 |
| Rev. Brent Russett |
Pastor of
Sunnyside Wesleyan Church in Ottawa:
http://www.sunnysidechurchottawa.com/ _______________________________________________________
PODCAST LINK to CFRA broadcast - Sunday, January 5th, 2014:
____________________________________________
‘What does it mean to Love Others’
Good
morning. And welcome to good news in the morning. My name is Brent Russett. I
am the Senior Pastor at Sunnyside Wesleyan Church. It is my pleasure to look at
some of life’s challenges, and then bring you some good news in the morning.
This
program is sponsored by Good News Christian Ministries. If you want to look us
up on the internet, or to re-listen to this program you can find us at Goodnewsinthemorning.ca
This morning I want to look at what it means Love
others.
MUSIC
Fill my Cup Lord – Vocal Union 2:47
Jesus
makes it really clear that we are to love our neighbours and that we are to
love one another. The question I want to grapple with this morning is what does
it mean to love others.
Now our language and our culture
doesn’t help us out a whole lot. We talk about loving pizza, and loving
puppies, and loving our spouse or our kids. But I really hope the way you love
pizza and the way you love your kids are qualitatively different.
Hollywood romances often distort
love. Love songs often portray sex and love as the same thing.
There are some parents who think it
is love to give their kids everything they want. The kids were spoiled but that
was love.
I must also say that our faith helps
us, but it also poses some obstacles of what it means to love others; especially
if you haven’t really thought it through.
We are supposed to love everyone.
But love that general is meaningless. Only God can authentically love everyone.
We have a tendency to generalize our
love, so it makes us feel like we are a loving person. But Christian love seems
to be specific. And we have a lot more trouble with specifics. We can love
everyone, but the good Samaritan loved someone.
And then just to complicate this
whole thing a little more some people are just hard to love.
There is the kind of person who is
just different than us. Loving someone with whom we have nothing in common with
is challenging. The bible would suggest that if we hold Jesus in common, that
this is enough to really love each other. I believe that to be true. I have had
deep rich fellowship with people with whom I have had nothing in common with
except Jesus and it has been good.
But then there is the other kind of
person. I call them the extra grace required kind of person. The kind that is
irritating, challenging, infuriating, and often insulting in an indirect kind
of way. How do you love that kind of person?
Have you ever had trouble loving
someone. I know I have. There are some people who are hard to love.
But there are people who are harder
to love yet. These are the people who you have loved, but then they have
betrayed you, or hurt you, or abandoned you, or offended you, or have ripped
your heart out and stomped on it. I think these are the hardest people to love.
And then we read passage like
1 John 4
7 ¶ Dear friends, let
us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born
of God and knows God.
8
Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
9 This
is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the
world that we might live through him.
10 This
is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an
atoning sacrifice for our sins.
11 Dear
friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
12
No-one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us
and his love is made complete in us.
My mind automatically looks for
exception clauses. I know that John is writing to Christians – so when he says
we have to love one another – I think that narrows it down.
But then again-- I sometimes find
Christians harder to love because they know Jesus and I think they should know
better. And Jesus really didn’t allow the exception clause when he said that
most important command after loving God with all you have is to love your
neighbor as yourself.
Have you ever had trouble loving
someone?
There are some people who are just
hard to love. But when I look closely at myself I find that I, myself, am a
problem in this love equation. There are times when I don’t feel like loving.
Love takes energy and time and thought – and I find myself warring with myself.
It is easy to blame the lack of love on irregular people, or hard to love
people but sometimes the lack of love – is in fact just that – my lack
of love.
Maybe you have seen that in yourself
too.
But here is the thing, when I think
about the kind of person I want to be, I know that part of that is a genuinely
loving person. More than that I want to be a genuinely loving man – which I
think shows up somewhat differently than a genuinely loving woman.
But the challenge is somewhat with
other people and somewhat with me. My guess is that many of you would like to
be this as well.
The question is how? What does it
mean to love? And if we figure that out how do we love.
MUSIC Music – Starfield
-Cry in my heart (3:21)
Let me give you some ways that people try to
love.
