Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign church. We are thrilled you decided to listen to our teaching on your favorite podcast app. If you made a decision to follow Christ today, would you let us know by visiting yes.newlife Gillette.com Here is this week's teaching.
[00:00:26] Hey, let me say welcome to those of you who are watching on church307.com to the guys over at the prison, to our friends at the jail, and those of you who are here in the room. How many of you are here for Easter service? Yeah, like all of you, plus many other people. We had 3,986 people here for Easter.
[00:00:50] That's crazy. That's only 14 people short of 4,000 people. So we got a goal for next year. Right.
[00:00:58] That's also 1500 more people than last year on Easter. That's a lot of people. And the best news of all, 71 people made first time commitments to follow Christ in the Easter service. So awesome. So good.
[00:01:16] All right, I need a couple volunteers. You want to come volunteer? Awesome. Something something told me you would volunteer. Hey, Corey, you want to volunteer for me? Yeah, man. It's an easy one. You just got to eat. Do either of you have a gluten allergy?
[00:01:31] Okay, good. Come on over here.
[00:01:33] I had my wife make two loaves of bread yesterday, and let me just tell you, my wife is a great baker. Like, she makes great bread. But I'm going to cut a piece off of both of these loaves of bread, and I'm going to ask you to take a bite of both of these pieces of bread and tell me which one is the better loaf of bread. Okay, you're the judges here. What's a good cooking show where they have to judge?
[00:02:03] I don't watch those. Gordon Ramsay. Gordon Ramsay. Yeah, something like that. Okay, take a bite of both and tell me which one is better.
[00:02:14] I'll let you see the two loaves here.
[00:02:18] These are the two options.
[00:02:22] She moaned after that bite.
[00:02:26] Yeah, this one's better. All right. All right, good stuff. Give them a hand. Thanks, guys. That's all two loaves of bread here. Let's just say I'm going to eat one of those after church today and one of them are going in the trash.
[00:02:42] The. The crazy thing about both of them picked this one, by the way, as the better loaf of bread. The crazy thing is these are made with the exact same ingredients except for one. This loaf of bread has one ingredient less than this loaf of bread. You want to guess what it is?
[00:03:01] It's not. Somebody said it up top.
[00:03:04] Salt. This one is missing the salt, which you don't even think of salt as an ingredient in bread, right? First it like puffs up really airy, and then it like dies like this. Because salt is a key ingredient. It works together with the yeast to produce what we think of when we think of bread. You need the salt in the bread. And so here's the thing about the Christian life. Many of you have encountered people in your lives that called themselves Christians. And then you started watching the way they interacted with people. You started watching the way they live. And you thought, you know, your words say that you're a Christian, but you just don't feel like a Christian to me. Right? It just doesn't feel right. You say it, maybe you shout it, maybe you're really passionate about it. But when I interact with you, it sure doesn't feel like I think Jesus would have made me feel if I would have interacted with Jesus. And if, if a Christian is somebody who follows Jesus, then maybe in the way we interact with people, we should make people feel like Jesus would have made them feel. Right. I think the key ingredient that these Christians are missing in their lives is love.
[00:04:23] It is kind of the core. It's the underlying. It's what makes us Christian. The key to ingredient of Christian, of the Christian life is love. Now, love plays out in many different ways, and we're going to talk about that a little bit. But when Jesus came to the world, he changed the world with love. Not through politics, not with physical strength or with really good looks, not through fear. In fact, Jesus says that the entire Christian story, all of the biblical teaching can be summed up with one word. Because it's easy to say Jesus loved. It's harder to say that those other events that happened in scripture can be defined by love. But Jesus, one time, he's talking to his disciples and they ask him this. He says, teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses, the Old law, the Old Testament, the law of Moses, which is the most important command? Jesus replied, you must love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. But then he goes on a second is equally important. Love your neighbor as yourself. This is. You hear people say, love God and love others. That is the greatest command. You can't separate them. If you love God, you will love others. You can't. You can't do one without the other. So the greatest command, love God and. And love the others and love others. But then Jesus adds this statement, which I think is not what normally what we would think. He says, the entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commands, the law and the prophets. What is the law and the prophets? Well, we call it the Old Testament. Some of the books are law books. You got historical books, law books, or the rules books, and then you got the prophets. And so Jesus is saying, you read all that and you can just sum it all up with one word, Love.
