goodness, if you, I think it would empty half library, that there's so much material out there generated by earthly human beings on the subject of love. In 1967, the Beatles sang, all you need is love.
What came after that in the song? Who can do it for me? Wow. Yeah, kind of like that.
All you need is love. And when I heard, you know, it almost is though, it's typical of the Beatles, you know, it's not a personality, but it's also whimsical. And there's, you know, she loves me. Yeah, does she?
So the profundity of the first statement, all you need is love. Is that true? A good question? Is that all you need?
What kind of love you're talking about? Any kind of love? That's a good question. Well, it's perhaps a superficial question when you just sing it like that and then go, mwah, mwah, mwah, mwah.
You know, it's almost a self-mocking song that it's portraying that this is very important, and we haven't got a clue what it's about. I think there's truth in that. I think about, you know, how loosely we also use it in the English language. Somebody, I wouldn't understand this person, but they might say, you know, I love broccoli.
Oh, well, that's just, you know, careless and random use of the English language. I'm not talking about such a careless use of this word. I'm talking very, very serious use of this word. You know, the Bible portrays to us, for example, in the book of James, that faith, you know, as a kind of a pure theory, is a nothing.
And if I were to say to you that, you know, there's a kind of love that, and I'm going to go and study this, the school of theoretical love. Purely theoretical. I'm a theory guy. I like theories.
Yeah, but I don't want to do anything. I don't want to do anything. Don't ask me to love anybody. I just want to study love theoretically.
You'd say you're silly. You're absolutely silly. That's non-love. Love that has no component of active action, of reality is actually not love at all.
It's analogous to saying faith without works is dead. You're going to study theoretical faith as if it's can be put in a vacuum bottle and looked at, you know, it's a nonsensical concept, a hypothetical love. Love is something that is, as we know, you know, it's acted out. It must have an action.
I think that in today's world, it's important to be very careful, especially as young people, going to school, because what we are being sold every day and, scarily, especially to our children, is that any and all love is legitimate. Any and all love is inherently legitimate. That is not true. And that kind of automatically legitimate love then legitimizes anything else that's connected to it.
And that is also not true. That is not how I read the Bible at all. And the reason that it's confusing, and you might be shocked for me to say this, is that some of the kinds of love that we are being told these things about. Am I saying that they are not love?
I am not saying that. That could be genuine love as far as it goes. But it is not love which God honors. It is not love that God wants, and it can be connected to stuff that is nothing but sin.
Nothing but sin. The love in itself is as real to that person as any love could ever be. Does that make everything about it right? It certainly does not.
We live in a society in a time and a culture in which this idea is used to legitimize all kinds of things. And that is being done illegitimately. If you say to someone, there is a good question for an English, a second language conversation group, what is love? Oh, that's a tough one.
That's a really tough question. It's probably a tough question for you for anybody. What is love? What if you go to dictionary like sources, online sources?
What is the information that's out there in the great big internet world and the printed word, the old printed dictionaries? I am giving them away, actually. It seems I still have too many. What do these books say?
What is love? Try this on for size. A wide variety of different emotional and mental states positively experienced. You say that isn't that rather vague?
It's extremely vague. It's not very useful at all. Miriam Webster uses a lot of A-words. Affection, attraction, admiration.
And then it says, yeah, and then there's this other thing and it's adoration of God. But that's over there. These are over here and that's over there. And the Christian goes, no, no.
I don't see my love for God as compartmentalized between there's love and there's love. That's actually quite an artificial compartmentalization. And part of my message this morning is that there's a real danger to compartmentalizing love too much. If you think about love and you think about what goes with it, having it been established.
Trust, commitment, respect, honesty between the parties involved. So if I were to say to you, well, I want there to be love and I'm not going to have, by the way, any of those things. Are you interested? Are you interested in love in which there's no trust?
There's no commitment, there's no respect and there's no honesty. Are you interested in that kind of love? You would say not in the least. And I would say I'm with you.
I'm not least interested in that kind of thing either. Love is very fundamental. It's interesting that it's in the background so strongly and it's all through the Bible and it is part of what we believe as Christians. It's so fundamental.
But did you ever think that in fact love is very intolerant? Love does not tolerate disrespect. Love does not in a sense tolerate dishonesty. What married couple would say married very long?
If their relationship was full of disrespect, dishonesty, breaking the commitment and lack of trust. I don't think that marriage is going to last a week. The love won't tolerate it. The love of God, the way that God wants us to love, does not tolerate such things.
We live in a world that wants everything to be very tolerant and tolerant. Well, really. Although you know that the kind of love that you and I and everybody actually wants is very intolerant of a lot of things. Love is also somewhat paradoxical because if I were to say, what if I was a young man and I walked in this, this is not in my notes on scary ground here.
I walked into this assembly and nobody knew me from Adam and I walked in here and I saw a lovely young lady and I was single and I said, you know, I'm a believer and I, she must be a believer and I walked up to her and her father and I said, you're going to love me and I want you to marry me. I'm forcing you to love me. I think she would go, you can't force me to love you. Love interestingly enough, paradoxically enough with all its importance and value, it also cannot be forced.
