Imagine a world without love. What would that look like? Well, sadly, you and I don’t have to do too much imagining. We don’t have to look too far from home to see what a loveless world really looks like.

A World Without Love

Love is something that we take for granted; it just is. It just exists. It’s always been here, always will be, love. When I was younger, by far the majority of pop songs were in fact about that very thing, love. These days, believe it or not, ninety-two percent of pop songs feature sex. Well, it seems that sex sells, but as much as love is something that’s always been there – something we take for granted, it’s the lack of love or the failure of people to love each other that causes the most pain in this world, and not just on a geopolitical scale; it’s the absence of love or the failure of love that causes most of the pain in our lives at an individual level.

Can I be even more specific? In your life, and my life, think about the things that are causing you pain right at the moment. Ok; there may be health issues or financial issues, but most of the pain in our lives is caused by relationship issues – anger, resentment, arguments, feeling ignored and passed over; people who try to bully you; people who always want to get their own way. Just think about your relationships at the moment. Where do they fall short? What are the things causing you hurt at the moment? Think. Isn’t it all about people failing to love one another the way they should? Absolutely.

Now my dictionary tells me that love is a strong feeling of affection. That’s it. Well, I don’t know about you, but I think that that’s a wholly unsatisfactory definition of love. My feelings, your feelings, the next person’s feelings, they go up and down depending on how we feel physically and emotionally; depending on what’s happening around us. Anyone who’s been married for any length of time will tell you there are times in a marriage that your wife or your husband drive you completely bonkers. You thought you knew them; then they do that! No. If love is going to have any meaning at all, it has to be much more than a strong feeling or emotion.

So, what exactly is love? What actually is it? If you had to get up and give the rest of us your definition of love in twenty-five words or less, what would you say? How would you put it? Well, that’s what I want to explore on the programme with you this week and in fact, next week. Let’s take a journey together to discover what love actually is, because if in our heart of hearts we can work that out, then at the very least, you and I’ll have a better sense of how to love other people, and that has to be a good thing. Right?

So we’re going to spend some time together in 1 Corinthians 13. I guess that’s a really familiar passage to many, written by the apostle Paul to the church in Corinth. It seems that the church which he was involved in planting in the first century AD was having some significant problems – arguments, dissention, so Paul (who’s off somewhere else at the time) writes this letter to them. These days, that letter is the seventh book of the New Testament, and the reason that chapter 13 is so well-known is that it’s almost always the chapter that gets spoken about at weddings … well, Christian weddings at least, and it kicks off talking about love in rather an odd way. It starts off by describing a world without love. Let’s have a listen. 1 Corinthians 13:1-3:

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but I don’t have love, I’m just a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

So, what God’s saying here through Paul is that it doesn’t matter how clever or gifted you are. It doesn’t matter how much your life is a life of sacrifice. It doesn’t matter how generous you are; how much faith you have. If you aren’t motivated by love, it’s all completely useless. You know something? I think He’s absolutely right.

We all know people who are incredibly bright or gifted or talented, and yet they’re not the sort of people you want to hang around because there’s no love. There’s no kindness or gentleness. For them, it’s all about them. Blow you! Blow me! They’re only interested in advancing themselves, and we just don’t like being around those sorts of people. It’s those sorts of people that ruin relationships. It’s those sorts of people who start wars. If I don’t have love, then I gain nothing! If I don’t do everything out of love, motivated by love for God and for others, then what’s the point?

And the love that Paul’s talking about here … well, it’s not some vague feeling of affection like in my dictionary. The original Greek word that he uses there is agape, and agape is a selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love. Of the four types of love spoken about in the Bible, it’s the highest form of love. It’s the love that God showed to you and to me by sending Jesus to the cross to die for us. When Jesus said, “No greater love has any man than to lay down his life for his friends”, that’s exactly the sort of love that He was talking about. Rock-solid, unconditional love. Love that endures all the ups and downs. Love that never wavers or fails, even when the object of that love doesn’t deserve it. Without that sort of love, all the gifts, all the abilities in the world, mean nothing. Would you agree?

So, how are you living your life? Is your life mostly about you, or about the love that you have for the people around you? Because when you and I are dead and gone, the only thing that we’ll leave behind is the love (or not) that we deposited in the hearts of the people who really mattered to us.

Love is Patient and Kind

I recently attended the funeral of a close friend of mine, Warwick Isherwood, and he was a lawyer who worked in several top-tier law firms. Many years ago, I’d worked for a firm who’d used his services and then, when I had my own company, we also used his legal services. Over the years, he became a close friend and sadly, he passed away all too young from pancreatic cancer. What amazed me though, as people got up to speak about him at his funeral and as I chatted with different people at his wake, was how many of his other former clients had become good friends. He was just that kind of guy – a tough insightful lawyer, but patient and kind as well. He stood out head and shoulders above his peers because he cared for other people. He delighted in mentoring young lawyers. He delighted in relating to people.

I left the funeral and went back to the airport to fly home. I had a couple of hours to kill, so I sat down in a large food hall area in the airport, pulled out my laptop, and did a bit of work and walked around. Now I love watching people in these large, busy airports. All the food vendors were selling their different meals; people wandering in, looking at the illuminated boards above the checkouts, deciding which salad or burger or kebab they were going to have; going and sitting down at tables, most of them on their own, and wolfing down their dinner. At one fast food outlet, people even placed their order on large touch-screens.

It was all so impersonal; so transactional; so typical of life today – people racing from one place to another through the airport, dinnertime, food, race to the gate, airline staff in their uniforms, transaction after transaction after transaction. As I was boarding my flight, I couldn’t help but be struck by the stark difference between the way Warwick lived his life and the transactional, impersonal world that we live in. In fact, it’s precisely because of that stark contrast that Warwick Isherwood stood out from the crowd. As I sat on the flight back home again, I had to ask myself, “Do I stand out from the crowd for the same reasons, or am I so lost in this high-speed world of impersonal transactions that I just blend in with the crowd?” Those are the questions that we should be asking ourselves, I think.

So, what are the attributes of this genuine love that makes a person stand out from the crowd for the right reasons? Well, let’s look at the first two that we find in 1 Corinthians 13:4. It says this:

Love is patient, love is kind.

Now, we don’t have to go to a dictionary to get a definition of patience and kindness; we all know what they are, right? I remember when I first read that verse it was like a dagger into my heart, because I’m not naturally a patient or a kind person. Before I became a Christian, I spent twenty years building a career as an IT consultant, and my plan was to climb to the top. I’d roll over anyone who got in my way. I’d climb over the top of anyone to get where I was going. I’d made grown men cry, I was that tough and that brutal, and let me tell you, that doesn’t all change the moment you become a Christian. Patience and kindness are things that I had to learn and let me tell you, they’re things that I’m still learning.

I want you to imagine for a moment a world in which everyone is patient and kind. Just stop and think, what would that look like? In the traffic; rushing through the train-station; at work; in the supermarket, so instead of people getting angry about the slow person walking in front of them, they just slowed down a little bit, backed off, and cut other people some slack. Imagine the stress that would evaporate instantly if everyone were patient and kind. Now, I know what you’re thinking. ‘Berni, get real! That’s never going to happen’, and I agree with you; it’s not, but now imagine your world if you consistently showed patience and kindness to everyone you met.

