Us: Love

Good Morning!  We’re at the midpoint of our series on worship, and we’re about to turn a corner.  In our first four messages, we focused on God and His attributes, His character, and some of the ways He reveals Himself to us.  We looked at God as our Creator, our Savior, our Shepherd, and our Father.

In today’s message and for the remainder of this series, we’re going to look into different ways that we respond to God in worship.  Today, we will talk about responding to God in love.  In the coming week’s we will look at gathering in worship, bowing in worship, and laying down our lives in worship. 

In the series introduction and flyer, we talked about how we desired to explore worship not only intellectually but also emotionally, with our hearts.  Today’s topic as much as any of the themes is going to connect with our emotions, our hearts.  We are going to reflect on how we worship God in love.

Before we start to unwrap this message, let’s pray and ask God to bring His message into our hearts.

God I do pray that You would speak Your message to us today.  May this message accomplish Your desires in each heart.  We do love You.  Help us to love You more.  Thank You that You first loved us.  In Jesus’ Name.  Amen.

Love.

That is a big topic.

God is love.  I John 4:8 and 16

We have spent the last four messages talking about different ways that God takes care of us.  He made a world for us to live in.  He made us.  When we fell into sin, He rescued us.  Because we are sheep, and we tend to always find ourselves in trouble apart from God, He is constantly shepherding us.  But God is not just “tending us,” He is in relationship with us as a father.  We are the children of God.  In these ways and many more besides, God is love.

We can also find the Biblical definition of love also in I John. 

This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. I John 4:10

Perfect love is God sending His Son to save us from our sins.  It is because of God’s love that we love.

We love because He first loved us.  I John 4:19

Let’s keep focusing our view toward our response and relationship to God.

This is love for God: to keep His commands.  I John 5:3

The verse goes on to say that His commands are not burdensome.  I John 3:23 explains His commands:

And this is His command: to believe in the name of His Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another.  I John 3:23

And so, we could make this the shortest message in Clemson Community Church history.  Isn’t it amazing how simple it is?  That doesn’t seem burdensome does it?  Believe in Jesus and love others.  If you do that, you are loving God.

You know I’m not going to stop here, right?  So, what are we going to do for the next thirty minutes or so?  Let’s continue to think on these things.

One of the common themes in the Divine Design study that we have been going through before our main service on Sunday mornings is that we as children of God are receivers rather than achievers.  We don’t earn our way into heaven by our own self-effort.  Likewise, we cannot love one another or God in our own strength.

Jesus quoted Isaiah 29:13 when confronting the Pharisees, saying …

These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.  They worship me in vain. Matthew 15:8-9

The book of Malachi talks in detail about how the people of Israel were far from God and what that looked like.  The format is a conversation between the Lord and His people.  It’s almost painful to reflect on.

The book begins saying that the people showed contempt for God’s Name.  The way that they did it was by calling worship a burden.  Worship had become boring to them. (Malachi 1:6, 13) Do the things of God ever seem boring or repetitive to you?  If I am honest, I have to say that sometimes they feel that way to me.

Even in the midst of this, God says that His desire in admonishing the people is that His covenant would continue, the covenant of life and peace. (Malachi 2:4, 5)

Another warning which God talks about is that the people have broken faith with one another. (Malachi 2:10)

Interestingly, the people continue to come to worship even though they think it is a burden.  It says that they even flood the altar with their tears because of hardships they face. (Malachi 2:13) God’s answer is that He sees their persistent sins, and He tells them to guard themselves and do not break faith.

How do they respond?  They tell one another that God is pleased with their unrighteous behavior.  “Those who do evil are good in the eyes of the Lord.”  (2:16) God tells them that this attitude wearies Him.

God goes on to explain that they are withholding gifts from Him.  He tells them how they say terrible things like how it is futile to serve God.  They go about following His commandments like mourners.

Jeremiah 13:10 talks about something similar.  It warns that those who will not listen to God will follow the stubbornness of their hearts and go after other gods.

What happened to the people of Israel?  I think there is a big contrast here between what goes on only on the outside versus what starts on the inside and works its way out.  Many of the people of Israel were still trying to do some worship but not earnestly or genuinely from their hearts.

God also confronted them about giving sacrifices that were polluted and damaged.  He asked them what would happen if they tried to give them to the governing authority as offerings.  Would they be pleased with such gifts? (Malachi 1:8)

There were people in Israel who were not acting like these hard hearted people who God is confronting.  God said of the ones who had reverence for God that they would walk in peace and uprightness and turn many from sin (2:6).  Those who fear the Lord and honor His name are God’s precious possession and would be spared judgment and they would ultimately be delivered victorious (3:16-17, 4:1-2).

Colossians 1:27 speaks of “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”  This is what life really is.  It is Christ in us.  When Jesus is on the inside, then it makes it possible for all sorts of good things to work their way out.

