MCC Podcasts
Love - It Really Does Make The World Go Round
And let's put our hands out as we come to God's Word. And we're on a journey toward the table this morning, friends. We're going to conclude our time with taking the Lord's table and music worship to end our morning. If you were thinking you got ripped off and you missed the music, we've got a few more times of singing. But let's put our hands out. God, this is what we do at times when we come to you as a symbol of our being receptive or longing to be receptive to your Word. The palms are up, they're outstretched, we're saying, "God, would you pour out for me what I need to hear as we turn to your Word by your Holy Spirit who inspired this Word, who shepherded this Word through the ages that we might have it today in this form, this reliable form that we know that God, you can speak to us by that same Holy Spirit. Would you illuminate it now through this English, the reading, through my speaking so that I wouldn't miss what you have? So open up the floodgates, God, pour it out, your grace, your challenge, your truth, your encouragement, your correction, your whatever you have for me, I don't want to miss it. I do not want to leave here the same as I came. That's what I'm saying, God, with my hands outstretched. So bring your Word for your servants are listening, if that's your prayer, say, "Amen." Amen. Oh, I'm so excited we get to start our new series this morning on love. We're going to, you've heard of the Summer of Love, baby, this is the winner of love. I know, this is the winner of love, we're going to talk about love and love and relationships and all its formats, God's love and our love and our love for people and our love for. We're going to be in this idea of love and we love love, don't we love love? We love love, love is a great thing, we love love, I hear it, okay, you know what? My first two loves, you got a story, you want to hear my story? My first two loves, my first love, I was seven, almost eight, went into third grade classroom. I had Mr. Patton as my third grade teacher. My brother had had him, he was a great teacher, everybody knew about Mr. Patton and because of God's great, apparently love for me, Mr. Patton suffered a heart attack and was not able to show up because Mrs. Kennedy was in the room. And there we were wondering who our substitute was going to be for the whole year because Mr. Patton was going to be out and Mrs. Kennedy walked through the door. Come on now, boys, some of you know what I'm talking about. Mrs. Kennedy had long dark hair and when she went by she smelled not like your mom, man, she smelled. And she was kind and gentle and she knew her times, tables like nobody's business. Man, I fell hard for Mrs. Kennedy. In fact, later on in life, I came to find out that her husband was a high school teacher at my high school and I remember thinking he ain't got nothing on me. I bet there's a chance, you know. Mrs. Kennedy, my heart went pitter patter and I excelled in third grade. I bet if you looked at my grades, they would have been way off the chart compared to the rest of my average for the rest of the time. My other love, my other love also had dark hair, half black lab, half German shepherd. My dog growing up was my dog and this dog was not about 90 pounds, 90, 95 pounds, big old bear of a dog, black with those brown spots right here that move like this, right? And I was so excited about having a big dog that I wanted to name him Lurch. Remember that from Adam's family? But it was a girl. So she was Lurch Ann was our dog and she went everywhere with me. I had a bandana around her neck. She was in the back of my pickup truck. She was my dog and went everywhere with me and that was by the time I was 16. When I was younger, she would follow me to school. She would walk behind me and I would throw rocks at her and tell her, "Go home. Go home. You can't follow me to school." So she'd hide around the corner and around the park cars and would then, I'd see her looking to see if I was looking at her and then when I wasn't looking, she'd run down and keep up with me. I would one time in seventh grade when I was in my math class. Mrs. McQuistion's math class and I had walked to my junior high. It was a mile, mile and a quarter away from my house and I thought I had ditched my dog and I'm sitting in math class and I'm looking at the teacher and the door's open and you know how when people walk by you instinctively look like this. So there was a figure walking by and I looked over and it was my big old dog walking down the hall of my middle school and the dog sort of did that thing where it's walking down like this and it goes like this and goes, "Ooh, comes in my class. My love, my lurchy baby." And as a kid, that dog. I remember when I was in trouble with my parents being 10, 11 years old, I would go and sit and cry to my dog and hug his big neck and go, "You love me," right? Oh man, we love love. Our lives are full of those kinds of stories. When our hearts were full, when our lives were completely connected to the things that made us alive and that made us happy and that made us excited, we love love. Apparently you guys, and this is why I entitled