You can't force anybody to love you by force, right? There is a mother's love. My mother's love is automatic and actually that is in my notes. Maybe I should have stuck in my notes.
My kids went to HCA and one of them was going through and one of the teachers got a hold of material pertaining to the languages of love. Oh, the languages of love. So I looked it up, you know, the five languages of love. Gary Chapman, words of affirmation, your full attention in quality time, number two, giving presence.
Now that number three, I just think that's way too easy. I mean, it's expensive money and I don't know. I'm not buying that one too much. Number four, acts of service.
That has a Christian heart to it. And number five, physical touch. So love is multifaceted. It's multilingual.
I like this. I like the fact that there are different facets to this thing called love. And I think men maybe in particular need to learn more about the multilingual nature of love. The story is told and it is not a story of a brother that I know and have known for years.
He was on his honeymoon. And they were driving down the road. And I guess there had been some tension. You have that during the honeymoon.
Anyway, anyway, I had tension in my honeymoon. I'm not saying. Anyway, you know, it wasn't all peaches and cream. Shall we buy this or shall we expand money on this?
It already started, right? Anyway, they were going down the road and there was some sort of background tension. And the new bride, newly married young woman says to her husband, how about we have a coffee? And he goes, I don't need a coffee.
No, I'm fine. Thanks. Don't need a coffee. And the point of the brother sharing that was that, you know, he still had a lot to learn about reading between the lines.
If your wife is saying we need to have a coffee, it doesn't mean that we need caffeine necessarily, right? It may mean, it may mean, hello, we need to talk, right? So this multilingual, multifaceted nature of love is something that we need to develop. And I'm scared because it's six minutes to noon and I have still my message.
Thinking about the love of God, we often think of the Old Testament God, at least certainly non-Christians that I've run into as intimidating, that we associated love with the God described in the New Testament, but that the God that's described in the Old Testament is perhaps a little intimidating. So I would say, you know, the next time somebody says that to you, pull out your Bible, you know, give them some verses. Sit down and let's look at this. In fact, this idea of love goes way back.
It goes back to the last book of the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy, which is founded upon the first commandment, having no other gods before me. So let's look at relational and past tense and future tense verses. I'm just going to include the bladder two from Deuteronomy. And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might.
And in looking back over their lives and explaining what God had done for them and pulling them out of slavery, why did he do that? Because he loved you, these children of God, who would prove to be very errant, err-filled, err-in their behavior, err-in their thinking, needed to be reminded that it was because God loved them that he redeemed them. This is good for us to keep in mind. He loved you in the past tense and he will love you in the future tense, same chapter, and he will love you and bless you.
He has loved you in the past. He has redeemed you. You can expect that he will bless you. There will be trouble.
This is the age of the law, the dispensation of the law. There will be trouble if you are disobedient, but he has loved you and he will love you. In books like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Hosea in particular, it's noteworthy that the relationship between God and his children is often by the prophets compared to the relationship between a man and his wife, the marriage relationship, a close relationship. Now Oprah gets on TV.
I don't watch Oprah. I don't know how I happen to hit that one with the remote control. But I did some years ago and she says the idea of a jealous God is something that we need to get past. Is that so?
Well, if I begin to betray my wife, do you expect her to say, that's fine, David? That is awful. If she is upset by that, she has the right to be upset because we are in a committed relationship. And God says, so you can understand it.
You people who are behaving in an errant way, you need to know that you are behaving like a person in a married relationship that is betraying that relationship. It's not being loyal to that relationship. Do you understand that? So you can understand it.
God is using an earthly picture. However, it's a picture that it's a thing that he himself created, which is marriage. It's God, so I was talking about the children of God. Now let's think, you know, what about does God ever say, I love you, Brian?
You actually does. It's most interesting. I was reading to you about loving the children of God. And now we have somebody singled out.
In loving the children of God, one of the things that signs of it, indications, is their proliferation, their multiplication, their prosperity. And here you have a woman at the beginning of first Samuel and she has no child. And everybody around her is not loving, they're judgmental. And they go, ha ha ha, you are not prosperous because there's something wrong with you more than you are.
You're probably not enjoying the love of God and there's probably a reason that puts you in mind of Joe. But what do you read in 1 Samuel 1, 5? He loved Hannah, the Lord loved Hannah in particular. And when you go through the Old Testament, you see God walking with Adam, walking with Enoch, walking with Noah.
Abraham is described as the friend of God. Moses is described as one with whom there's an interaction like no other interaction that you find in the Old Testament, a direct interaction. As if they were friends. Friendship is a very important aspect of love.
And now part B, the love of Jesus Christ. He taught it. In fact, as pointed out by the philosopher Francis Schaeffer, what it says is that by this shall all men know that E are my disciples, by that if you have loved one to another. That's what it says in John 13, 34, 35.