The Intentional Model
In this model love is an action.
That is true. If you skip down a few verses this is what it says,
1John 3:18 Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but
with actions and in truth.
So you can’t just say to God or to
other people, I love you, I love you. There needs to be some action to back it
up. Love is more than a feeling/ if it is a feeling at all. Love is an action
But not only that, love is a
command. Jesus said, John 13:34 "A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved
you, so you must love one another.
Jesus didn’t say, an new option I am
giving to you. He didn’t say, a new suggestion I am giving you. He said a new
command I am giving you.
So we are commanded to love, and
love is an action, therefore love is a choice. We are going to choose to be
loving. We are going to choose to do what is in another person’s best interest
whether they respond or not. We are going to choose to love, without the
expectation of return. Love is a command and love is an action so love is a
choice.
There is a lot of truth to this
model. There is a good book written on this topic called “love is a
choice”. There is a place for this kind
of thinking and this kind of model. But
let’s go back to what the text says.
1John 3:18 Dear children, let us not love
with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.
Love in truth. Sometimes what this
model leads us to, is a kind of love that is not particularly truthful. When
you are making a choice to do the right things, the loving things, but if your
heart is full of bitterness and resentment I don’t think that we can say I’m
loving in truth.
It is true that he can give you the
power and the strength to choose but maybe there is more.
Let’s look at a different
model. That was intentional model let’s
look at
The Imitation Model (The
Copy model)
This model takes a different
approach to love. The Copy Model says we should copy God. God loved us so we
should love others. Again there is something to be said for this copy model.
1Jo 4:11 Dear friends, since God so
loved us, we also ought to love one another.
We see how much God loved us, so we
should love him. We should be like him. We should copy God’s actions.
In fact the Bible kind of indicates
that any love that we do engage in, really is copying God.
1Jo 4:19 We love because he first loved us.
Now where is this more keenly seen
than in the death of Christ. While we were yet sinners Christ died for us.
When you realize that God so loved
the world that he gave his son. When you realize that it was love that took
Jesus to the cross. It was love that kept Jesus at the cross. It was love that
caused him to bear your sin and my sin. It was love. Then we start to see that
there is something to this copy model.
How can I really follow after Jesus
and not love as Jesus loved. Love cost Jesus a lot, so how can I complain if
love costs me relatively so little.
In fact, if you are having trouble
loving God or loving someone else then I recommend that you walk with Jesus in
your mind and in your heart to the cross. I recommend that contemplate how
difficult that it was for God to love you – and yet there was no question he
did. He loved you.
Often time when we see the suffering
and sacrifice of Christ it puts things into perspective. That is why we
celebrate lent and Easter every year. It has a way of bringing life into
perspective.
But sometimes the copy model falls
short. We see someone who has hurt us. We see someone who is unnatural for us
to love and we say – I’m not God. God might love them but I just can’t. I would
like to be like Jesus but I am not there yet. Or sometimes we wonder about our
love for God. The hurts in our lives cause our love for God to grow cold.
There is another model I would like
you to consider
The Infusion model
Romans 5:5 b God has poured out his love into our hearts by the
Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.
How does love come from God in a way
that we can give it away. – In a way that we can give it back to God and love
each other. This verse says that love has been poured into you by the Holy
Spirit.
When you became a Christian God
placed his Spirit in your heart. The third member of trinity, God the Holy
Spirit came and took up residence in your life. Now if God is love, and God has
been placed in our lives, we have an infusion of love.
It is like God has poured his love
into our
This is the model I want when I am
having trouble loving God, or loving someone else. I want God to come along and zap me, or pour
his love into me, or fill me so that it will be easy to love. I want to do this
the easy way.
But this is not really the easy way.
Let me give you this verse in context.
Romans
5
3 Not only so, but
we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces
perseverance;
4 perseverance, character; and character, hope.
5 And hope does not disappoint us, because God
has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given
us.
It seems that the love that God has
poured into our lives by the holy Spirit seems to emerge in the middle of
difficulty. It emerges in suffering, and perseverance that develops character,
that produces hope, that sees the Spirit of God give us the grace to love.