our kind of kickoff sermon into this, apparently love really does make the world go round. It really does make the world go round. I looked into this quote this week. We've heard that quote, it's sort of an American proverb, "Love makes the world go round." And I looked into this quote and it may have been the first person that may have used it was Louis Carroll, "Love makes the world go round." It was in Alice in Wonderland and then we've got famous people throughout the age of saying things like, "Love may not make the world go round, but I must admit it makes the ride worthwhile." Have you heard that? And then love makes the world go around and so does a bump on the head. I thought that was a good quote. Love makes the world go round, but some whiskey makes it go around faster, I heard that. Ice tea, of course, our famous theologian ice tea said, "Passion makes the world go around. Love makes it safer." I thought that was fascinating, but apparently love really does make the world go around. But we love love, it's that the root of all our ideals, I think. It's the root of all of the things that compel us. If we sat and talked and you told me sort of the iconic moments of your life or even the iconic moments of our nation's life and our world's history, we could find this theme of love in it even though it's very difficult for us to define exactly what love is. We could put our finger on the fact that love is a part of a definition of all things compelling, all things deep, all things most significant in our lives. There's a love piece or a lack of love piece in every part of those stories. I dare you to start thinking about it, I bet that's the case for you. And so we do love love, it's part of our, when we look back, it's part of our romantic life, it's part of all the good films that we've seen, is it not? It's part of our, those of us that have had kids have that experience of loving love and recognizing the power that is in that. It's part of our compulsion about sex, you know, when we look at our culture and it's so crazy out of control, sex crazed, I actually don't judge it the way that I used to because friends I think what that's about is that longing for love that's in there. That's about love, the search for it and the missing of it and the need for it. It's actually a driven thing about love that's in there. When we go to see the world and experience the world and live in other cultures or look at other cultures or meet people and we sit next to somebody at a dinner party and we find it's a fascinating evening, it's about learning to love them and appreciate them and to be appreciated and loved by them. There's love in just experiencing the world with people. If there's love in these relationships and these friendships that we have that are so deep and so rich and we connect with somebody and we realize, man, I love that guy and that guy loves me. That's a powerful reality in our lives. And then there's love in all of our good music, isn't it? We love love, we love love in all these places, we love love in our music. That's what makes music so rich. You think about your favorite songs in your life and there's a love component to it. I guarantee there's a love component to it. You thought about that, right? You've looked at the catalog of your history. It's powerful when you look at the songs about love. I printed out my -- I just did a little search on my library. My iTunes library, 770 songs in my iTunes library have love in the title. In the title. Isn't that wild? And 126 of them started with love. I thought that was just fascinating to me. And then I start thinking about it and I go, there's never been a song in my whole life that I've ever really liked that wasn't about love. It's something in us to love love. It's pretty fun to go through all this. I mean, it's worship and R&B and gospel and jazz and rock. I mean, it's all kinds of genres in here. Michael, there's no country in here, by the way, in my library. You could love your pickup truck, I guess. Al Green's got the best love songs. Love and happiness. He's got L-O-V-E love. He's got songs that don't have love in the title, but they're love songs. Let's stay together, let's stay together, loving you, weather, weather. Come on, everybody, good or bad, happy or sad, yeah. Oh, man. Does this be in videotaped? There is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight songs in my library called Love Song and they're all different. It's just there is called Love Song and you go all the way through it is fascinating to see and loving you, Minnie Ripperton, who wants to try that one? Love and you has made my life so beautiful. Let's stop there and love is part of who we are. It's part of what we love. It's part of our very existence day in and day out from art and music and children and relationships and pain and all of it. It's part of all of it. Love apparently really does make the world go round. And friends, that is God's idea. I want to read the scripture this morning and I want you to hear these scriptures and then we're going to do some theological sort of underpinnings of this study of love before we come to the table, which is so appropriate. You