[00:06:32] Now, that does not fit with our culture's description of what the Old Testament is all about. Usually when you're talking to somebody who's trying to be skeptical, skeptical of Christianity, what they'll do is they'll point to this hateful, angry God of the Old Testament, and they'll say, you really want to follow a God like that? Who would do all these evil things and make these crazy rules? Jesus says, no, actually, I read all that story, and I sum it up with one word.
[00:07:04] Love.
[00:07:05] Why is that? It's because sometimes love does not come across like what we expect love to come across as. Because God, in his infinite wisdom, you know, our knowledge is finite. We can only see so much. We start to get a little bit prideful because we think we know a lot. Well, we have access to the Internet, and we're really educated. We know all this stuff, and we start to think that we know a ton. But our knowledge, no matter how much we know, is just limited. You cannot see everybody all day long is making decisions. You're trying to figure out if I go this way or if I go this way, which one is a better option? A fork in the road, which direction do I go? And we're just trying to guess. We can't see into the future to know which option is the best. And we can kind of make an educated guess, but we're always just guessing. God is not like us. God is outside of space and time. God is not finite like us. God is infinite. And God can look into the future and he can see the results of every action before we even take the action. God can recognize that sometimes it is necessary to do something hard or even painful in this world in order to produce a greater good, because he can see the outcome of every action.
[00:08:25] And so when we put our faith in God, what we're saying is, I will be okay with the hard, with. With the negative, seemingly negative, with the painful, because I trust you that you will make the greatest possible good come out of whatever happens in this world. And so if you See God causing somebody to die in the Old Testament, you choose to say, okay, I don't understand. That doesn't make sense. That seems evil to me. But because I know it's only evil if you say it's good, or if you say it's evil, then I put my faith in you. I trust you. We can do the same thing with the commands of God. You. You read the Old Testament. You see all the commands that he gave to the Israelites, which they obviously could not follow, all the commands that he gave to the Israelites, but they were trying to obey these commands. And why did God give the Israelites these commands in the Old Testament? Why did he make all these laws and all these rules? It could be easy to say, well, God's just a killjoy. God's just this angry guy who wants us to all be miserable.
[00:09:27] But God says, no, I'm doing this because I know what's best for you. And I will give you a command to keep you on the path that will actually lead you to a better destination than if you just do what comes naturally.
[00:09:40] You know, my kids push back on this all the time. I tell my kids to do things, and to them, it seems like I'm just this angry dad who just loves to say no because I love to see them miserable.
[00:09:52] I don't limit their Xbox use because I dislike my kids. I limit their Xbox use because I love my kids. So even though it may seem hard or painful to them, it actually is better for them. It comes from a place of love.
[00:10:09] And anytime you are tempted to doubt God's goodness in the world, and I say this from a place where I've just come out of a season where it seems like a lot of pain has happened in my life, you have to just choose to say, I trust you.
[00:10:25] I surrender my will to your will. I believe that you know what's best. And so if that comes in the form of a rebuke, if that comes in the form of correction or a new rule or instructions that I'm not okay with, or him leading me in a direction in my life that I don't want to go, I say, I trust you. Why? Because I know that he loves me. Because his love will never lead me in the wrong direction. God wants to make our lives better, and he wants to make us better at life.
[00:10:59] You know, sometimes obeying the rules that God gives us can start to give us pride.
[00:11:05] And when our pride begins to build because we're obeying the rules that God gave us because we're performing well. We're actually regressing.
[00:11:17] If I don't fight it, this can happen in my heart. As I learn more Scripture, as I develop biblical habits in my life, as I remove sin from my life, I can start to become proud and think, look how good I am. Look how moral I am. I can become a Pharisee that looks down on other people who do not obey the rules of God like I do. Which is actually the sin that Jesus fought against most.