Think of the person who frustrates you most in your life. Instead of getting hot under the collar with them, you just kind of accept them for who they are and show them patience, and that rude individual that you deal with day after day after day, you make a decision to be kind to them – not because you have to, but because that’s what love is, and Jesus died for you on that cross, bearing your sins when you didn’t deserve it. Now, how different would your world be? How much of the tension would just disappear out of your life if you lived out that one half a verse from the Bible? How much more would people look at you and say, “Wow! I like being around that person?” Psalm 86:15:

But You, o LORD, are a God who is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

See, that’s what God’s love to you and me is like. God is patient and God is kind. Now I think right there is a great definition of patience; it’s being slow to anger. Instead of flying off the handle, you just kind of pull back, and cut the person some slack. And in this high-speed, impersonal, transactional world, I sometimes think that patience and kindness, simple as they are, are profound and amazing expressions of love. They’re so rare in the supermarket and the train-station and the airport, they stand out, much in the same way as my friend Warwick stood out.

So, here’s the challenge for you today. Take a short half a verse, and just start living it.

Love is patient, love is kind.

Because when we start loving the people around us the way God loves us, the world starts to change. Their lives start to change. They start wanting to know what it is that we have that they’re missing out on. How about it? Be patient; be kind, and see what happens.

Love Isn’t Envious, Boastful, Arrogant or Rude

Love. It makes the world go round. Countless songs have been written and sung about it, and yet it seems to me that in this modern-day world, many of us have forgotten how to love. People are working longer and harder. Add to that the traffic, the commute, the crush of the train-station, the crush of the local shopping mall, and nerves are frayed; tempers are boiling over. It wears you out, doesn’t it? It’s tiring; exhausting, so we withdraw into our shells, and we try and shut it all out. You know that feeling of plonking yourself down on the couch at the end of a hard day, and just being glad that the rest of the world is out there, and you’re in here?

So you get to the end of a hard day like that; perhaps the end of a hard week, and you think to yourself, ‘Who are the people that I’ve encountered who stand out from the crowd? Who treated me well? Who treated me badly?’ Have you ever done that? Why not do it now? In your mind, do a quick stocktake of the people who’ve treated you well and those who’ve treated you badly. For most, there’s a real imbalance between the good and the bad there, and my theory is that the reason for that is that we’ve forgotten how to be a community in the clamour to get ahead. We’ve forgotten how to love one another in this transactional world, and in a sense, that’s what this series is all about – a rediscovery of what love is; going back to God’s Word, since after all God is love, and rediscovering from God Himself what love was always meant to be:

Love is patient, love is kind.

We’ve looked at that, but right now, let’s go to the second half of that verse (in 1 Corinthians 13:4), which tells us what love isn’t. This is what it says:

Love is not envious, or boastful, or arrogant, or rude.

That’s quite a list, isn’t it? Envy, boastfulness, arrogance and rudeness all bundled in together. I wonder why. Well, it turns out that they’re all symptoms of a much deeper malady, and that malady is so often insecurity.

Think about it. What makes you envious? Someone else has something that you don’t. They’re better-looking; they have a better spouse; more money; a bigger house; they seem to be more happy and content than you are; they have more friends; they enjoy their job. Whatever it is, they have something that you don’t, so you compare, and you covet, and you desire, and you envy what they have. Never mind that you have this and that and the other thing that they don’t have! Out of a deep sense of insecurity, you envy them, and so then to bolster yourself up, you boast about what you do have. Boastfulness is the other side of the coin to envy.

People talk themselves up; they tell others how good they are; they namedrop; they … It’s a vicious, sad cycle. Those people come across as being arrogant and rude, all because deep inside, something’s missing. It’s insecurity; it’s discontentment; it hurts, and so it comes out as envy, boastfulness, arrogance, and rudeness. Let me ask you simply and kindly, do you have any of that in your life? Come on, be honest with yourself. Take a good, hard look because if that’s happening in your life, you are going to struggle to love other people the way that Jesus loved you.

Before I came to Christ, I was that guy. I wanted everyone to think well of me. I wanted everyone to be impressed with who I was, and I remember the deep sense of envy I felt when someone else succeeded. It felt as though their success was my loss. That’s a terrible state of affairs, and so I would boast about my success and, I’m told, it came across as arrogance and rudeness. You can’t build healthy relationships like that. You can’t show love like that.

For me, it began to change when I met Jesus; when I started to experience His love. I don’t mean that in any kind of cliché way. Seriously, I remember sitting quietly in prayer during a dark, dark time in my life; being filled by His Spirit and His love. The Bible says that God’s perfect love conquers all our fears, and that’s how it was for me. You see, I couldn’t stop that envy; that boasting and arrogance and rudeness, until I experienced God’s healing on the inside. It’s not enough to say, “Don’t do those things; change your behaviour”, because our behaviour is simply a manifestation (a symptom) of what’s going on in our hearts.

Murder begins in the heart, Jesus said. “Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks”, and unless and until we experience the amazing love of Jesus Christ for ourselves, we can’t heal ourselves. The world will tell you, “Look, modify your behaviour. Simple! Done!” yet people see psychologists and counsellors for years; I mean, years, and they still don’t see improvement. There’s a reason for that. It’s because only the love of God in Jesus Christ can bring you that healing.

I looked and I looked everywhere. I was successful on the outside, but lost and empty and insecure on the inside. I can tell you, I looked everywhere. And over two decades ago now, when I encountered Jesus for myself, that’s where I found the healing on the inside that I’d been looking for; the healing that I so desperately needed. Psalm 34:17-20:

When the righteous cry for help, the LORD hears and rescues them from all their troubles. The LORD is near to the broken-hearted and saves the crushed in spirit. Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the LORD rescues them from them all.

That’s simply what God does. That’s why Jesus came – to give sight to the blind, to bind up the broken-hearted, and to set the captives free.

Now perhaps you’ve never experienced this perfect love of God for yourself. Perhaps you’ve been listening today, and you’ve got an ache to have that love heal you on the inside – to set you free, so you can truly love other people around you; so that you can truly get rid of this whole insecurity that makes you behave the way you do. Well, I want to give you that opportunity today. If you want to accept Jesus Christ into your life, why don’t you pray this prayer with me?

Father God, I’ve been listening today about your amazing love, and I know … I know that I need some healing on the inside. I’ve been searching and looking, and today as I’ve heard about Jesus, I feel like I’ve finally found what I’ve been yearning for. Lord, please forgive me for all the stupid things I’ve done in my life. I’m so sorry. I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. I believe that He came to die for me so that my sins (all my failures) would be forgiven, and I believe that Jesus Christ rose again from the grave so that I could have a new life, forever and ever and ever.

Father God, today I accept Jesus as my only Saviour and the Lord of my life. I put all my trust in Him because I can’t do it for myself. Please accept me today just as I am. Lord, please heal me from the inside out. In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.

