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] Well, good morning.
[00:00:28] How are you guys doing this morning? You doing well?
[00:00:31] Awesome. Awesome. Hey, I've got some exciting news before we jump into the sermon. You might have noticed this on your way in. To your right as you walked into the auditorium, there's a wall with a bunch of keychains on it. Last year we had a branding wall where we put a brand on the wall for every person who decided to follow Jesus that year. This year we have a wall of keychains celebrating every person who has decided to follow Jesus and has received the keys to new life in Christ. And we have had just about 100 people, just shy of 100 people this year decide to follow Jesus here at New Life. Yeah, that's something to celebrate.
[00:01:09] So as you're leaving today in a little bit, I want you to take a look at that wall and then I want you to pray for the person you know who needs a keychain hung on that wall. Because God has put people in all of our lives who need to know his love and experience his transformation. Amen.
[00:01:24] All right, we're going to be in First John, chapter three today. First John, chapter three. If you got a Bible, go ahead and open up there or the app on your phone while you're turning there. We are in our second week of this series called four Loves, where we are talking about the primary Greek words that we translate to the word love. In English. You probably know we have one word for love in English. I love my dog. I love burgers. I love my wife. I love Jesus. One word in Greek. They had a lot of words, four primary ones. So today we're talking about the Greek word storge, which, interestingly enough is a word that's only found in the Bible one time and combined with another word, phileo storge, which combines another word for love. But even though the word isn't used very often in scripture, we see it described very often in scripture. We see what this love means described to us a bunch of times. And that's what we're reading about in First John chapter three. We're reading about the description of this storge love. So here's what it says.
[00:02:32] See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God. And that is what we are the world. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. All who have this hope in him purify themselves just as he is pure. Let's pray.
[00:03:07] Jesus, this is your word and your truth and we are here for you this morning. So, God, I ask that anything that's just my ideas, let us notice that and just let it go because we're not here for my ideas. But if there's anything over the next few minutes that's faithful to your character and consistent with your word, would you plant it deeply in our hearts? Jesus, that's why we're here. We want to know you and become like you. We love you, Jesus. Amen.
[00:03:34] Hey, check out this video.
[00:03:39] I think Bigfoot is blurry. That's the problem.
[00:03:44] It's not the photographer's fault.
[00:03:48] Bigfoot is blurry. And that's extra scary to me because there's a large out of focus monster roaming the countryside.
[00:04:03] I love Mitch Hedberg. RIP Storge is a word that would best be described as loving affection. The definition is going to be right here on the screen. Loving affection. When C.S. lewis, in his book The Four Loves, talks about this word, this is what he calls it warm affection or loving affection. And it's really the type of love that we would associate with a family. You would think of this as a familial experience. And here's the best way to understand that. Your family, your kids, your parents, your spouse, brothers and sisters, they are the only people that they can be so mean to you and you still want to hang out with them, right? Your kids can. Parents can disobey you, scream at you all day, disrespect you, and then when you put them to bed at night, you still think, should I get in one more hug? Should I just sneak back in there, right? Because you just genuinely like them. If your coworker treated you like your kids do, you wouldn't hang out after work. There's. There's no way you would. But that familial love, that loving affection, it's that as a parent, you probably know that when your kid opens a Christmas present and you see the joy on their face, that's way better than anything you could get, right? Because you love them in this way that you have affection and desire for them. Their joy is your joy and they Skin their knee. And you wish you could amputate a hand to replace that, to take that away. Because when they hurt, it hurts you worse than you could ever hurt. You've got this affection, loving affection for your kids. Their joy is your joy. This extends to our families, to our brothers and sisters, maybe to those of us who. To our adults and single, to the people we've chosen