[00:11:46] The sin that Jesus hated most was the pride that comes as a result of obeying his commands. Why? Because he didn't give us the commands so that we can feel good about ourselves or we don't act good so that we can look good. God gave us the commands because he knows what's best for us, because he was giving us a gift. I believe that sanctification is a gift. What's sanctification? It's just this journey of becoming the person that God created us to be. We use this word a lot, and I think it's. It's a valuable term that as a Wesleyan denomination, we believe in this idea that God. We believe optimistically that God can change us, that God can grow us and mature us, can make us more spiritually mature. And all of that process of growing and learning is the process of. Of sanctification. But the thing that you'll learn if you study Scripture about how sanctification works is you'll discover that it's never us who sanctifies ourselves. It's not me by trying harder. It's not me by doing better, by beating my body into submission. It is God who sanctifies me. And so if my pride grows as a result of being sanctified, I'm proving that I'm not actually sanctified at all. I'm just behaving better because I want to look good.
[00:13:01] Jesus gives us new life, and he makes us new people. He makes us into the people that he created us to be. And when we receive the gift of sanctification, it should lead us towards a life that is more full of love and generosity and grace, not a life of arrogance and pride.
[00:13:22] If the church that. That you're looking at has become more prideful and angry and judgmental as a result of their sanctification, then their sanctification is not actually sanctification. It's just them, their behavior modifications so that they can feel better about themselves.
[00:13:39] Sanctification should always lead us towards becoming more loving people.
[00:13:45] My ability to live a quality life or a moral Life is only valuable if it makes me grow in my relationship with God. My ability to remove sin from my life is only valuable if it makes me a more loving person.
[00:14:05] Because giftedness without love is worthless.
[00:14:12] Without love, talent is wasted.
[00:14:16] That's because love is the key ingredient of the good life, of the godly life.
[00:14:25] You know, if God were all powerful but not loving, you would hate him. You would have absolutely no reason to love that kind of God. Why? Well, if he was all powerful but not loving, he was. He would probably just make us all slaves so that we could protect his perfect world.
[00:14:51] If God were all powerful but not loving, he would probably just kill anybody who stepped out of line, who didn't obey his perfect commands.
[00:15:03] There is no way God should have given Israel. And you read the Old Testament. There's no reason God should have forgiven them so many times.
[00:15:11] And I think the same thing when I look at my life. There's no way God should have forgiven me so many times.
[00:15:19] But he's not all powerful and not loving. God is full of love. God is love.
[00:15:26] Specifically, God is full of agape love.
[00:15:31] There's a famous chapter in the Bible called the love chapter. Anybody know what chapter it is?
[00:15:38] Somebody whispered it, but wasn't confident enough to shout it. First Corinthians 13. We call it the love chapter. It's written by the Apostle Paul. It goes like this. You've probably heard it at a wedding.
[00:15:48] If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, I said animals. If you could speak the language of animals, that'd be cool.
[00:15:58] If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels but didn't love others, I would only be a what? A noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
[00:16:10] If I had the gift of prophecy and if I understood all of God's secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains but didn't love others, I would be nothing.
[00:16:26] If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it. But if I didn't love others, I would have gained nothing.
[00:16:37] Here's what love is. Love is patient and kind.
[00:16:41] Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice, but rejoices whenever the truth wins out.
[00:16:58] Love never gives up. It never loses faith. It's always hopeful and endures through every circumstance. It endures through Every circumstance. Why? Because it's freely given.
[00:17:11] It's given without the expectation that anything will be received.
[00:17:16] I love the illustration that Paul uses that. It's like a clinging gong.
[00:17:22] What is it like if you had have a lot of talent but you don't love?
[00:17:29] He talks about someone who offers sacrifices but doesn't actually love people. That's like somebody who tithes to the church so that they look good because they tithe to the church, but they don't actually care about the people who are getting saved because they tithe to the church. It's this legalistic, behavior focused type of Christianity where it's all about what I'm doing so that I can appear a certain way or so that I can please God rather than loving the people that my actions can show love to.