How does that work. At the core of
who you are, if you have given your life to Jesus you are, indwelt by the Holy
Spirit, you are full of love. You can’t help but be, because God lives in you
and He is love. But often, there is huge distance between our core and what we
project to the rest of the world.
Because what stands between the core
of who we really are and the person that other people see is our false selves.
This is the part of us that gets easily
offended. It is the part of us that is insecure and acts out of that
insecurity. It is the part of us that is out of touch with our core. Because of
that our emotions are out of wack. We get angry at the wrong things and fail to
get angry at the right things. We can’t genuinely love there is too much of us
that is broken to be able to love.
So what does God do. He doesn’t want
to see us left in this state. So instead he allows challenges and suffering
into our lives. And suffering and persevering through that suffering, in the
power of the Holy Spirit breaks down our false selves. It also brings us a
measure of humility. It produces character – it produces who we really are. And
when the Spirit of love is at your core and when your false self is dismantled,
and your true self shines through you love.
You love at a depth that was before
impossible. You love those difficult to love people. You even can love those
who have really hurt you.
Now as I am sure you know, loving
someone and giving people the opportunity to do evil are two different thing.
By the grace of God we can love someone who has been an abuser, but loving the
does not require that we allow vulnerable people to be alone with them.
But that is the thing about the Holy
Spirit. Not only is He the Spirit of love but he is also the Spirit of Wisdom.
When we are ready to here is voice, he can show us how to love in this broken
world.
****
So how do you start. Well you make a
commitment to the Lord, Lord you have commanded me to love, and you have shown
me that love is an action. I am going to choose to love.
For those of you who this doesn’t come naturally to – I
would suggest that you commit yourself to do two loving acts this week, as a
spiritual discipline. I am choosing to obey Christ.
But then you go further than that.
You remind yourself of God’s love for you. You have seen the Lord love you. Be
imitators of Jesus. Spends some time thinking about how the Lord loved you, and
then look for a place to pass that love on. Let your mind dwell there.
As you do start to give thanks for
the Love he has already poured into your heart and let him know you want it to
come to the surface. Ask him to help you get rid of the stuff that hides his
love in you.
We pray and we look for the filling
of the Holy Spirit, to complete the work.
There is a reason why love is
mentioned first in the list of the fruit of the Spirit. Because that is what
the Spirit does. A by product of the indwelling of the Spirit is that we are
empowered to love.
And what is going to happen is that
the shackles of our false self will fall away, and you will be free to love,
even when that love is not returned.
Let me end by reminding you what
love is
1 Corinthians
13 (NLT)
4 Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud 5 or
rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no
record of being wronged. 6 It does not rejoice about injustice but
rejoices whenever the truth wins out. 7 Love never gives up, never loses
faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.
Then
it goes on to say
13 Three things
will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.
That Is
who I want be. How about you? Are you willing to allow God to work with you to
fill you with love?
Let’s
Pray
Lord Jesus, I thank you
that you have given us the power to love. You’ve given us the command of love, and
you’ve shown us to make a choice for love. You’ve shown us what love really means
when you went to the Cross and now you’ve put yourself in our hearts and you’ve
given us the ability to love.
But Lord, so often we fail
at that. So often we’re not good at loving others, especially difficult people.
So Lord, I’m asking today
that you would change us so that we could love others well.
I ask this in Jesus’ name.
Amen.
Thank
you, Listeners for your words of encouragement, and for keeping us in your prayers. Keeping this program on the air continues to
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My name is Brent Russett and it has
been a pleasure to spend this Sunday morning with you.
May
you know Jesus Christ personally and
profoundly. May the Holy Spirit reside
deep within your heart . And may the
heavenly Father surround you with His constant and abiding and accompanying
love
These thousand Hills –
third day 3:08
Rev. Brent Russett
Pastor of Sunnyside Wesleyan Church in Ottawa:
___________________________________________________
To listen to the above broadcast,
click on the following link:
http://proxy.autopod.ca/podcasts/chum/6/18568/good_news_086_jan05.mp3
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