A sermon on love by Owen Rogers. These thoughts come largely from 1 Corinthians 13 and 1 John 4:7-21. If what follows seems to lack content it is because I’ve turned my notes into sentences without adding much to them. The essence of the sermon is here and in the Bible passages which I recommend you look up.
I have said that love is the essence of the Trinity and the nature of God. Love is also the essence of our new nature in Christ. Today, we look more closely at this love and how it plays out in our lives.
True Love is Christ-Like Love
The nature of true, Christ-like love is spelt out in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8.
We can use words like selfless, unconditional, giving; not getting, others-focused, and so on to describe this love.
When we read this it is likely that we think of Jesus. This is how he was and is.
This shows up even more clearly if we put Jesus’ name in place of ‘love’ in these verses.
True love is demonstrated by Jesus in his life, in his teaching and in his actions. God’s love is shown by the gift of his son to die for sinners. See Romans 5:8 and 1 John 4:9-10. No one can show greater love than the one who lays down his life for his friend: John 15:13.
Who can love like that? See 1 John 3:16. Maybe we can after we’ve known God’s love for us. How does your love match up at home, at work, in church, etc? To get an insight into how you are doing at love try putting your name in the place of the word love in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8.
The five love languages
Gary Chapman, in his book , The Five Love languages, puts forward the idea that We all ‘speak’ at least one of these languages by the way we express our love. It’s what we naturally tend to do. It’s also our preferred way to receive love. To an extent it defines ‘true’ love for us so that, when someone expresses love to us using another language we might be inclined to say, “It’s nice but it’s not real love.”. The more we use all five ways of expressing love the better we will be at loving others. If you aren’t fluent in all 5 at least become conversant with the ones you don’t know as well. You’ll gain fluency from practice.
Chapman’s five modes of expression or languages are:
Quality Time,
Words of affirmation,
Gift giving,
Acts of service,
Physical touch.
Get the book or check them out at http://www.5lovelanguages.com/
True Love is the “Active Ingredient” in the Christian life
Spiritual gifts or actions are of little value without love (1 Cor.13:1-3)
Not only does love make the world go round, but love is the glue which holds the church together.
God is love and calls us to love (1 John 4:7-21). The word ‘love’ is misused a lot in English-speaking societies today. Used properly, ‘love’ is for people and not for things. That is, we love people; we like things; we enjoy activities.
It is our loving one another that makes us safe people and our church a safe place for all who come.
Our challenge in all this is to so live that God’s love is the active ingredient in our Christian lives.