[00:18:01] Actually, Paul said that that kind of talent, focused behavior, focused love or Christianity is like a resounding gong, kind of like this, I think, for I am yours and you, you are my.
[00:18:50] That's what he wanted. He wanted the applause. That's why he was doing it. He learned that role and he wanted to show everybody how good he was. Right? And she was staying in the moment. She just kept worshiping. I was so impressed. I love how the cameraman like zooms out. He's just like, everybody's gotta see this dude. He's going nuts over there drumming and. And she's like, softcom.
[00:19:15] I think this is what it looks like when it's like we don't pay attention to what's going on around us. We don't pay attention to how our behavior is affecting the people around us. We're just pounding out the Christian life. Look at how I can behave correctly. Look at the good things that I can do. I'm going to show the world what a good person I can be.
[00:19:33] And I just totally forget that the reason for doing all of this is this calling that we have on our lives to love.
[00:19:42] Love takes the attention off of self and puts the attention on others.
[00:19:50] So we've just read this first Corinthians 13 passage and all throughout this passage. It's originally written in the Greek language. And the original word for love in this passage is the Greek word love, agape, which we translate to love in English. In English, there is only one word for love. And that makes this conversation very difficult. So I have to use the same word when I'm talking about how I feel about my mom and how I feel about the chiefs.
[00:20:23] Sorry, mom. I love you both. There's like one word I got here, I got one option, so it makes it seem equal, right. I have to talk about how I feel about my wife and about how I feel about peanut butter. They're just one word. Sorry, babe. Got one option here in the Greek. That's not the case. There are multiple words that we can. That we have to translate to love into our language. And in this series, we're calling it Four Loves. We're going to talk about four different Greek words for love. There's the romantic love and the brotherly love and the family love. We're going to talk about the different kinds of love. But the love we're talking about today is kind of the foundational love. It's the love upon which all those other loves have to be built. If we are going to love like Christ love. We build all those other forms of love on this one type of love, agape love. What's agape love? Agape love is freely given, never earned, always offered.
[00:21:28] It's not based on feelings, it's not an emotion.
[00:21:33] It's not based on fairness or what I'm going to get out of it. If I love, it's choosing to love, even if loving costs me everything.
[00:21:45] The most clear example of agape love is what we saw last week in Easter.
[00:21:50] The most clear example of agape love is Jesus hanging on a cross for people who are actively sinning against him.
[00:21:59] It's Jesus hanging on a cross and forgiving the people that are torturing him.
[00:22:05] It's the love that seeks the best for someone, regardless of what you're going to get in return.
[00:22:13] It's Jesus telling us to love our enemies.
[00:22:18] Loving your enemies is impossible without agape love.
[00:22:24] And it doesn't work well with our world's version of love, because agape love is actually the opposite of our world's version of love, which is this is very transactional love. It's like, I'll give until I have given enough.
[00:22:40] I'll give as long as you're giving the same amount back or more.
[00:22:45] And if we could ever truly understand this, this would change everything in our church, wouldn't it?
[00:22:51] No marriage would ever end in divorce.
[00:22:55] If we could figure out how to do this, there wouldn't be any broken friendships or families.
[00:23:01] If we could all actually love like Jesus, well, actually, this would just become heaven. That's what heaven is.
[00:23:09] Everybody with perfect love for each other all the time. Perfect love for God, perfect love for each other. That's heaven. The problem is, loving like Jesus is really, really hard because people are really, really hard to love, aren't we? Like people are just screwed up, messy things. Think about the people in your life who are the hardest to love. Don't say their names out loud, that would be rude.
[00:23:42] Who are the people in your life that are the most difficult to love?
[00:23:48] And now as you're thinking about those people, put them into category. What makes them difficult to love?
[00:23:56] Some people are difficult to love because they're really selfish.
[00:24:00] They just take and take and take, but they never give.
[00:24:06] They're very self centered. They're always talking about themselves, but they don't talk about others.
[00:24:11] They just take and they never give like a cat.