know, when the early church took communion, they did it as part of something they called the love feast and it means just what it sounds that they would get together and celebrate. God's love for them, their love for God and their love for one another and for the world and they would feast. I've been finding that when I pray around our table, our dinner table, our lunch table, whenever I have often been led lately to say God, this feast is a celebration of all things love, all the ways that you love us and we're going to come to the table this morning. If you have your Bible, it'd be great for you to turn to this passage and we'll do a couple passages here. Mark chapter 12 is the first text I want to read. Mark 12, 28 through 34. One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating and noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer. He asked them of all the commandments, which is the most important? The most important one answered Jesus is this, hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, love the Lord your God with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your mind and with all of your strength and the second is this, love your neighbor as yourself. There's no commandment greater than these. Well said teacher, the man replied, you're right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him to love him with all your heart and with all your understanding, with all your strength and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burn offerings and sacrifices. When Jesus saw that he'd answered wisely, he said to him, you're not far from the kingdom of God and from then on, no one dared ask him any more questions. First John chapter 4, we're going to go there again next week and actually both these passages a little bit next week but just a few verses from 1 John 4, dear friends let us love one another for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God, whoever does not love does not know God because God is love and then up to 15 and 16. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God and so we know and rely on the love God has for us, God is love, whoever lives in love lives in God and God in them, that's the word of the Lord. Here's the point, we love love, it's so sweet of an idea and it really is you guys God's idea, this is the whole idea that it's God's point, it's God's idea, it's what God would have us to do. God is love and God says the most important thing for us to do is love, period. That's what these texts are about. It's supposed to be sweet because this is the whole idea that God would have us live in a life and in a relationships full of love. It loves a God thing, it's part of who God is and let's go into some of those theological and biblical sort of teachings underlining there and that first idea there you have on the slide, God is love from 1 John 4, it says it twice in those passages, God is love. The idea here is it's not one of the activities that God does, not like God, there's a lot about God we should know but one of the things about God we should know is that he's pretty good at loving, he's pretty good lover like it's one of his strong suits. On the personality test it comes up, he's kind of high in loving, that's not the idea but this is that it's one of the few descriptors that the Bible uses to speak of his essence. It's not God loves just, it says that in our scriptures, God is good at loving, it's God is love, there's only a few of those in the scriptures, he's light, he's righteous, he's jealous but this is God is love and what that means is not that it's just one of the activities that he does but it's that in all of his activities it is loving activity, you hear that? It's part of his essence, so with all else of what we know about God, his activity is a loving activity, if God creates he creates in love, right? If he rules in his sovereignty and power, he rules in love, that's what he does. If he judges, he judges in love, if he speaks, he speaks in love, now think about it when we keep, if he blesses, he's blessing in love, if he withholds dear children of God, he withholds in love. God is love, it is something we got to get our heads around when we think about life, when we think about life with God when we think about trying to live a faithful, serving Jesus kind of life, we got to remember that God is love, it's part of the whole picture because when it comes to those moments like when God withholds, we have to know that he withholds in love. That's an anchor we have to get in because when you've been withheld something from, when God has withheld something from you, that's the temptation, it's the go, "He doesn't love me." Do you remember that? Those of you that have had kids, when you had to take something away from your child because it wasn't good for them and the pain that it caused you because you saw them not understanding? I remember my kids getting shots. My wife, such a wimp, she would never take, it was like that was my job when we had to get our kids shots because she didn't like to see them get shots and so, you know, because what would happen? You go to the doctor and you get that sweet little two-year-old and the