My friend, if you just prayed that prayer with me, you are forgiven. You are set free, and the Holy Spirit has come to dwell in you, to make that healing start in a way that you could never have done for yourself. Do yourself a favour. Go find yourself a Bible-believing; vibrant, faith-filled church that preaches the good news of Jesus Christ; that serves and loves the poor and the needy, and you will grow immeasurably as Jesus deals with all of the things in your life that you yourself can’t deal with. God loves you more than words can say. Let that love transform you. Love isn’t envious or boastful or arrogant or rude; God’s perfect love is gentle and kind, and I guarantee that as the weeks and the months and the years pass by, that love will transform you into who He always meant you to be.

Have you ever met someone whose life’s credo is … my way or the highway? Course you have. It’s not a lot of fun is it? But seriously, how do you get on when you don’t get your own way?

Love Doesn’t Insist on Its Own Way

I remember a soccer game when I was in the fifth grade. Mr Moore was my favourite teacher. He took the whole class down to the local park at the end of the street where I lived.

He broke the class into two teams, and we had a game of soccer. All good, until he made a call that the ball had gone out, and I absolutely knew he was wrong. Never mind that there were no lines marked on the field. He called it out and I called him out.

“Hey Sir, that wasn’t out!” He just blew the whistle and called it out. So I carried on, and he called me over and he said, “Look Berni, if you don’t like it, you can go and sit under that tree.”

Well, even at a young age, I was a man of principle and I did just that. I, in my immaturity, thought I was doing the right thing. Of course, it was stupid. I was living out the credo – it’s my way or the highway. And sadly, my life headed in that direction until well into my thirties.

Now, you don’t have to be Einstein to figure out that if each of the several billion people on planet earth lived their lives that way, there’s going to be an awful lot of chaos. Well, actually there is an awful lot of chaos, have you noticed? At any one time there are around 45 to 50 wars being fought. Yeah, that many.

There’s conflict on the road. There’s conflict in the workplace. There’s conflict in the home. All because everyone wants to have their own way.

We’re in the middle of a series of messages at the moment that I’ve called simply, ‘Love Is …’. It’s all about rediscovering exactly what love is, in this busy, chaotic world in which we live, by going back to the source of love, God Himself. So we’ve been poking around a bit in 1 Corinthians chapter 13 – a familiar passage to many, because it’s almost always used in wedding ceremonies.

So, let’s have a bit of a listen to where we are so far, 1 Corinthians chapter 13, verses 1 to 5:

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but I do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but I do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way…

So the upshot of all that, is that without love all the gifts and abilities and sacrifices and successes in the world are completely meaningless. We all know good looking, successful, intelligent people … who are an absolute pain in the neck for that very reason, right?

No, instead, love is patient, love is kind, love isn’t envious, or boastful or arrogant or rude. And, the thing that we’re going to unpack a bit more today, is that love does not insist on its own way.

Now the truth is, that in this world we don’t get to have our own way all the time. When we’re children, we’re subject to our parents, and our teachers. Their job, in great part, is to teach us to be submissive to authority.

Now you see, that’s not a particularly fashionable notion these days anymore, is it? You speak to a lot of teachers these days, and they’ll tell you that their hands are bound, by and large, in disciplining children at school. Many parents have abdicated their role of teaching submission to authority … and so we’re turning out young adults, not all of them, but a lot of them, who think they can all have their own way.

They get into the workplace, and they have a rude shock! God talks a lot about submission and obedience, not because He wants to put us under His thumb. No, actually, He lets us choose – which is a pretty amazing thing, isn’t it?

But He knows that submitting to authority is an important part of growing up and being mature. Have a listen to this little one for instance – Ephesians chapter 5, verse 21:

Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.

That’s talking about mutual submission between a husband and wife. And again, it’s pretty obvious that for a marriage to work, there needs to be mutual submission. So what exactly is this submission thing?

Well, to put it plainly, it’s giving up what you want, and letting the other person have their way. We do it out of respect for authority every day. It may well take my fancy to drive down the wrong side of the road, but I don’t because it’s against the law and because if I did, it would cause absolute chaos. I don’t steal from the local supermarket for similar reasons. You see, we do it every day without thinking.

But then, all of a sudden, we run into a situation like my childhood soccer match, we run into a situation where we just want to dig our heels in. I’ve seen it at church council meetings where people have torn into each other like you wouldn’t believe! I’ve seen it in marriages and families. I’ve seen it in the workplace. Hey, I’ve seen it in the carpark at my local supermarket. It’s my way or the highway!

Now … let’s just stop and think about that for a minute. What exactly is going on here? At first we might imagine that we have a right to stand on principle. And to be sure, there are times when that’s necessary.

I answer to a board here at Christianityworks … they’re a great bunch of godly leaders with great wisdom. But every now and then, someone will come up with an idea that just isn’t workable, so I have to push back and explain why that is. That’s part of submission, but in wisdom.

To their credit, when that happens, 99 times out of 100 they will yield, they’ll submit to my experience and my knowledge. Just as I have to yield to their godly wisdom. See that’s what mutual submission looks like. And we do that out of love. We do that out of reverence for Christ.

Mutual submission preserves and indeed strengthens and deepens relationships. Remember, this comes in a passage which sets out to define what love is. That’s why this series is called, ‘Love Is …’. And love does not insist on its own way.

If we’re operating out of love, then we don’t approach the day, a situation, a relationship, with a ‘my way or the highway’ attitude. Now, here at Christianityworks I’m the overall leader and, whilst I involve the team in decision-making, at the end of the day I have the final call on things.

Sometimes, many times in fact, other people have better ideas than me or they have a different approach, a better approach to the one that I had. Under those circumstances I’d be an idiot to insist on my own way. Other times, I can see the bigger picture, and I make the call to go in this direction rather than in that direction.

Love operates out of wisdom. Love looks for mutual submission. And when you have two people who work that way, say in a marriage, it’s going to be a fantastic marriage. If you have a team of people working that way in a ministry, or at work, hey it’s such an exciting place to work, because you get to tap into all the gifts and abilities and insight and experience of all the people on the team to get the best results.

Now, just a quick footnote, to letting the other person have their way. The key to submission, is to do it gladly, willingly, joyfully. “Alright then, have your way!” that is not what we’re talking about here. Passive aggressive behaviour, undermining a decision, resisting it at every turn is not what we’re talking about here.

If we’re operating out of love, we won’t insist on our own way. We will persuade, we’ll guide, we’ll yield and we’ll submit out of a good heart. And when that’s the way you live, man, people really respect that. People delight in that. Because what they see there, is love at work. Because that is what love is.

Love Isn’t Irritable or Resentful

I remember when Jacqui and I were married many years ago. It was back in the days when toothpaste didn’t come in the plastic tubes that it does today, but these were (kind of) soft metal tubes.

From when I was a little boy I had been taught to squeeze the toothpaste from the bottom and as the lower parts of the tube became empty, you kind of rolled it up systematically. The aim was to get the maximum amount out of your tube. By the end, the whole thing was rolled up, except the very top, where you squeezed the very last little bit out, before you opened the new tube.