[00:24:24] I don't think this means though that we all just need to be pushovers sometimes. Agape love is tough love.
[00:24:34] And usually when you love a selfish person at some point in the relationship, the most loving thing that you can do for them might come across as tough love. Sometimes when somebody is only taking, only consuming the love that they need to receive is a rebuke.
[00:24:53] Sometimes you have to call somebody out of their selfishness. But even when we do this, we do this in the most loving, gentle, patient way we possibly can. Not out of frustration, but out of love.
[00:25:07] Some people are hard to love because they're just too dependent.
[00:25:12] Some people are just needy, they just have more needs. That's just the reality. Sometimes our kids are in this category, aren't they?
[00:25:21] They're learning how to interact with people. If we love them well, then we are rebuking them into the to less. We're building disciplines into their life so that they become less dependent.
[00:25:34] But we all know adults who never learned how to grow out of this, how to mature out of this. And some people are just incapable of doing so. And no matter why they are in this place of dependence, love is patient, love is kind.
[00:25:52] Some people are just overwhelmed by challenges in their lives at a certain time of life. I feel like I've gone through a season recently where I was really dependent and I was extremely thankful for people who were patient with me, who started carrying burdens that I was dropping, carrying loads that I was not able to carry.
[00:26:13] Some people are really hard to love because they're just negative people, right? No one likes to be around negative people. Complainers now sometimes you want a negative person when you're feeling really negative and then you can both get together and complain and then everybody gets miserable and it's just a miserable way. It's not. Those relationships don't last.
[00:26:34] So most of the time what we usually do is we avoid negative people. You complain too much, and people just don't want to be around you. But what does agape do? Agape is patient as they learn that their behavior is repelling.
[00:26:53] And what do we do when we recognize.
[00:26:57] When we look at this list and we recognize, actually, that's me.
[00:27:05] Like, at some point in my life, I'm all of these things.
[00:27:10] I recognize that I'm hard to love.
[00:27:14] Maybe that recognition can give me some patience, can make me a little less prideful and show that I'm going to have to give some love that isn't earned because I'm going to need some love at some point in my life that isn't earned.
[00:27:30] And how does God respond to our failure to our.
[00:27:35] To us, when we are difficult to love? How does he respond? Sometimes he rebukes us, sometimes he corrects us, brings discipline. But he always loves, he always forgives. He's always patient and always kind.
[00:27:52] So what's the big question? Well, if we are being matured, if we are being sanctified, becoming like Christ, becoming who we were created to be, we have to ask ourselves the question, do we agape like Christ? We'll never be perfect at this.
[00:28:09] But we ask ourselves, am I on a journey of learning to give, learning to give to my spouse, learning to give to my kids, to my friends and my family without expecting to receive anything in return?
[00:28:26] Sometimes that we think about love as just this abstract emotional thing that I either have it or I don't. I fell into it or I didn't fall into it. And scripture portrays love as something much more important than that. It's something that all of us need as a part of our lives. We can't live without it.
[00:28:47] So why is it so important?
[00:28:50] Why is it so important that we have a relationship with God that teaches us how to love? You know, that's a benefit of being a Christian. And it's why Christians are more likely to love. It's because they are in relationship with the most loving person there is. If you are in a relationship with God, then you should be learning from Him. You should become like Him.
[00:29:15] And we grow and we mature. So that's why it's so important for us to have a growing relationship with God, so that we can learn from him, so that his love will rub off on us.
[00:29:27] The prophet Zechariah said this. For the Lord, your God is living among you. If he's your God, if you're in relationship with him, you're rubbing shoulders with God. He is a mighty Savior. He will take delight in you with gladness. We're going to talk more about this kind of love, this kind of relationship that. That we take delight in each other.
[00:29:51] With his love, he will calm all your fears.
[00:29:56] What does a jacket do for you?
[00:30:00] If it's. If it's. There's a blizzard outside, I put on a coat.
[00:30:04] What is this coat doing for me in the blizzard? It's keeping me. Is it stopping the snow from falling?
[00:30:13] Is it stopping the wind from blowing?