In other words, Jesus gives those who know not the Lord permission to assess the reality of what you know and believe by how much love they can see between us and between you. That's a scare of thought. We bear responsibility. By this shall all men know.
Know what? That your mind, we need to live out the fact that we are his. And if we don't, and the world says, what's that? I don't know what it is, but I don't like it and I'm not going near it.
The Lord says, well, you can actually do that. I give you permission to do that. That's a scary thought. We bear responsibility in knowing the love of God, in that we should show love to each other.
John 11 and John 13 are just two examples. I mean, this is a huge subject from the life of the Lord Jesus pertaining to the visible, observable demonstration of his love. In John 11, we have verse 35, Jesus wept. And the Jews said, see how he loved him.
They could see it. They could see it in his face. They could see it in his determination. And of course, the Lord Jesus raised his friend, Lazarus, his friend from the dead.
I was saying to the Chinese Bible said, you know, there's talks about him being wrapped in a little open it. Come out. Right? They thought that was quite funny.
It's not in the Bible, but how else are you going to come out if you're wrapped up? Come out. Indeed. Come out.
It was obvious. In John 13, the only gospel that records that, he washes their feet. He washes their feet. Isn't that something?
He said, you call me Lord and master and rightly so for so am I. But what I have done for you and done to you do for and to each other. John 13, he practiced it. And of course, as we know, he went all the way to the cross for us.
He died out of love for us. The passages from 11 and 13 were almost out of time. What about we are believers. I trust that all of us here are believers.
This is mandated for us. Well, as I just pointed out, we're not greater than the Lord Jesus. If the Lord Jesus was willing to wrap himself in a towel and wash dirty feet, then we shouldn't shy away from unpleasant tasks. And it's different, you see, with us.
And I hope that you know something about this. Romans 5, 5, and hope makes not a shame because the love of God is shed abroad. It is poured out in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, by the Holy Spirit given unto us. If you know that, if you have that and you know that you have it, you have the power to do it.
That's different. That's different. I had a Muslim working for me years ago. It actually said to me, from what I can tell your religion is characterized by love and mind is not.
And my boss was responsible for his job that I answered to, who was a prominent person in the Muslim community and said, here's your summer student. Thank you very much. This was back in the early 80s. And that's what that young man told me.
But it's more than that. And what is the explanation for that? It's because of that love that is shed abroad in our hearts, poured into our hearts, not as a hypothetical thing, but as a person, as a person. What is a miracle that the Old Testament only hints at?
And John 13, as I said, by this shall all men know that ye are my disciples. The two big passages on love in the New Testament are 1 Corinthians 13 and 1 John 5. And I would recommend to you at 5 after 12 that you read and think about and ask before the Lord what he would have you to do, how he would have you to change. I hope it shakes you up.
The love that never fails. The love that has undying faith. In our case, faith in the Lord. But faith and a positive, non-judgmental attitude to those with whom we interact.
Because you could be the smartest Christian in theoretical Christianity that ever walked the face of the earth. And the Bible just says right there, says to me, it doesn't add up to a row of beans if you are a loveless person. It doesn't meet as a sense of difference. As far as God is concerned, if you know the Bible and you can recite it backwards, it makes no difference.
It has no value if you have no love. She's not her own. Wow. I think that's all I ever do all day long.
Looking out for me. Looking out for my interests. We need to take a step back and think about our brothers, our sisters and the ones whom God has given us to love. Sorry, first John, do I have that right?
Four or five? You better check that. It says four, but I'm thinking five. I guess it is four though.
I said five. Look at 13, the remarkable unity of the New Testament. Sometimes some theologians and scholars have said Paul is over here and he's kind of severe. John is over here and he's very loving and maybe we have trouble reconciling.
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Hereby know we that we dwell in him and he and us because he has given us his spirit. Same thought from Romans 5.5.
The love that comes into us that we know about by his spirit. I like apologetics. I read those books about apologetics by Lee Strobel and MacDowell and all these other guys. There's the cosmological argument and there's the biological argument and there's the argument from the point of view of consciousness and personhood.
All of that is weighty and impressive when you read through it. People who know way more than us about these complex subjects and they believe in God. They believe in salvation in Christ. And there they are.
Great. It's great to know these things. You should be able to give an answer to everyone that asks you for a reason to the hope that's in you. Yes.
But what's the really, really the most important one? That you know this. When you stand before someone, when you stand before someone to interact with them, you have love. You have the love.
You have the love of God in your heart for them. If you don't, maybe it's better not to start the conversation. And they can say actually whatever they like. But one thing I know, I know, I know, I know.
Is that I have been given God's spirit and that I experience His love right here, right now standing in front of you. I hope that's true. I hope that we can in all of our interactions with others be people who live and enjoy the love of God. Shall we pray?
Father, when we think of the Lord Jesus Christ and his life of love and his sacrifice, we are in awe of him and we pray that. We would always hold him before us, before our eyes, to revere him and be in awe of him in our hearts so that we might have this power, this power to love. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
Thank you for your attention. Thank you.