to have a family type relationship with, our close lifelong friends, the people that we want to spend time with, we desire their company. It's kind of natural. And when we think about our lives, we think about them as naturally part of it. Now, storge is what we would think of as the baseline expression of a healthy family. Agape. Like Mike talked about last week, the unconditional love is also part of a family, but that is present when you see relationships that break, when you see forgiveness that needs to exist, People that let each other down. If you're familiar with the prodigal son story in scripture where the son leaves home and his dad welcomes him back, those are the moments where we see agape, the unconditional love clearly expressed in a family. But when you think of the daily experience, the joy, laughter, the fighting and arguing and loving, spending time together, anyway, that comes in a healthy family. That's storge. It's loving affection. Now, when you look for storge in scripture, if you look for an example, not a description. We read a description just a minute ago. But when you look for an example, a family in the bible that shows us what storge is, it's like looking for bigfoot. You were wondering why we watched that video. It's like looking for bigfoot if it exists. It's blurry. It's hard to tell. Here's what I mean. The first family that exists in scripture, Adam and Eve, they have two sons, Cain and abel. You might know that story. One brother kills the other brother out of j Jealousy. That's not really loving affection. Probably not. You fast forward the story a few generations, and then you get Abraham, Abraham and his wife Sarah. They get promised a son by God, but they're impatient when waiting for God's promise. So Abraham sleeps with his wife's servant and has another son. That doesn't sound like loving affection in a healthy family. But then when God finally fulfills his promise and gives Isaac to Abraham and Sarah, there's so much jealousy in the home that Abraham sends his mistress and his son out in the desert to fend for themselves alone.
[00:08:11] Not a lot of storge now we see kind of a blurry picture of what this loving affection might look like with Abraham and Isaac at times. But there are other places. Back in the story, Abraham and his wife Sarah had to flee to Egypt for a while. And the story tells us that Abraham's wife, that Sarah was so beautiful that Abraham was afraid the Egyptians were going to kill him and take his wife. So he said, hey, pretend to be my sister, which is a red flag. Don't do that. Don't pretend your, your spouse is your sibling. But he, he says, pretend you're my sister so that they won't kill me. The they'll just take you and we can both survive. That's weird. That's not storge. That's not a loving family. But then in the next generation, Isaac, who grew up in the home of Abraham and Sarah, when he and his wife Rebecca have to flee to Egypt, guess what they do? Isaac says, hey, you're really beautiful. I don't want them to kill me, so pretend you're my sister.
[00:09:08] And then in the next generation, Jacob, the third generation in this blurry, confusing family that's nothing that we would call healthy, becomes maybe the most conniving and manipulative character in the entire Bible. If not in the human story. He accidentally marries two women. He marries the wrong one and then he marries the right one. There's tons of jealousy in his family. He tricked his father in law so that he could make money off of his father in law. We see a little bit of loving affection with his second youngest son, Joseph, but he plays so much favoritism with Joseph that his family divides in jealousy. The brothers sell another brother into slavery. It's blurry. Then you fast forward. Well, maybe. What about David? David's family? He's called a man after God's own heart. But if you read the story of David's family, it looks like something Taylor Sheridan wrote for the Duttons. It's like the, like the 2000 BC prequel to Yellowstone. It's just confused backbiting and anger and hatred. It's blurry. There's no clear picture. We see blurry pictures. We see places where we can guess that it exists. Joseph and Mary, Jesus, earthly parents. We see that. We see characters where we can assume it happens. Maybe Deborah in the Book of Judges, we see certain instances where David loves his son Solomon. But every time you look for a picture for an example that you could base this love on in your family, it's a blurry picture. Bigfoot is blurry.
[00:10:43] Now it Gets sticky when we start to think about our own families.
[00:10:51] Because if I had to guess, I might be wrong. This is certainly true for me now. I don't have murder. I've never pretended like my wife is my sibling. But if I'm looking for an example of that storge love, it's blurry.