pigtails and they're so great and they go to the doctor and did your kids, by the way, learn that when they started to get near the doctor, they would freak out because they knew that someone was going to do something mean to them, but they would get their shots, right? I mean, we had Brooke, we had our oldest Brooke, you know, big, oh, honey, we haven't done it yet. You know, that kind of a, that kind of a, then we had Emily and we thought, man, Emily is a pistol. What is Emily? It's going to happen with Emily when she gets her shots, you know, and we go to the doctor and, you know, Emily does that when I'm all braced and this is going to be hard and Emily, they will give Emily that shot and she gets one of these, like, is that all you got to the doctor? Didn't react to how we thought, but she was so funny about it. Then one time Emily actually got salmonella, so sick and I remember being at the doctor, she was as sick as I've ever seen a little kid, gosh, she had to have been, I don't know how old was she, honey, do you remember when she had salmonella? Yeah, five and we had to go take her to get a blood test, so it wasn't the quick shot, it was to put the needle in the arm and draw the blood out, right? And I'll never forget, because Linda was at home praying, prayer support, I guess, and I was there that I had her on my lap in the lab technician's place and the lab technician is like, get a hold of her. So I put this arm around her and she had her arm on that little thing, you know, and that lady stuck that thing in her arm and Emily went through the ceiling and I remember her being like, no, and her feet, she was kicking the technician with all and I had one leg wrapped around the bottom of her legs like this and my arm wrapped around her and she was like, no, and at one awful moment in the middle of that, she turned around and looked at me like, you're in on this. And all of me inside was like, you have to do this for your goodness out of our love. You would die without being treated for salmonella and when God blesses and judges and rules and speaks and acts and doesn't act, friends, it's in love. God is is love. This whole love thing is so sweet because it's God's idea. God is love and so by transition and really where we go with this is if that is who He is, if He chose by His own self-definition and self-existence that He would be love and He chose that we would have His nature, all of us created in His image, all of us, even if we don't know God personally yet, even if we have not embraced the good news of Jesus Christ, every single human being is in God's image, been created in God's image, friends, they have a part of that in them. That's why this whole world dreams and longs for love. And even further, those of us that have said yes to salvation in Christ by His Holy Spirit in us, we partake in His nature. And so if He is love, then we become lovers. Is that right? We become lovers. So not only is He love, but by nature, we become lovers. So one, this is the whole idea that God is love, two, it's then also what we do. It's what we do. And this is what the Mark 12 passage is all about. These guys came to Jesus and they said, and these teachers of the law were actually very, they were all excited about this. This is a conversation you see in all kinds of extra-biblical literature where they were always trying to figure out how to sum up the law. And then that Mark 12 passage, the teachers of the law came, a parallel passage in Matthew. It looks like maybe the guy was coming to sort of test Jesus and see if he could catch him, or maybe just test him to see if he could come up with a good answer. But these guys would ask the question, how do we sum up the law out of all the law and the commandments? It says in the scriptures, he says, what's the most important one? And you can put in the parentheses there out of all the 613 commandments because this is how they had characterized them. There were 613 commandments in the law. But of all the commandments, which is the greatest one? I love this question because we ask this question all the time. And our students ask this question all the time, man, there's a lot going on here. I got all these things that you want me to be about. I got all these morals that are coming my way. I got all this Christian music. I got my youth pastors talk. I got our pastors speaking up front. I got all the biblical reading. I got all the devotional books. I got 6 more Christian books for Christmas. I got all these things I ought to be doing out of all the commandments, out of all that I should be for you, God. What is the most important one? It's a good question, don't you think? And Jesus gave it a two-part answer. And that two-part answer, by the way, did not originate with Jesus. It wasn't like he said, listen, you've never heard this before, but I'm going to blow your minds. It actually was one that other rabbis had already taught. In fact, parenthetically, if you look at another passage in Luke chapter 10, in that pane of look at it now, but in that passage, a guy came and said, "Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" Do you remember that question? And Jesus said, "What's in the