I heard Brian give this illustration one time.  Imagine two trees.  One is a normal fruit tree doing what fruit trees do, bear fruit.  Imagine another tree which is not bearing fruit, but so that it can look like a fruit tree, it goes and gets some fruit and tapes the fruit onto itself.  It was a surprise to me, but I found a picture of such a “banana” trees on the internet.  In comparison, a real banana tree looks incredibly different.  Rather than having a few bananas hanging here and there from branches, the bananas grow in a bunch that is nearly as large as the tree itself!

Banana trees in the right environment are ridiculously productive.  We went years ago on a short term mission trip to Ecuador.  We used a small bus to get around.  At a roadside stop, one of our team members got off the bus and came back with this enormous bunch of bananas.  We asked him why he bought so many.  He said that it was the smallest bunch, he could manage to carry it himself, and it only cost $0.50.  If he had bought a $1 bunch, it would have taken two people to carry it.

Jesus talks about abundant life in John 10:10.  He explains that while the thief which is Satan comes to steal, kill, and destroy, Jesus comes that we might have life and have it abundantly.  Where then does this abundant life come from?  It comes from Christ in us, the hope of glory.  “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.”  John 15:5

This brings to mind II Corinthians 6:13 which says, “Open wide your hearts.”  Paul in the preceding verses talked about how they had demonstrated a deep abiding love of the Corinthians even through suffering and deprivation.  After relating their sacrifices, he implores the Corinthians to open their hearts as well.  It is in this way, by opening our hearts, that we will find our way to worshiping God in love.

We open our hearts first to Jesus and let Him come in (Revelation 3:20).  Jesus words, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock,” were directed to the church at Laodicea.  After we have opened our hearts to Jesus, then we are able to open our hearts to one another.

Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, His body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds. Hebrews 10:19-24

Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our "God is a consuming fire." Keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters.

Hebrews 12:28-13:1

This couplet of loving God and loving others finds its highest endorsement in the Greatest Commandment as found in Matthew 22:37 as well as in the Old Testament in Deuteronomy 6:5.  It’s on the front of your programs.  “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. … And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Unfortunately, I am not a Hebrew or a Greek scholar, but looking at different versions of the Bible, you get the impression that the verb tense of love here is imperative and urgent.  The NASB says that you shall love.  The NLT says that you must love.

I think we get a little nervous when we hear something like “you must love.”  But, I think we “must” be careful about how the think of this.  It’s not “you must love” with the sense of impending punishment, but rather “you must love” in a sense like you just can’t help it.  That goes back to the idea of the fruit tree and Christ in us.  We can’t be fruitful by ourselves.  Christ must be in us.  We must be connected to Christ.  (John 15:5)  And we must be both loving God and loving others to be truly alive and healthy.

In preparation for the message, I spent a fair amount of time reading from C.S. Lewis book The Four Loves.  Truth be told, I would have rather just read to you from that book that try to organize these things on my own.  If you haven’t read it, I would recommend it.

In response to my statement that we must be loving God and loving others to be truly alive and healthy, I thought of this line from The Four Loves, “There is no good applying to Heaven for earthly comfort.  Heaven can give heavenly comfort; no other kind.  And earth cannot give earthly comfort either.  There is no earthly comfort in the long run.”

I hope this is clear in what has been said already.  God’s economy is fairly simple.  We love God by believing in His Son and loving one another.  Sometimes we seek other things, but that just messes things up.  Then, we seek God to straighten things out, but if we do that, thinking of life only in terms of worldly benefits, then God can’t help us with that.  If we turn our focus solely on trying to make things work out for ourselves in the world, that won’t succeed either.

When I started to prepare for the message, I looked up the word love.  There’s a reason why I didn’t start with that.  If I had, we might still be talking about what Merriam-Webster dictionary says love is.  I’ll spare you a dry reading of it, but the noun form of love has, depending on how you look at it, up to 17 definitions.  The verb form of love has only 7 possible definitions.  Suffice it to say, when we say the word love, we can mean a lot of different things.  When we think about loving God and loving others, we can let it get complicated.

Drawing from Lewis, he simplifies the situation a bit looking at love in two different groups:  Need-love and Gift-love.  He explains that Need-loves are the opposite of Gift-loves but not in the sense of good to evil but rather in the sense of the form to the mold.  Need-loves are not inherently wrong.

“We are born helpless.  As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness.  We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.” (Lewis, The Four Loves)

God anticipates and even created many of our needs.  Even the needs which were not created by God are met in Him.  “Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden and you will find rest for your souls.” (Matthew 11:28) God is the true giving lover.  He is the one who meets our needs.

As a result, we’ve got a self-focus when it comes to love.  We’re often thinking about what others are thinking about us.  We are designed to need God’s love, but sometimes we focus on our needs to the exclusion of our need to love God in return.

This is a silly story, but it demonstrates my point: Probably about ten years ago, we had a birthday party at our house for one of the kids.  Daniel had come, and so Fred came to pick him up.  Things were winding down, but Daniel wasn’t quite ready to go.  Fred and I were just having a quick conversation.  Fred asked me something to the effect of whether or not we needed anything.  I don’t even remember what problem I started talking about.  At the time, it must have seemed important, and I was talking to Fred in his role as “Pastor Fred.”  But, what Fred was really asking was if we needed help with cleaning up from the birthday party.