[00:11:07] It's hard to find, like, a clear picture. A. Yeah, that's exactly it. That's exactly right. That's exactly what I want to model my life on. Think about it like this. If you had the perfect family, if you had the perfect parents, or if you were the best parent that's ever existed, not perfect, but the best that has existed in human history, which, statistically speaking, you do not have the best parents that existed in human history, but even if you did, you had the best one since Adam and Eve. Those people are people who are struggling with their own sin, who are making a lot of good decisions and some bad decisions. They have that the selfishness that we all have in them. And even though they are modeling a very good picture, it's still a blurry picture, because scripture tells us that all of us have fallen short of the glory of God, that all of us struggle. So the picture is blurry. Even if we had the best family that's imaginable in human history, the picture is blurry. But most of us don't. We certainly don't have the best. Most of us just have normal families where we make a lot of really good decisions, where we see some really great pictures of love and affection, and where we see some really bad pictures of it.
[00:12:20] Some of us had genuinely bad homes that we grew up in. We grew up in abusive homes where we had parents that knowingly and intentionally did physical or emotional harm. And when we look for a picture of this loving affection, it's nowhere to be seen.
[00:12:37] Some of us had parents who rejected their responsibilities altogether, and we don't even know where to look. We might know what a loving grandparent looks like or what a loving aunt and uncle looks like, but we have no place to look to look for that example of storge. Some of us have really wonderful parents who are doing their best. A lot of us, most of us have and are normal parents who make some really good, selfless, godly decisions for our families, for our spouses, for our siblings, for our kids, and who make some really selfish decisions where we blow it.
[00:13:13] There's a concept here that we have to see because it's clear throughout the story of scripture, and it's Clear in what we now know through from human psychology. And it's this. It's going to be right here on the screen.
[00:13:26] You can only model what you have seen.
[00:13:31] You can only teach what you have learned, and you can only give what you have received.
[00:13:40] One more time, because this is important. You can only model what you've seen, you can only teach what you have learned, and you can only give what you have received. If you have not seen it, you cannot do it. If it has not been taught to you, you can't teach it to someone else. If you don't have it, you can't give it away. Modern psychologists would explain that to us like this. The home you grew up in is the most formative thing thing in your life.
[00:14:16] What we understand now about human psychology is that we understand the world. We learn the world from the home we grew up in. We view the world through the lens of the nucleus of a family. The family is kind of the sun that our life circles around. And we learn about the world and about the roles of the world from the homes we grow up in. And then we interact with the world through families. We grow up in a family and then we go either make our own family or maybe we build close relationships and friendships that operate like that family. But a healthy familial relationships are crucial to our health in the world. We learn how to exist in the world from the home we grew up in. In other words, we model what we've seen, we teach what we learned, and we give what we've received.
[00:15:07] Christian teachers and Christian psychologists take that a step further. And they would say that the very first picture of God that we get is the picture we get from our parents. God describes himself as a father in scripture. So when we think of God the father, we usually think of God the Father a little bit like our father, which as a dad, is horrifying.
[00:15:33] God reveals himself as father, but describes himself with mothering characteristics. Which means when we think of God's comfort and his care and his presence and his empathy with us, we think of it through the lens of our mother. Another way to understand that is that basically, and this has been proven true and documented by Christian teachers and psychologists many times, that if we had a maybe a father who was distant or who was harsh, we tend to imagine God as distant and harsh. If we had had a mother who was not very present and not very comforting, we have a hard time going to God when we need comfort because we have a hard time imagining God as a gentle and comforting presence. We learn the world through the homes that we grow up in.
[00:16:21] Scripture talks about this through these terms. It talks about the sins of the father or generational sins or generational curses. Just for the record, generational curses are not Harry Potter. This is not like a pox on you and your family. It's not that. It's. We learn what we were taught. We model what we've seen.
[00:16:41] So if divorce was the only thing we've seen in our family for generations, then divorce is a high probability in our lives.
[00:16:49] If addiction was present in generations of our family. Some of us struggle with addiction because it's what we saw, not it's not, because it's what we chose.
[00:17:00] Some of us repeat the same cycles that we see because we haven't seen anything else. Because Bigfoot's blurry.
[00:17:09] Because when we're looking for an example, the best examples we can find are blurry.
[00:17:15] The author and Pastor Pete Scazzero said it like this in his book the Emotionally Healthy Leader. He said, jesus may live in your heart, but Grandpa lives in your bones.