Well, we got married, we moved in together, and I’m thinking we’ll share the toothpaste tube in the bathroom. But to my shock, to my horror, SHE squeezed the old tube from the middle – and it was this mangled mess! I … I was speechless. After a few weeks, I decided that, for the sake of marital bliss, we would need to have separate toothpaste tubes, something which continues to this very day.

That’s crazy isn’t it?! And yet, as Solomon writes in the Song of Songs, it’s the little foxes that spoil the vine. It’s the little things that can niggle away at a relationship that can destroy things. Certain things annoy each one of us. The things that annoy you are probably quite different to the things that annoy me.

If you really want to annoy me, (other than squeezing the toothpaste from the middle), be late to a meeting and waste my time. Why does that annoy me? Because I’m an achievement oriented kind of guy, who plans his time down to the last minute.

Sometimes we find other people’s habits incredibly annoying. The way they speak, or some aspect of their body language. And it irritates us. Think about how you behave when you’re irritated. It’s not nice is it? You’re not nice to other people when you are irritated, none of us are. And let me say it again, it’s often the little things that rub us the wrong way.

So, how do we love others in that situation? Because that’s what this series of messages is all about … love. How to love, what it means to love. And it’s down here in the weeds, down here in the middle of the nitty-gritty little things of life, where either we love people or we don’t.

We often think of love as some grand thing, supported by grand or romantic acts, and that’s fine as far as it goes. Love is a grand thing and sometimes we do big things, we make big sacrifices to love other people. But have you noticed how 99.9% of life is just the humdrum mundane stuff. The same old, same old. Day after day?

Here’s what God says about the whole irritability thing. 1 Corinthians chapter 3, verses 4 and 5:

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful.

If you love someone, if you want to show the love of Christ to a work colleague, to a friend, to a child, to a spouse … then irritability and resentfulness – we’ll talk about the second one in a moment – they just don’t have any place in the relationship.

If you’ve been married for any length of time, you will know that the little foibles of your soul–mate can drive you nuts. I remember being at a church in Accra in Ghana a few years ago, and the pastor was preaching on this very thing. He told how all their marriage, his wife would just come in the front door and kick her shoes off and leave them there.

It used to cause a huge amount of tension in their marriage – drove them crazy. Why can’t she just pick up her shoes and put them away?! Until one day, He was praying about this, and God spoke to Him. God said: You just can’t go and pick her shoes up and put them away for her?

Since that day, that’s exactly what he’s done, with a glad and a willing heart and the tension is gone. You see, if we allow this irritability to go on and on, it turns into something worse. It turns into resentment. Now, resentment is a nasty thing. It’s like a cancer that eats away at a relationship. When you start to resent what someone does, it brings up bitterness and unforgiveness.

It’s interesting to go back to the original Greek language that this verse was written in: love is not irritable or resentful. Quite literally, it says that love is not easily provoked (that’s the irritability bit) and, here’s what it says about resentment: it doesn’t think about, dwell on or reckon the evil.

And that’s exactly what resentment is. You dwell on it, you think about it, you turn it over and over and over in your mind, you think about how bad this person really is, and you ascribe it to them, and you reckon it to their account. You think of them as being evil. And here’s the absolutely crazy thing: we do this over stupid little things like how you squeeze the toothpaste.

You think about the people who irritate you, the people towards whom you feel resentment – and ask yourself, what is the thing that irritates me? What is the thing that I resent in that person? And ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it will be some stupid, insignificant little thing, in the scheme of things that really doesn’t matter.

Listen again and listen carefully this time:

love is not irritable and resentful.

So, how do you overcome that? How do we get over irritability and resentment? The answer, the plain and simple answer, is forgiveness. Here’s what Jesus had to say on the subject. Matthew chapter 18, verses 21 and 22:

Then Peter came and said to him, ‘Lord, if another member of the church sins against me, how often should I forgive them? As many as seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy- seven times.’

See this speaks directly into this sort of irritability and resentment that goes on day after day as someone’s habits rub you the wrong way. When you think about it, we’re a lot like Peter. He thought that seven times was an awful lot of times to forgive someone. But Jesus reaches into His hyperbole bag and says, no not seven times, but seventy–seven times. Over and over and over and over again. Do you get the picture?

If we truly want to love someone, really, then we forgive over and over and over again, just as God forgives us. Is it hard? Sure it is! Forgiveness is always hard. Look at what it cost Jesus to forgive us – death on a cross. That’s why Jesus said in Matthew chapter 16, verses 24 to 26:

If you want to become followers of mine, then deny yourselves, take up your cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but they forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life.

The whole crux of love, the whole point of love, is that it’s not about us, it’s about the people whom we’re called to love, you and I. There are two ways to live, for ourselves with the big ME in the centre of the universe, or for God and others. And what, according to Jesus, is the single most important thing in life? Mark chapter 12, verses 30 and 31:

‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these two.

And as I said, all that begins down here in the weeds, in the little things, where the little foxes want to spoil the vine that bears the fruit of love in your various relationships.

Its sobering stuff isn’t it? So who’s irritating you right now? Towards whom do you feel resentment right now? It’s time to start praying about those relationships, and your reactions and the forgiveness and the acceptance that needs to come out of your heart. Because … that is what love is.

Removing the Roadblock to Love

Let’s face it, some people just don’t deserve our love. They don’t deserve our forgiveness. They don’t deserve the sacrifices that love demands of us.

Think of the person in this world who has hurt you the most. Now, how much do you feel like loving that person? And in that question lies the problem. Feelings. We think that love is a feeling. We’ve been conditioned by Hollywood and Bollywood to imagine that love is romance, a wonderful, beautiful experience. Even my dictionary tells me that love is a strong feeling of emotion.

But that definition, quite simply, falls so far short of the mark. Because love is often a decision that we have to make, despite our feelings. When imperfect people love imperfect people there is going to be pain and sacrifice. There is going to be arguments. There are going to be a whole bunch of things that don’t fit into that nice, cut and dried, dictionary definition of love.

And so, we think to ourselves, or more to the point, we delude ourselves into thinking that if someone doesn’t deserve our love, then we’re off the hook. We don’t have to make those sacrifices. We don’t have to live out love towards them.

I want to take you to a powerful scripture about this very thing, just to show you how wrong that thinking is. Because there’s a roadblock that God wants to remove in many a heart today, this roadblock, this deception of thinking … that if they don’t deserve it, I don’t have to love them. Romans chapter 5, verses 6 to 9:

For while we were still weak, just at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person — though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God.

If God had been duped into this deception, then He would never have sent Jesus to die for you and me. But of course, God is never duped by deception. It was in the face of our sin and rebellion, yours and mine, while we were still God’s enemies that He sent Jesus to die for us. Just think about how radical that is. God proves His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Wow!

You see, love takes the initiative. Let me say that again, because it’s as powerful as it is radical. Love takes the initiative. It doesn’t sit back and wait for a deserving individual. It takes the initiative, even when, especially when that person doesn’t deserve our love.

In fact, that’s what the Apostle John goes on to say. Have a listen – 1 John chapter 3, verse 16:

We know love by this: that Jesus laid down his life for us — and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.

