Our reading this morning is from 1 Corinthians, chapter 13. If I could speak all of the languages of Earth and of angels, but I didn't love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging symbol. If I had the gift of prophecy and I understood all of God's secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn't love others, I would be nothing. If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it.
But if I didn't love others, I would have gained nothing. Love is patient and kind, love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It is not demand its own way. It is not irritable and it keeps no record of being wronged.
It is not rejoice about injustice or rejoice whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful and endures through every circumstance. Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless, but love will last forever. Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture.
But when the time of perfection comes, those partial things will become useless. When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child, but when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly like puzzling reflections and a mirror. But then we will see everything with perfect clarity.
All that I know now is partial and incomplete. But when I will know everything completely just as God now knows me completely, three things will last forever. Faith, hope, and love and the greatest of these is love. This is the word and can't be trusted.
Good morning. I have a little bit of a cough, so please excuse that. So this scripture has been on my heart for a while, and we first used it in one of our night of worship and prayer, and it just kind of stuck with me and just kind of kept spinning in my head. And I realized that one of the big things about this scripture is that it's about motive, but I can't have a conversation about motive without personally speaking from my own motives.
So when I was 20 years old, is when I became a Christian, I grew up in church, but that's when God just really kind of knocked on my heart. And it was through the Wesley Foundation at the Yolam campus, which is how I got involved here. And it's just been a huge part of my story. It's been a lot of good things have come out of that program.
But when I first got there, there was kind of this like sweet honeymoon phase. And so it was fun. It was beautiful. There's a lot of freshmen.
I got to know people and they loved on me in ways that I've never been loved on before. I came out of the aviation community right after high school and even in high school. You know, it was just people didn't love like that. And so this honeymoon phase started to deteriorate though about a semester in.
And I started seeing people start making decisions that really kind of counteracted who they were as Christians. And then I started watching the cycle over the seven years that I was in college, I'm super, super senior. So I started watching the cycle and it was heartbreaking because I would see people come in who are just full of life and very idealistic and they would eventually just spin out. And they would join sororities or frats.
Not that those are inherently bad organizations, but they would use those organizations in bad ways. And so it was heartbreaking watching people go down a path that ultimately took them away from Jesus. You've probably heard Chad preach on this a couple of times, but we were talking about it one day. We called it the wall of purpose when Kumbai Amalord doesn't get you through hard times.
When your spiritual life just kind of meets the end of the rope. And so my motive for growing in my faith was to fight this, what I kind of considered an injustice. I was very angry at the world. I became very angry because of all of the things that the world had done to me and my friends.
And you know, it was just heartbreaking. It's just a sad thing. And so I remember the day I walking into Chad's office that was almost in tears because I realized that the main motive of my faith wasn't a deep and profound love for God. It wasn't out of wanting to do the right thing.
It was that Jesus was the biggest match that I could find to burn down the thing I hated the most. So I promise this gets a little bit more happy. That was a very profound realization. It was a kind of a midlife crisis of my faith.
And I had to reorient a lot of what I was doing and why I was doing it. So when we look at this first bit of scripture, the first three verses, it talks about speaking in tongues and talks about prophecy. So I look at this and it's talking about power. It's talking about a gift of a gift of God that he gives to us and it's talking about how you use these things.
And so if our motive isn't good, if our motive is, let's be honest, human. If I can tell the future, I'll be going by a lot of tickets. So what we see though in this is that it's about where these actions come from, not about the actions themselves. So if we look at God, it is a story of a God of love and how he uses his power, not a God of power and how he loves us.
And this is important because we are called to be like Jesus. We are called to walk in the ways that Jesus walked. And so for us, it is for how we go forward in this world and loving people and the power with the power God has given us. So our first thing is our motive has to be a motive of love.
So if you go through verses 4 through 7, it gives us the wedding passage, right? This to me speaks to awareness. It tells us what love is. It tells us how we can actually have actionable steps going forward and even to measure ourselves with the world around us.
If you want something you can do when you go home after hearing this message, I recommend writing these down, putting a scale of 1 to 10 and saying, okay, where do I fall like with patience? Normally with patience, I fall about 8 until I get into the car and then it's about 2. And so, and then when I hit 165 to 5 o'clock and it becomes a negative 3. But this is a way for us to go forward knowing what God is calling us to do.
This is also important because this is how God loves us. One of my biggest like things that I say all the time is love God, love others, make disciples. So if we use that framework with this, this tells us how God loves us and this tells us how we can go and love others. And so this awareness of what God is calling us to do helps us also know what God is doing for us.
Therefore, we can go forward and do what God does. But this also allows us to be honest. This allows us to tell our stories. This allows me to be up here right now and tell you all about my biggest faults because it is kind.