[00:30:15] Is it raising the temperature outside?
[00:30:18] No, but what it's doing is it's protecting me in the blizzard. The jacket doesn't change what's going on around me. It changes what's going on inside of me. It doesn't change my circumstances, but it protects me in my circumstances.
[00:30:36] The cool thing about that is now I am able to give what I wasn't able to give before.
[00:30:42] If I'm outside in a blizzard without a coat on, I'm just trying to survive. I've got no ability to help anybody else, to give warmth to anybody else, to protect anybody else, because I'm just trying to survive. But when I have the coat on now, all of a sudden I'm warm. Now I'm able to survive so that I can then help other people. This is what God's love does for us.
[00:31:09] God's love does not always change our circumstances. It doesn't remove our problems. It doesn't make life easy. But God's love for us can give us this ability to survive in a world, this peace that passes understanding, that can then show love to other people, even when it seems there's no reason to show any kind of love.
[00:31:33] Paul said this to the church in Thessalonica. May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and by his grace gave us eternal comfort and wonderful hope. Comfort you and strengthen you in every good thing that you do and say. Let him strengthen you.
[00:31:53] I think the people who are most loving in my life have built their life on this solid foundation, truth and of grace.
[00:32:05] And because they are living their life on a solid foundation, they are able to give in a way that those who are just living in chaos are not able to give.
[00:32:15] So what about you?
[00:32:17] Have you put God's protection, his jacket, his coat around you, his love?
[00:32:26] How do you recognize, receive this comfort and hope that Paul is talking about? Well, the Bible is full of advice about some next steps that you can take. Some things that you can do in your life, we call them spiritual disciplines that can help you to grow in your relationship with God to get to know him more so that his love can rub off on you.
[00:32:46] And so we are wise to read Scripture, to follow its advice, and to do the things that it says so that we can grow, so that we can mature, so that we can be sanctified and become the person he created us to be. I want to invite all of you to take an assessment. We call it the psa. Many of you have already done this. If you've done this and you feel like it's been a while and you need to do it again, we invite you to do it again. What's the psa? It's this assessment that you can take. It does not take long. You're just going to answer some questions about your life and your current spiritual disciplines, your habits that you have in your life. And then you're going to be assigned to an advisor or a mentor who's going to look at the results of your assessment and they're going to start to pray for you. And then they're going to ask God to lead them in guiding you towards next steps that you should take in your spiritual development.
[00:33:40] If you, if you're not able to scan the QR code, you can go to newlife gillette.com PSA newlife gillette.com psa and this will be a way for you to just get some advice from a wise spiritual spiritual advisor who can tell you, looking at where you've been, looking at, the things that you've done. Here are some next steps that I think you should take to grow in your relationship with God, to become more and more like Him. So they're going to send you an email and that email is going to have those next steps on it. Don't ignore it.
[00:34:17] Maybe you don't totally agree with everything that they say. I would ask you. Just try it. Whatever it is they ask you, the next step that they ask you to take, just try it and see what happens. Don't just ignore it. Don't just move on. It's so easy in our lives to just hear some advice and think, okay, maybe someday I'll get to that, make it a priority. And those of you who have done this before and you got those pieces of advice and you took those steps that they ask you to take, maybe it's time for you to take it again so that you can get the next steps that you need to take. You can take it again, or you can just respond to the email of the person that emailed you the first time. And say, hey, I did those things, or I tried, it didn't work. These are the experiences that I had and just begin a conversation of continually growing, continually, continually learning. Because I know the people that you're going to be assigned to and they've been through this journey. They've been on this journey for a while of becoming and growing and learning to love. Just listen to their advice and allow the Holy Spirit to speak through them to you.
[00:35:23] God, I thank you that you have given us the option of being in a relationship with you.
[00:35:30] Let us take it for granted. God, we thank you for your perfect agape love.
[00:35:36] I pray that you would make us more like you in the way that we interact with the world and the way that we focus on others more often than we focus on ourselves.
[00:35:48] God, I thank you for your love for us. In Jesus name, amen.
