There are a few things that I enjoy in life more than a really good country in Western song and You know it was it was not always thing. You know we I went out to high school I was like kind of made fun of it. No, I got the more I realized that they're just they're great songs You can make jokes better content. You remember when I was a kid I think the big famous joke was what do you get when you play country song backwards?
I got my dog back. I got my truck back at my trailer back, you know, you know saying but we can make jokes about their content But you know country Western music is it's it's pretty much arranged around the idea of dreams of doubts of despair But above anything else good country songs are about love now this week I thought I was gonna make a list of my favorite country songs about love I realized all I was actually doing was just creating the tracklist from George Jones greatest hits He stopped loving her to actually else every time But so many of these songs they're in the idea of of a love that's not answered a love that's been broken I love that one accepts her love that one doesn't accept But we're not here today to talk about country music we could I mean like talk about country music all day long We're not here to talk about country music today. We're here to talk about love We're talking about love is a fruit of the spirit We started this conversation last week about the fruits of the spirit and the fruits of the spirit are visible examples Of the presence of the Holy Spirit in our life It's gonna read you those two verses from Galatians where we find the fruits of the spirit That's what Paul says the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives Love joy peace patience kindness goodness faithfulness jillings in self-control. There is no law against these things You know the Holy Spirit the Holy Spirit and give us these fruits they change us because these fruits are not about what we have in us These fruits are about what Jesus puts into us through the Holy Spirit It's not about what it's in us.
It's about what the Holy Spirit puts in us now if it's just about what we have in us I know all week long I was struggling with this because I was like, you know, I really don't want to talk about love You know, it's a guy. I'm like I kind of love. Okay Kind of mushy makes a great country song. There's that whole side of things There's also the side of things.
You know sometimes I really kind of have a hard time loving sometimes I might not necessarily might not want to love but I realize that so much of that is me thinking that love is an emotion that we have And simply a way of us trying to describe a way that we've encountered engage with God But it's fact it's the exact opposite that love is something that God gives us in our own Frustrations and our own worries and fears about engagements love because the fact that we're not God We realize our inadequacy of trying to engage like God. We're gonna talk about that today So first John 4 verse 7 through 13 that's me our passage today where we talk about love and friends This is possibly one of the most just With the best place to look at what does love mean and God to God and in God's economy there isn't scripture So for 7 through 13 so it says dear friends Let's continue to love one another for love comes from God anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God But anyone who does not love does not know God for God is love God showed how much he loved us by sending us as one and only son to the world so that we might have eternal life through him And this is real love not that we loved God But that he loved us and sent his son as a sacrifice to take away our sins dear for instance God loved us that much We surely ought to love one another no one has ever seen God But if we love each other God lives in us and his love is brought to full expression in us I'm gonna read that again, but his love is brought to full expression in us and God has given us his spirit Is proof that we live in him and he in us Love is is complicated The first step for us understanding what love is for us to think about that the first thing is realized that God's first action is love Love is not something he had to do for us love is not something he chose to do love is not something he turns on Or turns off love is not something he chooses to give to some people and not to give to other people But God's first action is love and Old Testament when we begin seeing how God calls a people to himself and how God is Engaging with people on earth is through love Off about the Old Testament read about God's loving kindness or his faithfulness How God is loving the people that he comes into covenant with and he they use a kind of an ancient practice of covenant making to describe How God loves his people it's really interesting typically you don't think about like a contract is a way to express love right? Like usually we think of contracts are waiting to keep ourselves safe, right? It's kind of a covering mode We see God expressing this relationship with his people through a covenant of loving kindness And what's what's weird is that covenants always assume a relationship might be broken one day and it either party can pull out of this relationship At any time if someone has broken this process But we see is that God can break out of this but God chooses to never have broken out of it And when we have broken our relationship with God is not us who comes to do the fixing is God who comes to the fixing for us So God's love the way that he reaches out the way that he chooses to love us is radically different from the way that we would Operate or behave in the first place God is love is the first actions the primary action God is love you know we often sometimes say that love is God But us saying love is God is us just putting on our own like romantic idealism into the way that he interacts with us I think for a lot of people who struggle with idea of loving God is because we are implanting a human-centered Romantic idealist on this relationship with him like Jesus you never brought me chocolate and flowers I've got a sign it's actually like an old Tablecloth that mirrors got me a few years ago and it said my love language is business and gravy which it is Well, I choose you know I'm business and gravy like we get frustrated because we choose to interact that that love is God But no, that's not the case God is love if we really think about they're fundamentally different The beginning point of God's history of God's relationship with us is love.
It's not anger. It's not bitterness It's not requirements It's not judgment. It's love God is love and God is loving and he's taking this initiative with us first the place that he's taking this primary initiative above anything else Is Jesus Christ? He loved us so much that he came to fix what we had broken himself And the only way that could be fixed and he chose to do that for us in Jesus We see love defined in the act Here's the thing we're having a hard time with love.
We're having a hard time with outward love with what does it mean to love somebody? And we're gonna talk about that later on today When we're having a we're showing the struggle bus What does it look like to apply love in our life? We don't know what to do or what to think what we can look at is how Jesus interacts and how does Jesus interact in those situations in love? Where we would choose to interact in a very very different way the second thing that's important about love We see this passage is this and this is something so important to us If you call yourself a Christian and we're part of the local church is this that how we love is a visible example of our relationship Towards God if we want to know how much we have been impacted and have accepted and chosen to follow in this world of Jesus We need to simply look at how well do we love?