[00:17:27] Now, at the risk of just making this point a little bit too heavy, but sometimes we've got to get into the heaviness so that we can come out of it with hope.
[00:17:36] Basically, what this means is Jesus teaches me to pray, but mom teaches me to yell.
[00:17:42] Jesus might teach me to worship, but dad teaches me to gossip. Jesus might teach me how to have faith, but if I grew up in a home that was marked by fear and hoarding and anxiety, then it's going to be really hard for fear to trump or for faith to trump fear in my heart and in my life, because I learn what I was taught. I model what I've seen and I give what I've received.
[00:18:09] Now, at this point, you might be thinking, cj, how in the world does anything change then?
[00:18:17] Because this is what I want to tell you. I want to pause here because I realize that this is a very uncomfortable topic. And some of you might be sitting here thinking, well, then, I don't know what to do. It seems like we are doomed to repeat the same cycles. I don't know where to look for a good example. What do I do to break this cycle? I want to tell you first that we serve a God of redemption and of transformation, that whatever cycle exists in your family can be broken. Can I say that one more time? Whatever cycle exists in your family can be broken. Whether it's something extreme like addiction or abuse, or whether it's just workaholism or whether it's just emotional distance or overreacting. Whatever cycle exists in your family can be broken. I am actually a testimony to this. I come from families on both sides of alcoholics. On my mom's side, my grandfather was an absent alcoholic who drank away the money and then spent most of his time drunk. But right before, right about the time my mom was born, he encountered Jesus.
[00:19:23] And my mom grew up in a different home than her older siblings did because the cycle broke. Now, my grandfather certainly wasn't perfect, but he was a clearer picture than the generations before him. The cycle broke, and I can guarantee you that my mom parented me way different than my grandparents parented her, because the picture got clearer through the generations. The cycle broke. On my dad's side, my grandfather was a violent alcoholic who was radically abusive to his family. When my dad was my age, he encountered Jesus. And when I hear the stories from my dad's childhood, they sound like Star wars or something. They sound like something from a different galaxy than what I experienced growing up. Why? Because the cycle changed. Because. Because we serve a God of redemption and hope. Now, my dad was not perfect. There are certainly things where I need to clarify the picture of Jesus from his. From that generation as well. But it's a different cycle that we're repeating on. So if you're here and you're saying, how in the world could my family ever. How in the world can I give something different to my kids than what I had? How in the world can things change? They change through Jesus.
[00:20:30] Transformation can happen. Did you have good parents? Guess what? Bigfoot can come into more focus. You might have had great parents, but there's a place in your life where Jesus can come into more focus and you can change the cycle. And if you had parents that were absent and abusive, the cycle can change radically. Where you. You can model for your family and your spouse the grace and love and mercy of Jesus instead of what you saw. But it comes from doing two things. The first, it comes from you as an individual choosing to center your life on the character of God, not the example you saw.
[00:21:07] Can I say that again?
[00:21:09] It comes from choosing to center your life on the character of God, not on the example that you've seen. It means choosing to let the revelation of Christ through Scripture be the guiding light of your life, rather than just the examples you have seen thus far. Which means you have to be willing to ask the question, in the examples that I've seen in my life, what was Christ like and what wasn't?
[00:21:31] You have to Be willing to be honest. The most. The most honoring thing we can do for ourselves and our families is to be honest.
[00:21:38] Honesty is honoring. What did God mean in the Ten Commandments when he said, honor your father and mother? I believe honesty.
[00:21:46] Honesty is honoring.
[00:21:49] Here's the second thing. As we reveal, as we see who Christ is, as we see a better picture of Bigfoot than the one on the screen behind me, as we see it get more and more clear, what we do is we point to the picture of Christ in our families instead of the picture of ourselves. Here's what I mean by that. When I found myself overreacting to my son, when I find. When he does something and I catch myself reacting in a way that was not consistent with the moment, instead of saying, oh, well, it was better than my dad did, what I say is, josiah, I'm sorry.