In others words, in exactly the same way that God took the initiative in loving us through that terrible sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross – you and I are called to lay down our lives for one another as well – whether or not the other deserves it. Do you get it?

Father God, this is so difficult, but then, laying down the life of your Son wasn’t exactly easy either. Thank you that you showed us the way of love. Thank you Father for sending us Jesus so that whoever believes in Him would not perish, but would have eternal life. Lord, you know the people towards whom we’ve had resentment and bitterness and unforgiveness. You know the people from whom we’ve withheld our love … your love. Forgive us in Jesus’ name. Lord fill us with your Holy Spirit, empower us, embolden us to love them, as Christ first loved us. In His precious name we pray. Amen.

My friend, God calls us to love. Not some lukewarm love but radical love, sacrificial love. How else will the lost and the hurting discover the love of Jesus, if not through you and me?

There are so many people in this world who are living a lie. Yeah, it’s a bold statement I know, but just take a look around. How many people truly see themselves for who they are? How many people see others for the way they truly are?

Love Rejoices in the Truth

I have to be honest with you. For the first thirty-six years of my life, I was pretty much living a lie. Here’s what that lie looked like. You’re told in this world that if you work hard enough, you can do anything you want to do; you can be anyone you want to be; you can have just about anything you want to have. Just work hard, and you’ll make it.

Just work hard, and you’ll be successful, so I did. I worked incredibly hard as a military officer, then in my own IT consulting firm and with my business partners. We were pretty successful. We had an international consulting practice. I drove a big expensive car; I lived in a big house and … you know what? I was on my way to real success.

The problem was that on the inside (and let’s face it; that’s where you live; that’s where your emotions and your feelings and your thoughts are) it just didn’t satisfy me. This was a real insight for me. Success isn’t satisfying. The world will tell you that it is, but it simply isn’t. It’s hollow. Any happiness or satisfaction it brings you is fleeting; here today, gone tomorrow. So in a very real sense, I felt like a fraud. Other people looked at me and they saw success, but I was discovering something else entirely.

And when other people looked at me, they saw a tough, hard-nosed so-and-so, who’d climb over anybody to get where he was going. You see, that’s the other part of the lie that I was living. I didn’t see people for who they really were. I didn’t see other people’s gifts and abilities and talents and creativity … Other people didn’t really have any worth to me, except to the extent that they could act as steppingstones for me to walk over to get where I was going.

Now, that’s quite an admission really, isn’t it? But there you go. That was the lie that I was living, and these days as I look around, I see so many other people living out their versions of life’s lie. You’ll be happy if you have this; if you buy a cute puppy, then you’ll be happy; if you hit budget this month; if you do this; if you do that … then you’ll be successful, and so what happens is that the world has become uber-competitive. The world has become transactional, and in the middle of all that, love has become conditional.

As I said earlier, we’re in the middle of a series of messages called ‘Love Is’, based on that powerful Scripture about love that we find in 1 Corinthians 13. Let’s just have another listen. 1 Corinthians 13:4-7:

Love is patient, love is kind. Love isn’t envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It doesn’t insist on its own way. It’s not irritable or resentful. It doesn’t rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things; believes all things; hopes all things; endures all things.

And the part that I’d like to take a brief look at today is the bit where it says that love doesn’t rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. To be honest, I think most of us don’t think all that often of love and truth in the one sentence. What does truth have to do with love after all? Good question, and the answer is rather a lot. I mentioned earlier how badly I treated people back in those days when I was living my personal version of the lies that we live, and that’s what happens. When we’re living a lie, when we’re kidding ourselves and we’ve lost sight of the truth, we end up treating people badly, and we justify that by telling ourselves that our career is more important; our success is more important, or whatever it is that we’re striving for is more important, and so what we end up doing is exactly what the apostle Paul writes here in 1 Corinthians 13:6; we end up rejoicing in wrongdoing instead.

Now, not everyone is a type A driven personality like me. Some people live their lie at the opposite end of that spectrum. Some people believe the lie that they’re worthless; no good; failures; there’s no hope; nothing’s ever going to change … These days, we have a label for all that. We bundle it all together, and we call it low self-esteem, and those people end up living their lives as victims and in the process, they treat other people badly as well, because they have no love to give. They’re so insecure that whenever anyone disagrees with them, whenever anyone doesn’t treat them exactly the way they believe they ought to have been treated, they start behaving badly.

Love doesn’t rejoice in wrongdoing; love rejoices in the truth. Makes sense when you look at it that way. There’s a parable that Jesus told that’s had a huge impact on my life, in helping me to see the truth. Have a listen. Luke 18:9-14:

He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: ‘Two men went up to the temple to pray; one a Pharisee, the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus: “God, I thank You that I’m not like other people; thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.”’

‘But the tax collector, standing far off, wouldn’t even look up to heaven, but he was beating his breast and saying, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” I tell you, this man went down to his home justified, rather than the other one. For all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.’

I used to be like the Pharisee, all full of self-righteousness. The thing that changed me was encountering Jesus; having a personal encounter; getting to know Him; giving my life to Him. It didn’t take me long to realise in the presence of Jesus that I was living a lie. And now when I go to God, I feel so much more like that tax collector, totally reliant on God’s grace to deliver me from my sin.

Jesus said this very same thing in a different way during His sermon on the mount. Matthew 5:3:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

In other words, those who are going to inherit the kingdom of God are the ones who realise their spiritual poverty; those who get real with themselves; those who see things for what they are; who see themselves and others for who they are.

Ok, so I’ve laid my soul bare before you today. I’ve shared with you part of my journey from a life of lies to a life of truth – a journey which, by the way, has a long way yet to run. None of us has arrived yet; at least I haven’t, but what about your life? To what extent are you living a life that’s tainted, distorted and misdirected by some lies that the world’s dropped onto your head and into your heart? What are you striving for perhaps, or what sense of inadequacy is robbing you of the ability to love? I know they’re hard questions, but they’re questions that need to be asked and answered if you’re going to live in the freedom that Jesus came to give you.

It can be scary to confront those lies. It’s hard to admit that we’ve not been loving people the way we should because we’re the ones who’ve been getting things wrong, but there’s no need to be afraid. The apostle John puts it this way. 1 John 4:18:

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out all fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears hasn’t reached perfection in love.

My friend, Jesus came to set you free, and as He said it Himself:

When the Son of Man sets you free, you will be free indeed.

The reason we’re chatting about this today is that I believe that Jesus wants to set you free, today; not just a little bit, but completely. Free indeed. How about it?

Love doesn’t rejoice in wrongdoing; love rejoices in the truth.

Love Bears, Believes, Hopes and Endures All Things

The statistics about divorce rates in the western world seem to be on the improve. That’s a surprise to some people. Here in Australia, where I live, around forty percent of first marriages end in divorce. That’s down slightly from around forty-three percent, and all the indications are that the trend is continuing. That’s a good thing, right?