It doesn't hold any record of wrongdoings and it rejoices in truth. So it allows us to be free and go forward and tell the story that God has given us to tell. And so when we move on through verses 8 through 12 or 13, yeah, 12, we see a story playing out of how God, see, it's my place. I can't remember handwriting.
So we see that love is going to last forever. We see that all these other things are conditional to our current situation, which is the fallen world, which is sin. And these tools that we have are to help us get along, but love is our ultimate goal. Love is the single most important thing throughout time because it is at the core of who God is.
And what we do must flow from who we are and who we are must be a people of love. Dallas Willard put it like this. I don't actually have the Dallas word. Whoops.
Okay. So Dallas Willard is a great author. He's lots of quotable books, things like that. But what he says, we are an eternal people that have an eternal life who we are goes forward into eternity.
It's not what we do. It's not what we bring with us from this life. It is who we are. And that is why it's so important for us to focus on ourselves in that manner.
See love is how God invites us into the work of salvation by changing who we are. People then get to see a physical representation of who God is on this planet. The Holy Spirit of God first about the work of loving a soul to awakening the expressions of spiritual power that flow from that love and compassion are the overflow of the love that moves the Father in heaven. So when we have this love filled inside of us, all these other things then flow from that.
Like I know I'm kind of harping on this one point, but it is the most important one. So all of this to say is like, okay, how do we do this, right? How do we get to the point of becoming a people of love? Well, A.W.
Tozer says we have to invite the Holy Spirit to do the deadly work of the cross of this involves relationship with Jesus. This involves us asking God on a daily basis to come into our lives and do the transforming work that will allow us to go forward and be his representative here on earth. And it's not an easy process because it's painful. It's a rewriting of our DNA, but into who God has for us to be.
And another way for us to do this because it requires that up relationship with God, so that love of God, but also requires that sideways relationship that love of others because it requires each of us walking alongside of each other to move forward because like we're going to fall, we're going to mess up. We're going to lose focus just like I do with my notes, so the honesty. So we have to invite people to an uncomfortable level of our lives to continue to move forward. And this is a good word for this accountability and to me that used to be a dirty word.
To me accountability used to mean someone's going to punish me for not doing something I was supposed to do, but I found that accountability as I got older is actually someone helping me achieve a goal that I set out to achieve because I can't wake up for my alarm. Like if I can't wake up for my alarm, then how can I do all of this other work? But when I have people at the gym, when I have to wake up at five in the morning to get there, that gives me the accountability and the motivation to move forward because I know there are people there that are going to help me do that. So we have to have that sideways relationship with others.
But how does love actually affect people? Like I mean, there are a lot of really kind of people out there. How does this become the secret sauce of revival? How does this help us go forward into sharing the gospel in the world?
Well, Pascal Pascal Pascal Pascal. That's good. It was a mathematician French mathematician. So I have a love hate relationship with this guy because he invented math, but form of math says there is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing, but only by God the creator may know in through Jesus Christ.
See, we all have a hole inside of us. Scripture says it is a piece of eternity that God placed in us. It is the throne of our heart that can only be satisfied with God sitting on it. If you think about your lives, we can all say there's something in our past that we used to try and fulfill ourselves with.
For some people it is success. For some people it is relationships. For me, it was partying. I kind of grew up like in the American pie genre of films.
And so that's what I thought I needed to fulfill myself. But it wasn't until other people showed me the love of Jesus that I had something inside of me calling out for more. Like it made me move from Florida from my dream of being a pilot to being back in Monroe, Louisiana. And so if we go forward believing that there is a hole in all of us that can only be filled by Jesus.
Now I remember the day that that hole was filled. That's why I was saved when I was 20. And we become this people of love that are showing love how Jesus has called us to do it. Then that is going to resonate with people out in the world.
It's not us going out and telling people you have to repent or you're going to hell. I mean that's not really a good way to go about things. That doesn't make any friends. But through people seeing how we treat others will be known as Jesus's disciples.
And that will resonate in their souls. That will resonate with who they are at their core. Because who they are at their core is thirsting and longing for Jesus. And so this is how God invites us into the important work of salvation.
Because ultimately it's his job. It's about his relationship with others. But we can be invited in that process by loving others. So the takeaway from this is we need to be focused on ourselves and how we can grow personally.
But also how we can help each other grow to be a people of love and to go forward and just share the gospel. To share the word just to be a loving people. So it's pretty short. It's pretty simple.
It's pretty sweet. But that's what I have for y'all today. So if y'all value us heads with me, please pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day.
We thank you for the love that you have given us. We thank you for being a person that just makes up the distance Lord. When we fall short, when we're not at our best, God, you're there and you're a strong man. Our weakness.
Thank you so much for all that you do. Thank you so much for all that you show us Lord. It's your name and pray.