[00:22:30] I've been really stressed and I overreacted. But our Heavenly Father doesn't get stressed and he never overreacts. And I'm trying to become more like him.
[00:22:41] So I'm going to try to do better next time. And what I do with my son is I clarify the picture.
[00:22:48] I bring Bigfoot into focus so that he has an example that's not just me. And so that my example looks through me and to Christ, when I find myself working too much and missing his soccer games for a while and not being home for bedtime, what do I do? Well, instead of saying, well, I'm just trying my best to give him a better opportunity than I had, what I say is, josiah, I'm sorry that I haven't been present and I haven't been there with you. Your heavenly Father is always present. His work never gets in the way of his desire to be with you. And I'm trying to become more like my heavenly Father, our Heavenly Father, so I'm going to do better next time. And I clarify the picture. When I catch myself doom scrolling at night instead of being present with my wife when we watch Netflix for a month straight. Basically, him don't talk in the evenings. Instead of saying, well, we're stressed and this helps us just veg out for a little while, I say, hey, I'm really sorry that I haven't been present and that I haven't been prioritizing connection in our relationship. When Jesus loves the church in scripture, he always connects and is always present. And I want to be more like him, not just like me.
[00:23:55] And we clarify the picture. We are not perfect. Listen, we are not perfect. But when we find the places we are not perfect. We can acknowledge it with honesty and clarify the picture. Picture set the standard on Christ, not on ourselves, so that our families have an example to model off of, that is Jesus. We can bring Bigfoot in to focus. You do not have to repeat the same cycles. But it comes when you're willing to be honest and to clarify the picture to point to Christ. You ever caught yourself when your son complains, when your kids complain about something, saying, well, back in my day, we walked to school, I didn't have a PS4. I had a PlayStation, one that only worked when you turn it upside down. That's what I had. I had it hard.
[00:24:41] Yeah, I do that all the time. But maybe instead of doing that, saying, you know what, maybe just different than what I had isn't quite the same as Christ and I should point to Christ instead of justifying my actions.
[00:25:00] Now we've reached a point in the sermon where I am officially out of practical advice because you probably know that this can only get you so far. Now, we live in a world where there are just tons of experts and wonderful tools. I would recommend you read books by Gary Thomas or Julie Slattery or Sheila Gregor and find wonderful tools to help you in parenting, in family relationships and sibling relationships and spouse relationships. They'll give you wonderful tools. But the thing that I've become convinced of over the years is that the tools don't make a difference if the heart hasn't changed.
[00:25:37] The tools just do what the heart desires. We use the tools to accomplish whatever our hearts desire.
[00:25:45] The only way for real transformation to happen is for our hearts to change.
[00:25:50] And this is the last thing I've got to say. There are some of us as parents, as husbands, as wives, as children who we have never allowed ourselves to believe that our Heavenly Father has loving affection for us.
[00:26:10] We believe that God forgives us.
[00:26:13] We believe in that. In that sort of like ambiguous way. God does love us, but we don't think he has any affection for us. We can't imagine God not being disappointed in us. Whenever we imagine God speaking to us, his voice is always stern, as if we did something wrong. Again, we can't imagine his love and his mercy.
[00:26:39] But did you hear how John described the storge of God?
[00:26:46] He said, do you see how much love the Father has lavished on us? Do you know what the word lavish means?
[00:26:52] Lavish is like having a car for every month of the year. Lavish is like having a five course meal for every meal that you eat. You ever gone over to someone's house and they cooked so much food that there's no way you and an army could eat it all.
[00:27:05] It's just, you know, we're going to take the leftovers home and fill the fridge with them, and they're going to go bad. That's what's going to happen.