I suspect things are pretty much the same across the western world, but what that apparently promising statistic hides is the reality that far fewer people are getting married in the first place. Most couples these days just live together first; the try before you buy plan, and a bunch of them come to the conclusion, “Oh, what’s the point of getting a marriage certificate?”

Things are just fine the way they are’, and so in a sense, those divorce statistics are being skewed by the fact that probably those marriages that were more likely to have failed didn’t happen in the first place. There don’t appear to be any stats on failed de facto relationships. It’s funny, although perhaps not at all surprising, how the nature of relationships changes the more affluent a society becomes. When you’re living in poverty, people rely a lot on each other: On community, on family … Those social constructs are vital, in fact, to survival, but the more affluent we become, the less reliant we think we become on one another.

When I was young, most wives and mothers worked at home, not outside the home. Marriages hung together more because it was hard for women to leave, even when the man was behaving badly. Now, I’m not saying that men behaving badly is a good thing, nor am I saying that the wives being completely financially dependent on their husbands is a good thing either. I’m just stating a historical fact.

These days however, many women (depending on where you live, of course) are financially independent, so it’s no surprise that most divorces are initiated by women. My point in all this is that as we become more affluent, relationships become less important to our survival and therefore more disposable, like an empty takeaway coffee cup; just throw it out in the bin; it’s all getting too hard; the pain of dealing with the same faults, the same foibles, the same weaknesses … I just can’t see it getting any better. I’ve had enough! Not just in marriages, but in wider families; amongst so-called friends. That’s it; in the bin.

If you’ve been able to join me on the programme over the past week-and-a-half, you’ll know that we’re in the middle of a series of messages called ‘Love Is’, based on that famous passage about love in 1 Corinthians in the New Testament. I want to dive into that right now, and see what it says about disposable love. 1 Corinthians 13:7:

Love bears all things; believes all things; hopes all things, and endures all things.

Now the Bible says of itself that all Scripture is useful for teaching, reproof, correction and training in righteousness. You’ll find that in 2 Timothy 3:16 (a bit later on in the New Testament), and that’s true, but as Scriptures go, I think you’ll struggle to find many verses in the Bible that pack more punch in so few words than this one; 1 Corinthians 13:7. Let me read it again slowly, just so that you can take it in:

Love bears all things; believes all things; hopes all things, and endures all things.

Let’s just pull that apart for a moment. Love bears all things. No, there are no exclusions in the fine print; love bears all things: All the mistakes of the other person; all their failures and foibles; all that they’ve done, are doing, and will do wrong; love, real love, true love, unconditional love (which is the sort of love that’s being talked about here), real love bears all things.

I have some dear friends going back many years, and a good many years ago, the husband had an affair; actually a couple of affairs, and whilst she had to show some tough love, his wife stood by him and all these years on, they are happily-married. All things.

Love also believes all things, and hopes all things. It’s so easy to get discouraged in relationships. Really it is. You know that old Chinese water torture where they’d torture a man by dripping water on his forehead for days on end, until each little drop felt like a brick falling on his head? That’s how it is in close relationships too. A person’s weaknesses, when they impact you again and again and again and again, end up feeling like torture. You want to give up! You can’t see any hope of things getting better. Love bears all things; love believes all things; love hopes all things.

See, love always looks for the good. Love always believes the best and hopes for the best, and tries to bring the best out in the other person. Love always finds a way. Love takes that difficult person to God, and hands them over to Him. “Lord, I can’t help this person, but You can. Lord, I can’t get through to them, but You can, and Lord while You’re working in their life – in their heart, work in me too.

Make me the best husband, the best wife, the best parent, the best son, the best daughter, the best friend that I can possibly be to them. Show me how I can be a help, not a hindrance. Fill me with Your Holy Spirit, so that I can bear all things; so that I can believe in You; so that I can hope in You for things to change, in Jesus’ name; in Jesus’ name I pray. Amen”.

See, that’s what love does, and on-top of that, love endures all things. Have you ever done endurance training? I have in the military, but there is one thing that all forms of endurance training have in common: They all hurt; a lot. By definition, if you’re going to be doing endurance training, you are hurting. There is no form of endurance that doesn’t hurt. Got it? Love bears all things; believes all things; hopes all things, and endures all things.

You see how much punch that verse packs? What would this world look like if you and I decided just to live out that one verse?

Love Never Ends

So, over the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about love. L o v e. The one topic that more songs have been written about and crooned over than any other subject. I’m pretty sure that you could think of your top three favourite love-songs of all time. For me, it’s Sinead O’Connor ‘Nothing Compares to You’, Roberta Flack ‘The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face’, and Elvis Presley ‘Love me Tender’. There are thousands, dare I say tens of thousands, of love-songs out there. I wonder which one is your favourite.

There’s something so beautiful, so wondrous, about love, isn’t there? To love and to be loved, I just don’t think there’s anything that tops that; to have that connection with someone where if something good happens in your life, you can’t wait to pick up the phone and share that; where when something bad happens, you can’t wait to share that with them too.

It’s that deep connection, that bond, that’s what makes the world go round. Right? But as many love-songs that there are out there, there are also plenty of love-lost songs. James Blunt’s ‘Goodbye my Lover’ I think is one of the most touching ones on the planet. If you haven’t heard it, have a listen. There’s great tragedy when a relationship of great love is broken.

We talked recently on the programme about the divorce statistics, but behind each statistic, behind each divorce lies incredible tragedy, the deep hurt of a broken relationship. It’s interesting what Jesus said about the marriage-relationship, as He quotes the book of Genesis. Matthew 19:3-6:

Some Pharisees came to Him to test Him, and they said: ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause?’

Jesus answered, ‘Have you not read that the One who made them at the very beginning made them male and female and said, “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.’

It’s this idea that when a man marries a woman, they become one flesh; they become one unit in a relationship of love and intimacy that mirrors the relationship between God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. And when you tear apart what God has joined together, it is the most incredibly painful thing you could ever imagine.

We’re talking in this series about love, what love is. In fact, that’s the name of the series, ‘Love Is’, because love is so much more than romantic crooning of love-songs. Love is so much more than romance and sex, as wonderful and as essential as those things are in a marriage-relationship. Love goes much wider than marriage, to family and yes, to friends. You and I can show love to a work-colleague; to a neighbour; to a member of our local soccer club. Love has a place in every relationship.

Before the break, we took a look at one of the most power-packed verses in the Bible. It’s a verse that punches way above its weight; way above the very few words that it uses. 1 Corinthians 13:7:

Love bears all things; believes all things; hopes all things, and endures all things.

It talks about a love that doesn’t give up – a love that bears all things; believes and hopes all things, and above all, endures all things as much as that endurance always hurts.

At this point, I want to take a look at the three types of love spoken about in the New Testament. There are three Greek words used for love. The first one is eros, from which we get the word erotic. It speaks of physical intimacy and sexual love. The second one is phileo, from which we get words like filial. It speaks of the love between friends or siblings, and the third one is the word agape (or agape, however you’d like to say it).