Our capacity to understand the love of God is directly related to our ability to give love That how we treat others many times shows how we feel God has treated us It's only come true minutes personal example just reflection How we treat others oftentimes shows how we believe God has treated us so our that makes our understanding our treatment of others It shows the level to where which we've been willing to let Jesus come into our life and transform us if we're holding back Love the first place I feel like I have to look in my life when I'm holding back love is how much if I process love The early this week I was working on the sermon about to give away my hidden secret right now And so I had to find another hidden secret after this But my favorite place typically on Tuesdays I take the whole day to work on sermons and my favorite place to hide away from the world Is the washer top-airish library on north 18th? It's a different world when you walk into those doors like the internet's kind of there, but not really I forgot my noise canceling headphones on Tuesday, which you really need in the public library And it's like there's stuff going on all around you and I'm like I'm like quiet library What happened what happened to the library one? Shh and also had a string of errands which I typically try to avoid on Tuesdays But I had a string of errands all day long and so I was like happen to go to as much as much traffic as we have in Monroe I was having to go to those places at the exact wrong times all day long and I realized just the irony of me Researching and writing and praying through sermon on love and I had a day where I really did not want to love anyone around me I said this before like I hate air travel because I believe it's like the most This most sub level of human existence because all we use is put our earbuds in and pretend that nobody else around us matters at all Like we try to be the guy that stands up immediately when the the door is opened so you can run out first and dodge people and stuff All Tuesday on processing man. How much do I love people because what I'm seeing in my own heart my own mind is I'm doing this It's not loving like where do I need to allow Jesus to come in and transform my heart?
Because I realize I've got problems going on in my heart right now by the way that I want to treat those around me See we're sharing the truth of God And we're sharing the power of the love of God by how we manifest the love of God in this world The way that we love speaks to who God is and when we have a really hard time loving What are we saying about the God that we claimed to have saved and redeemed and transformed us? Are we doing that good of a job or are we doing a kind of a cruddy job? We're making the presence of God a concrete reality by how we love if we don't love and value we're communicating that God does not love and value I'll say that again if we don't love and value we're communicating to people that God does not love and value How we love tells the story of how we believe and the last thing is this the perfect love cast out all fear It's a little bit further down in first John 4. I really wanted to read the whole chapter today But merit is that was way too much But this is what says such love has no fear because perfect love expels all fear We're afraid this for fear of punishment and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love Such love has no fear So what do we do with the people we don't like?
That's really what this kind of comes down to like we love to love the people that we love right? We can't have a conversation with loves the fruit of the spirits outward action of the present is always spirit in our life Without talking about how we love the people we don't like this is perfect love cast out all fear perfect love perfect the concept that we find In Christian in scripture perfect and perfect doesn't mean without blemish We're humans. We can't live full-off like that It's to bring to completion not to it's a full measure But this is what I love the most that we see some scripture it means overcome expecting limitations Perfect love cast out all fear love that overcomes expected limitations friends. We live in a world that has completely told us It's all right to not like people right?
We live in a world where I mean the polarization of our society right now. It's completely culturally acceptable to hate other people now We have all sorts of words to use to describe it Description perfect love cast out all fear we get into these situations because we become fearful because we become fearful that something about who I am or what I am or what I have is going to be threatened St. Yoda said Fearly stanger and really say hate hate leads to the dark side St. Yoda, I'm telling you right?
There's going to be people because every single one of us has a different experience in life Every single person has gone through something different the person they're sitting next to Even those of you who are married you have different relate different examples and different situations You've gone through in your life that your spouse might not have been through if you have kids You're probably doing everything you can to make sure your kids experience in life is drastically different experience in life that you had right? We all have had different experiences in life Some of you all have been a founder for a long time remember Allison Saul's when she was here sometimes There's one day I was kind of frustrated with somebody and Allison said this to me She said this to me stuff with me ever since she says Chad your world is very different than her world There's so much truth inside of that statement your world is different from her world Some of us have big worlds some of us have worlds the size of starlington all of us had a different level of experiences that made us Who we are so when we talk about people we don't understand we don't agree with or that we don't like We have to talk about that in terms of love because we look at what is what does Jesus do? How does Jesus interact with these people? There's one thing that Jesus never did and sadly it's the first step It's so easy for you and I to go to now in our world But what Jesus never did was dehumanize I mean there's clearly people that Jesus did not agree with in scripture You see that people that might not have understood who he was his own disciples didn't figure it out I'm sure there's some people he did not like as well But what we see Christ exercises love is never through actions of dehumanization They love us about value gloves about saying I might not agree with you or I might not understand you and Because of the love of Jesus.
I can love you The fruits of spirit are about outward actions outward actions matter when we need outward actions, right? Outward actions are simply just reactions true love is only manifested by an action of the spirit That's the difference between human love and God's love human love has qualifications behind it, right? We can we can say I don't agree with them because of this or I don't like them because of this or I hate them because of this Human love has boundaries around it. God's love is a manifestation of the Holy Spirit in spite of every single thing that our sinful nature Might be trying to say it's us saying I can love because Jesus loves It's us saying I'm willing to be defined and powered by the love of God that's implanted upon my heart It's us sayings me saying is you saying I am alone going to allow the Holy Spirit to have such a presence in my life That it changes the way I outwardly behave And friends if we think about that that is truly something radical, isn't it?
Jesus we pray for us to understand love and for us to understand it in such a way that we allow it to change us for us to understand it in Such a way that we live beyond ourselves for us to and there's no way we're ever gonna understand your love Jesus But for us to be willing to say my outward actions are going to be controlled by the Holy Spirit Not myself to where we allow you to come into our heart in such a way it changes us Jeez, we believe in your love. We believe in your kingdom. We want to be part of it Thank you so much for giving us the ability to do this alongside of you. It's showing pray