law? How do you read it?" And the man said, "Love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love my neighbor as myself." And Jesus said, "Yeah, that's right, do that, and you'll know life." So it was out there already. And Jesus said, "That's the stream of my thinking as well." And Jesus gives this definitive answer, and when you look at where that answer came from, it was two scriptures, Old Testament scriptures. It was part of the Shema, which was a Jewish confession of faith, good, solid Jewish believers, at least twice a day, morning and evening, and others, many, many times during the day, would quote these passages, these core passages to them, and they started the Lord, the Lord our God is one, love the Lord your God with all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your mind and all of your strength. It was something that good, solid, religious Jewish people would say, and Jesus said, "That's it. I'm summing it up. You're a lover, and you love God." And that's just the first part of it. He said, "This is what we do. We love God." Heart, soul, mind, and strength, what he means is all of us. We love God, all of us, with all of us, not just a part of us, it's all of our nature to love God. And we're going to actually answer this question and talk next week very, I hope, detailed and graphically about this question, what does it look like to love God? Because we hear that all the time. And you may look at the person sitting next to you at church, or you may know somebody who is a Christian, and the way they love God feels different than the way you feel like you might love God, and what does it look like? What does it really mean that we're called to love God? We're going to talk about that next week, but I know that it's going to expand our notion of love. I know that loving God isn't just romantic, right? It's not a romantic thing. That's different than the way we love. It isn't the same way we've experienced human love. It can't also be full of feeling all the time. I know that for sure, because how could you be commanded to feel something? Here's the greatest commandment. You love God with all your heart. How do we do that? How do you make that happen? It can't just be a feeling, you can't just be commanded to feel something. So I know there's more to this going to expand our notion of love, but for now it's got to be at least this. We love God back. We love God in response to God's love to us. We love God loving Him back. We want His best the way He wants our best. We want to give our life to Him the way He gave His life to us. We want to lean into Him and know who He really is and delight in Him so that we long for Him the way that He knows who we really are and delights in who we really are. We love Him back. That's at least the beginning of understanding of how we love God. We are grateful for what God has already done. We become and we end up feeling grateful for all that God has accomplished. That's the whole idea that we, God's love and this is what we do at least in part by loving God. I've mentioned my friends, the Smiley's many times and it's our friend who were missionaries in Turkey and their son has cancer and had cancer for the first time at 5 and now he's 24. In 18 years of multiple cancer surgeries he now has his fourth different kind of cancer. Just had another surgery and the cancer they found when they took out this tumor in his lung was not a good, it wasn't good news and prognosis is pretty dim and he writes the most powerful blog as you can imagine a 24 year old wrestling with 19 years of struggling with cancer and in his first blog entry after coming out of this last surgery he said and he talked very candidly in fact I wouldn't even recommend it to some of you because maybe some of us can't even handle that kind of honesty before God. But one of the things he also said in that is he said you don't worry about me, he goes because I'm experiencing a sense of gratitude for who God is and what he has given me. He said that is surpassing all my understanding. He said I mean in the midst of this lost, confused, scared to death, mad at God kind of a moment. He said I'm still yet experiencing a deep love for God. He said I mean I mean a when the lights are off and nobody knows it in the dark I'm smiling kind of love for God. This love thing is God's idea, he's loved by his nature we become lovers and we love God with all of us. We'll talk more about what that means next week. And then the second thing is what Jesus said in this. He said in the second commandment is like it. He said you love your neighbor as yourself. There's no other commandment greater than these two. These are the two that we're going to sum up. We love God and we love him back is what we're doing and we love people. And of course parenthetically is because he loves people. We become lovers. That's his nature that he's put in us. We love people because he does. That's what we do. Jesus adds to this shamaw, this Jewish confession of faith by this other Old Testament passage that says just that you love your neighbor as yourself. And you know if we had time we would go into how dramatic and different that is than the way that