Now I want to take you to a very clear definition of what this word agape actually means, because that’s the word used here in 1 Corinthians 13. That’s the sort of love that we’re talking about here. Agape is selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love. It’s the highest of the three types of love spoken about in the New Testament. It perfectly describes the love of God, the love He has for us, by sending Jesus to that cross to pay for our sin so that we could have a new life – a resurrection-life, being born-again to live with Him for all eternity. Selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love.

That’s powerful, isn’t it? And the very next verse, after 1 Corinthians 13:7 that we just read, seals the deal in terms of what that sort of love means:

Love never ends.

It’s so easy to want to give up on love when the going gets tough. When love stops being a feeling, and becomes a tough decision that we have to make every day. It’s easy to love someone when the going’s good. They’re being nice to us; they respond to us; they treat us the way we want to be treated, and it’s easy! But that’s not the way that love is all the time.

Imperfect people, which is pretty much … well, let me see … that would be one hundred percent of the people out there … Imperfect people are so hard to love. We so want to give up loving them sometimes. We start by hardening our hearts against them to protect ourselves; then we start by reliving their faults over and over again in our minds, which only hardens our hearts more; then, we start imagining … no, it’s more than that … it’s dreaming about a life without them; then sadly, people just walk away from that love. But God’s love never ends, and that’s the sort of love that He’s calling you and me to – the sort that bears all things; believes all things; hopes all things, and endures all things; the sort of love that never, ever, ever ends no matter what.

Love, they say, is what makes the world go round. But as I look around the world, yeah, sure there’s love between family members and other people and yes, there are some great missional and humanitarian initiatives afoot, no doubt about that … man there’s a lot of hatred too, isn’t there?

God is Love

Hatred is, well, it’s rather a strong word, isn’t it? But then again, according to Wikipedia, there are at least fifty-four armed conflicts underway in the world just at the moment. So yeah, there’s more than enough hatred to go around.

But maybe in your everyday life, hatred doesn’t quite fit. You perhaps don’t necessarily hate anyone. I know I don’t. So let’s now step it down to systematised, institutionalised self-interest. That’s a bit long-winded and highfalutin … so what do I mean?

Well – all the clothes you buy – and chances are that the majority of your clothes that you buy and wear, not all, but the majority, were made in a sweatshop in a developing country where the workers face harsh and dangerous conditions. Some countries even have designated zones where labour laws are suspended and people live like battery hens, to produce the well-known brands that we wear. Not to mention the smartphones and the tablets we use.

Well, Berni … you might say … I can’t help that. It’s not that I want to exploit those people, it’s just how things are. I can’t change them. Fair enough.

So let’s drill down and get even closer to home. Think about your attitudes and behaviours towards people at work. Many people work in a competitive environment, where you not only have to succeed but you have to be seen to succeed to get ahead. You get up in the morning, shower, breakfast, and then it’s off to the commute. Struggling through the traffic, honking your horn at that selfish moron who won’t let you merge lanes. Or perhaps it’s the train or the bus where everybody just jostles for a seat, and squeezes on and takes your personal space away.

By the time you get to work, you’re frazzled, you’re in no mood for that incompetent idiot, who’s your boss, so you join in the gossip in the tea-room, you complain about this and that. Does any of that sound even vaguely familiar? And then by the time you get home, you’re snapping at your wife or your husband or the kids. You feel like kicking the dog in the head instead of patting him. Alright, maybe I’m taking the metaphor just a bit far, but you get my point.

Be it the geopolitical level, the economic level, or the personal level, there’s a whole lot of room for us to live out a whole lot more love than we do today, would you agree? Growing in this area of love is something that would make such a difference in the world – in our own lives, in the lives of those whom we love, those whom we work with … our whole circle of influence.

I want to take you back now to the central scripture that we’ve been looking at in this series. Let me read it to you again and presuming that you’re not driving at the moment or operating heavy machinery, just close your eyes and soak it in. Think about what God’s saying in the context of the love that you try to live out in your life. 1 Corinthians chapter 13, verses 1 to 13:

If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but I do not have love, I am just a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and have all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but I do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but it rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.

Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; but when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see as in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Yeah, at the end of the day, there’s these three things left. Faith – well, that’s super important, right. Hope – you can’t keep going without hope. But without a doubt, the greatest one of those three is love.

Because without love, it doesn’t matter how clever, how talented, how sacrificial, how industrious we are, it ain’t worth anything. You know people like that, so do I – in fact, I used to be one.

I’m thinking what my little corner of the world would look like, if I picked up and owned and lived just these few verses, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day – much more so than I do now. I’m thinking what your little corner of the world would look like if you did the same:

Love is patient; love is kind; love isn’t envious, it’s not boastful or arrogant or rude. It doesn’t insist on its own way; it’s not irritable, it’s not resentful; it doesn’t rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

Darkness can never consume light, since, after all, as a young Einstein pointed out to his atheist teacher, darkness is simply the absence of light. And so hatred, apathy, selfishness can never snuff out love, because they are simply the absence of love. And, selfish creatures that we are, the place where we discover an absolute abundance of love is God Himself. 1 John chapter 4, verse 7 and then 14 to 18:

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everybody who loves is born of God and knows God.

And the nearer we draw to Jesus, the more we get to know Him personally, the more His love starts to change how we see things. How we feel about other people. How we behave towards other people.

All too often, we hear a message like this one and what we take away is: I have to love people more. Okay, who am I not being nice to? What do I have to change? What are the opportunities to love them better? And whilst none of those are bad questions to ask, if we think that that’s all it’s about … what we have to do … then we’ve completely missed the point.

Over the years I’ve had some people in my life who I’ve found incredibly frustrating. There are a couple of people who betrayed me deeply. And I used to think, I just have to change my attitude. I just have to change my behaviour. But I don’t know if you’ve noticed, it’s pretty much impossible to do, because before we can change on the outside, something has to change in our hearts. Jesus … in Matthew chapter 15, verses 17 to 20:

Do you not see that whatever goes into your mouth enters the stomach, and goes out to the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness and slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands that doesn’t defile.

In other words, if we want to change on the outside, first we need, as we would say today, to have a change of heart. And that’s exactly what God promises you. Ezekiel chapter 36, verses 26 and 27, have a listen:

A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances.

Real, lasting, powerful change doesn’t happen when we work harder. It happens when God the Holy Spirit changes our hearts. When He replaces the heart of stone with a heart of flesh. Then all of sudden, living God’s way becomes a whole bunch easier. Why don’t we get that?

Discovering Love at the Cross

The Bible says that God is love. The Bible says that God loves us – you, me and every other homo-sapien on this earth. The Bible says that we’re created in His image, and that despite our rebellion, despite the fact that the original image has been marred and disfigured almost beyond recognition, God still wants to restore us back into His original image. The Bible says…

Now at this point, I know that more than a few people are thinking, “Well the BIBLE says … Whoopity-doo! Big deal! Come and look at my life. Come and look at my lousy marriage, my rebellious children, my loneliness, my pain, my financial hardship, the losses I’ve been through, the complete lack of hope that I have for the future. Come and look at that … and then tell me what the Bible says.”

And if you relate to any of that, just a bit of that, then today, I want to share some good news with you. I want to put God’s love under a microscope for you. Let’s make like we’re in a court of law, in a trial that accuses God of loving us.