[00:27:11] That's lavish. Lavish is more than you could ever need or use. Impossibly more than you could ever use. It's extravagant. Lavish is almost wasteful. That's how much lavish is. God has lavished his love on you. He has poured more love on you than you could ever use in a hundred lifetimes. You could never exhaust it all. He loves you that much. He lavishes it on you like a Kardashian buys shoes. He loves you so, so much. He lavished. How did he lavish it on you? What is the thing that he did that tells us his love for us is lavish? He called you his child, and that is what you are. That doesn't make sense to the world around us. It doesn't make sense why Christians could have peace and joy in the midst of a world that constantly seems to be falling apart and falling into chaos. But they don't know him, so they don't know us. They have a blurry picture, but we don't. We have a clear picture of who Christ is, that he lavishes his love on us, that he would call us his children. And that is what we are. That is what we are in Christ. He loves you, you know, my son. Every night when he goes to sleep, when we put him to bed, he says, I love and like you. Good night. And it's not always cute. Sometimes it's like, I love and like you. Good night. It's. But from a very young age, we decided we wanted him to know that we love him and we also like him.
[00:28:33] We love him, but I think he's clever and funny. We love him, but I really enjoy spending time with him. We love him, but his soccer games are fun to watch. It's not work.
[00:28:44] We love him, but I like it when he wears socks that don't match because he thinks it's cool.
[00:28:51] We love him, but we like playing video games with him and we want that to be baked into his mind. And somehow he started to reciprocate that back. And I don't even think he knows what it means yet. But we love him and we like him. I love you and I like you. What I'm trying to tell you is that God loves you and he likes you. If I can Be really cheesy for a second. God thinks you're clever and your dumb jokes are funny. He loves hearing them. God loves the food you cook, even if you burn it. God thinks you did a great job at work today, even if your boss took away some pay. God. God loves you and he likes you. He enjoys spending time with you. You know, when I come home from work, my favorite thing in the world is when my son Josiah says daddy and he runs out. I went turkey hunting two weeks ago and I was gone for a few days. And when I got home, he was riding his bike and I heard his bike come up and he ran up and jumped on me. And I'm telling you, you could not double my salary if it would take that away. You couldn't triple my salary if it would take that away. I would take a huge pay cut. I would be broke for my son to like me and love me.
[00:30:03] Do you know how God feels when you go to him?
[00:30:07] It's his favorite thing in the world.
[00:30:10] When you choose to carve out time in your day to pray, that feels to God like it does to a dad when his son runs up and jumps on him because he was gone at work.
[00:30:22] He loves you and he likes you. When you go to him in prayer, he's not saying, oh, this again.
[00:30:27] He's saying, I've been waiting for this all day.
[00:30:30] This is what I wanted. He loves you. And some of you listen, especially. Guys, let me just stereotype for a second. There are some guys here who are thinking all this emotional stuff. I don't really need that. Just tell me what to do. I don't need all this emotions and that's, that's fine. If you would like to repeat a cycle of emotional distance for your family, then that's great, do that. But if you don't, then you need to understand that even if you're a big tough guy who doesn't have emotions, God is giddy when he sees you.
[00:30:56] He loves you and he likes you.
[00:31:00] And when you see that. Can we put this quote back up on the screen one more time?
[00:31:05] You can only model what you have seen. So what you need to see is that God loves you and he likes you.
[00:31:14] You can only teach what you have learned and your kids need to be taught that God takes so much joy in them.
[00:31:25] But you have to learn that first.
[00:31:28] You can only give what you have received. But what you have received is a never ending supply of love that is lavish in the abundant joy God takes in who you are. He loves you. And he likes you. And when you receive that from God you can give that away.
[00:31:47] You can bring Bigfoot into focus for your family, for your spouse, for your parents, for your siblings, for your close friends that feel like family to you. You can bring Bigfoot into focus. They can see a clear picture of God's love because what they will see is is someone who in spite of their failures knows how loved they are and someone who's willing to be honest when they fail and say I messed up but God doesn't look at him. Don't look at me.
[00:32:16] We do not have to repeat the same cycles because God loves us and he likes us. Let's pray.
[00:32:27] Jesus, I thank you for the love and joy that you take in me and in all of us.
[00:32:36] May we continually know more and more clearly how deeply you love us, how much joy you take in us so that our families can be marked by loving affection. Thank you Jesus. Amen.