they conceived of loving people. But Jesus was of course way beyond that Jesus even said remember love your enemies. He goes who doesn't love their people who love them. He said that on the Sermon on the Mount and he goes but you love your enemies. But he said love your neighbor as yourself. When I refer to that Luke 10 passage where the guy said teacher how do I receive eternal life? Jesus said how do you see the law? He said love the Lord your God, love your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus said you're right, go do that. Well then that guy said okay who's my neighbor? Go do this because he's trying to figure it out. So what does that look like? And then Jesus told the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus said well here's a story and to be brief because we're almost out of time. He said a man was going down the road, got attacked by robbers, he got beat up, everything was taken from him, dumped on the side of the road suffering. A priest comes by and a Levite comes by two different times. The religious spiritual people, priest comes by, crosses the other side of the road, goes on his way. Priest comes by, crosses the other side of the road, goes by. But a Samaritan came by and again many of you know that the Samaritans were despised people. They goofed up the Jewish religion, they goofed up the Jewish bloodlines. They were half breeds, they were infidels in terms of the truth and they were despised. It was an awful racism that existed in that part of the world at the time. And a Samaritan comes by and his point of Jesus' story goes to the man, binds up his wombs, puts him on his own donkey, takes him to an inn, gets him cared for, leaves money so that his further care is taken care of. And then Jesus says and so which one of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who had been robbed? And the people couldn't, they knew they had been tricked, they couldn't even say the name Samaritan so they just said that the one who had mercy on him. And Jesus said you go and do likewise. And so forever for us Jesus has defined our neighbor as being the one who needs mercy but also in that whole encounter, Jesus said you go and do likewise, the neighbor, one neighbor is the neighbor to the other is the Samaritans. And Jesus said you're enemies and those who need mercy, they're your neighbor just like you thought, your neighbor was your neighbor and your brother was your neighbor and your spouse was your neighbor and your child was your neighbor. And so Jesus has forever said that the one, all of these, everyone with whom we find ourselves in the world is a neighbor and we are lovers. And it's so echoing the most famous verse we all know, for God so loved the world. We love because God loves, it's his whole idea and let me conclude with this. In the text in Mark 12, the man, he heard Jesus say this and he goes, wow, yeah, I think you're right. You're right in saying these things and he quoted his version of that idea of loving God and loving other people. He quoted his version of it. He got it and Jesus said to him, when Jesus saw verse 34, that he had answered wisely, he said to him, you're not far from the kingdom of God. I love that Jesus probably leaned into him and said, oh, you're getting it. You're so close. You get this idea where God rules and God reigns and God's principles stand. You get it. Love is it. You're getting it. You're so close. This was a teacher of the law who hadn't embraced Jesus as the Messiah that Jesus goes. But you get this love thing. You get that loving God and loving people is the whole idea. You're so close. You're not far from the kingdom of God, he says, friends, nor are we when we live by the nature that God has put in us and love. We're not far. We're getting it. And as I said before, there's a whole world that are created in the image of God and they may deny who Jesus is and they may be anti-Christian even, but they long for love because they have God's image in them. And I think when they live in love, when they long for it and search for it and love, God says to them, you're so close. You're so close. Those people aren't our enemies, friends. They're people created in the image of God with us that are so close to the kingdom of God. You with me on that? That's why we're partnering with people who don't yet say, oh, Jesus, all the way, Jesus, they're so close. And we who have the Spirit of God in us, we're very close to the kingdom of God because the whole idea is to love. Do you love? Is that who you are? When you look at all of this religious stuff inside of you and all of this pressure and all of this wondering what life's about in your relationship with God, can you also settle it and say, oh, the first and greatest commandments, I'm going to love God back. And I'm going to love people because that's my nature for to the extent that we love people, we live out of who we truly are and to the extent that we do not love people, we deny the work that God wants to do through us and we deny who we really are. May this series be a challenge for us and a great one and a fun one to be the lovers that we were created to be, loving God, loving the world. [BLANK_AUDIO]