The question I want to answer here is this: Is there enough evidence to convict Him? Now please don’t write in or email or call – I don’t mean that disrespectfully in any way. I simply want us to see what the evidence tells us as to whether God loves us or not. So … where do you begin? Let’s begin at the beginning. Let’s take a look – Genesis chapter 1, verses 26 to 31:

And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.’ And it was so. God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over every fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’

And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, on the sixth day.

So God goes on to create this whole universe and then … the last act of creation … is He gives it all away to you and me, the whole, cotton-pickin’ lot! But it’s not just that. It’s not just an act of incredible generosity, it’s also an act of incredible vulnerability. Not on our part, but on God’s part. Because He creates us knowing full well that, having given us a free will, we would turn our backs on Him. We would rebel against Him.

In fact, if you like, that’s the whole story of the Old Testament in a nutshell. God’s people rebelling against God. The name ‘Israel’ literally means to struggle with God. And through all the ups and downs of the Old Testament, one thing becomes abundantly clear. It’s this: that in our relationship with God, we will never, ever, ever be able to hold up our end of the bargain. We will always fall short. And that’s exactly what the Apostle Paul writes in the New Testament – Romans chapter 3, verse 23:

For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

And then Romans chapter 6, verse 23:

For the wages of sin is death.

So … what to do, what to do, what to do? Now God has a dilemma. If He truly is a God of love, does He put sinners to death? That is after all what it says here. I mean if He truly is a God of justice, He has to follow through, doesn’t He? So His response to this dilemma is a real test of His love for us.

How can you have justice and love? So, what is His response? Well, let’s look at the whole of Romans chapter 6, verse 23:

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

The price of God’s justice is paid when Jesus, the Son of God, takes our sin on His shoulders, punished on the Cross, so that we can be forgiven. In fact, when you think about it, this is the only possible way that God could have solved the dilemma – by meeting both the requirements of justice and love.

So, forensically, what does this tell us about God’s love? Well, Jesus put it this way – John chapter 15, verses 12 and 13:

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, than to lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command.

Just the other night on the evening news where I live, there was a story of a father who died, drowned in the surf saving his son who was caught in a rip. Now, you might expect a father to do that for his son, right? After all it’s his son, he loves the son. If I had to put my life in harm’s way for my children, I don’t think I’d even think a second about that. I love them. They’re my children.

The question however is, would you put yourself in harm’s way for someone who has treated you badly? Would you lay your life down for someone who has rebelled against you, spoken badly of you, turned their back on you? Well, would you? Have a listen, Romans chapter 5, verses 6 to 8:

While you and I were still weak, just at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person — though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.

And that my friend, right there, is proof positive of God’s love for you. I know that things in your life may not be perfect in every department. I know that you may be suffering over this or that. And I know, believe you me, I know – I’ve been there – that life can sometimes look so bleak, so desperate that you can’t even see how you’re going to make it through until tomorrow.

But right in the middle of whatever it is that you’re going through at the moment, God has something to say to you today. Through His Word He’s saying, “I love you more than words can ever say. Just look at my Son. Look at how He suffered and died for you. That’s how much I love you. That’s what you are worth to me.”

And you know, it’s not until we feel loved that we can love other people. If you don’t feel secure in love, you don’t have any love to give away. So many people are missing out on the abundant life that Jesus came to give them because they know about God, they just don’t know Him personally.

And if that’s sounds like you, then why not pray this prayer with me today:

Father God, I’ve heard about your love today. I’ve heard about Jesus. The Jesus who died for me and rose again for me. And I want to accept this Jesus as my Saviour and the Lord of my life. I want to experience for real this love that I’ve heard about today. So Lord, please forgive me, please accept me just as I am, please fill me to overflowing with your Holy Spirit and with your love. I ask you that in Jesus name. Amen.

If you just prayed that prayer, you are forgiven, you have been made whole. And your life has just completely changed, for ever and ever. Amen.

You Are Loved

I passionately believe that God is speaking to us – to you and to me – through His Word today. And here’s how it goes. There is such incredible power in the Word of God. I think sometimes we Christians trifle with God’s Word, as though somehow, it’s just words on a page. But that’s not it! Hebrews chapter 4, verse 12 says this:

Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides the soul from the spirit, the joints from the marrow; it’s able to judge the thoughts and the intentions of the human heart.

And that’s what I believe is happening in our hearts today. I want to take you now into your relationships, the ones that are difficult right at the moment. The ones where you’re losing hope, where you’re feeling as though it’s never, ever, ever going to get any better. I believe those are the relationships that the Lord is speaking into today.

And I believe that He wants you to hear this singular message very clearly: in Him there is hope. In Him you can believe for good things. In Him, in His power, and in the power of the Holy Spirit, you can endure all things. And while all this is going on, and while you feel the hurt and the pain, God is doing a mighty work in you. He is changing you, softening you, humbling you. He is getting you ready for the amazing things that lie ahead. Things that you wouldn’t be able to do, if you hadn’t travelled through these difficult days.

Can I tell you, a couple of decades ago, I went through great hurt and what felt like great harm in this area of love in my life. But I met Jesus in that place. And if I hadn’t been through that terrible time back then, I wouldn’t be able to share the love of God with you today as I do.

There is hope, in Christ and Christ alone. And I’m absolutely convinced that that’s the good news that He wants you to hear today. It’s not until we experience God’s love firsthand, that we can really begin to love others, as God loved us through Jesus Christ.

I don’t know, but my hunch is that there’s a relationship in your life right now, a relationship that’s supposed to be filled with love, that you may want to walk away from. A relationship where you’re fed up, where you’ve had enough, where you’ve lost hope. And it’s right into that relationship that I believe the Lord our God is speaking. Right into that difficult place. I just believe with all my heart that He’s wanting to write these words onto your heart today: love … never … ends.

Don’t give up. How many times have you had to go to God and ask for His forgiveness through what Jesus did for you? Has He ever not forgiven you? Has He ever said to you, nope, that’s it, I’ve had enough of you. You’ve just hurt me one time too many times. I don’t think you’re ever going to change. I don’t think I can put up with you anymore. I’ve just had enough, I’m out of here.

Has God ever, ever said that to you? No! Every time you turn back to Him, he rejoices like the father of that prodigal son who returned. When the prodigal son came to his senses … Luke chapter 15, verse 20:

… he set off and went back to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran down, threw his arms around him and kissed him.

That’s the picture. That’s God’s love for you. That’s what it looks like and it’s that love that His Holy Spirit would pour into your heart. So when a person you love hurts you, offends you, disappoints you … it won’t feel any more like it’s about you. Instead the love of God for that person will ache in your heart. The same love that God has for you will be the love, the unconditional love, the never ending love with which you will be able to love them. The love that never ends.

Father God thank you so much for your love. We want more of you, more of your love. We want to experience firsthand the amazing love that took Jesus to that Cross. Pour out your love on us. Pour out your Holy Spirit on us … that we may taste for ourselves, see for ourselves and know for ourselves that indeed, the Lord is good. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.