What Really Matters – Part 1
This newest series of messages on Internet Pastor is called “What Really Matters”.
We are going to start a new series called “What really Matters”. In this series we will be talking about living a life of love.
1 Corinthians 13:13 (NIV)
13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
Galatians 5:6 (NIV)
6 For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.
The only thing that counts (there is one of those words, ONLY) is faith expressing itself through LOVE. We have talked over the last few months about forgiveness, about trust, about hope, about grace, and now we are going to wrap them all together as we talk about love. What really matters in life? When Jesus was asked this question His reply was “Love God and love others”.
We use the word love to describe all sorts of things. But what does “love” really mean? What is love? That is what we will look at in the weeks ahead, but for today, let’s try and establish a working definition.
Just like the other foundational series we have looked at, forgiveness, faith, hope, grace, these concepts of love are one which we need to constantly re-examine and evaluate to see how we are doing. In this fallen world, this broken planet, with rampant sin and suffering, tragedies and pain, one of our biggest battles is against become hard hearted.
Living a life of love will help us to keep our hearts soft and pliable before the Lord.
1. Love is a command.
2 John 1:6 (NIV)
6 And this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love.
We are commanded by God to walk in love. This is significant, because it tells us something about love that we might not otherwise understand. Love is more than a feeling. Love produces lot’s of feelings, but it is far more than a feeling, because God does not command feelings. It is like trying to command someone who is sad to be happy. BE HAPPY! This is extremely important to understand because culturally we have reduced love to just a feeling. When in fact….
2. Love is a decision.
We choose to love, and we choose to not love. It’s a choice.
1 Corinthians 14:1 (MSG)
1 Go after a life of love as if your life depended on it—because it does. Give yourselves to the gifts God gives you. Most of all, try to proclaim his truth.
Circle “go after.” That means make a choice. Decide. Choose. We choose to love or to not love.
That challenges another one of our bad ideas about love. That somehow love is uncontrollable. I fell in love. I had no control over it. And then, I fell out of love, I had no control over that either. Love is a decision. It is deciding to give a person what they need, not what they deserve. Love takes in all the facets of forgiveness, grace, mercy and hope and offers them to the people we are in relationship with. Which, by the way, is how God loves you.
Love is giving to another person without any guarantee of getting anything back. If you’re doing it to get something back, that’s not love.
3. Love is an action
1 John 3:18 (NIV)
18 Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.
It’s a behavior. It’s an action. Love is something you do. More than a feeling, more than words, love is an action. It is a way of life. And it takes….
4. Love is a commitment.
1 John 4:16 (NIV)
16 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 him.
And yet we have become a culture that doesn’t like to make commitments. We want to be able to “keep our options open”. What if I commit and then something better comes along. I want to be free to experience the next new thing, and so we never commit and yet “real life is found in love, and there is no love without commitment, and so people that can’t commit spend their lives waiting for something that they will never attain, without learning to commit.
Our relationship with God is largely affected by our relationship with other people. It is in the day to day living of a life of love that we learn about God. God is love. “Whoever lives in love, lives in God, and God in him”.
So, how is your love life really? It is being defined by the culture, as something that is just an uncontrollable feeling that you fall in and out of, or is your life of life defined by God as a command, a decision, an action, and a commitment. Just like we did in the grace series, we will look at the many facets of LOVE in the weeks ahead.
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