I don’t think I’ve ever told that story, not even to Fred.  But it pops up in my mind every now and again usually as a reminder to make sure you know what someone is asking before you start answering.  In light of this message, I thought of it in terms of my self-focus, my needs above Fred’s needs.

It must be true that our love for God must nearly always be a Need-love.  God doesn’t have hunger that needs to be met.  God is full of good gifts that He desires to give.  God is so great that all of creation could be compared to a precious jewel in His hand.  God is far greater than anything and even everything of His creation.  God carries in His hand “all that was made.”

And so, what does our love of God then look like?

Someone may quote Luke 14:26, saying, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.”

Many confusing things have come out of different interpretations of this verse.  I thought that Lewis gave several helpful perspectives on this thought in The Four Loves:

Jesus is not “commanding us to cherish resentment, to gloat over another’s misery, or to delight in injuring others.” That would be contrary to God’s nature as love. To hate as Jesus means here is “to reject, to set one’s face against, to make no concession to, the Beloved when the Beloved utters, however sweetly and however pitiably, the suggestions of the Devil.”  Think instead about how Jesus spoke to Peter when Peter rebuked Jesus saying Jesus would never go to the cross.  Jesus replied, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.” (Matthew 16:22-23)

And so, our natural loves must submit to be in a lower place if they will continue.  And when our natural loves are not contrary to God, we don’t need to “hate” their object.  An example of this would be a chivalrous knight who goes off to fight.  He tells his lady that his love of duty compels him to go.  He does not need to “hate” her or set his face against her.  They both acknowledge the same code.  They agreed and understood each other on the subject long before.

Another wrong understanding would be that we should avoid love relationships to protect ourselves from loss.  I hope it is clear that this is not in keeping with the heart of God.  “His teaching was never meant to confirm my congenital preference for safe investments and limited liabilities. … Who could love God on such prudential ground-because the security is better?”  We would not choose a spouse or even a pet with this kind of attitude.  “There is no safe investment.  To love at all is to be vulnerable.”

It is possible that God would come and ask us to give up something which is inappropriate.  We may have loves which are not godly, but to shun relationship, that is not right thinking. 

And so, we should not be afraid of loving others too much, but we should be concerned about loving others too much in relation to our love for God.  The problem then is a smallness in our love for God rather than the greatness of our love for others.

And, as we “draw near to God, God draws near to us.” (James 4:8) God will work out His Gift-love into us.  God will enable us to love those who are not naturally loveable.  “Only the lovable can be naturally loved.  You might as well ask people to like rotten bread or the sound of a mechanical drill” apart from God.  “All who have good parents, wives, husbands, or children, may be sure that at some times … are loved not because they are lovable but because Love Himself is in those who love them.” (Lewis, The Four Loves)

You’ve experienced that kind of love, haven’t you?  God will put that kind of love in us for loving others if we open our hearts to Him.

This Gift-love is a way of giving to God.  The parable that Jesus tells in Matthew 25 about the sheep and the goats reveals that every stranger we help or feed or clothe is Christ.  “The ‘sheep’ in the parable had no idea either of the God hidden in the prisoner whom they visited or of the God hidden in themselves when they made the visit.”

“God also transforms our Need-love for one another.”  We need love from others which is the love of the unlovable.  “But this, though a sort of love we need, is not what we want.”  We want to be loved for our merits.  But … “We are all receiving Charity.  There is something in each of us that cannot be naturally loved.” (Lewis, The Four Loves)

We don’t want this to be so, but it is true.  We need to be careful not to reject this kind of love from others or from God.  Apart from Grace, our desires and our needs are in conflict.  “No sooner do we believe that God loves us than there is an impulse to believe that He does so, not because He is Love, but because we are intrinsically lovable.”  (Lewis, The Four Loves)

“Thus God, admitted to the human heart, transforms not only Gift-love but Need-love; not only our Need-love of Him, but our Need-love of one another.”  Isn’t that crazy? (Lewis, The Four Loves)

“I wasn’t designed to fulfill my life apart from Christ.”  Pam O’Gwin said in our most recent Divine Design video (Lesson 11).

A garden is a good thing, even a beautiful thing, but it is not self-sustaining.  That is not the kind of goodness a garden has.  We’ve had a “vegetable garden” in our backyard for several years.  In the beginning, it was fairly successful, but year after year, it has been less and less productive partly because of lack of time for tending but also because the deer all know where it is and the squash wasps know where it is and the tomato fungus is in the garden.  This year, we only had whatever herbs, green onions, and volunteer tomatoes sprouted up.  It’s really quite sad.

And so, a garden only remains a garden rather than a wilderness when it is maintained by someone.  I need to put a fence around the garden to protect it.  I need to clear it of all the weeds, and so on.  But we don’t look at that work and say that the garden is bad or wrong.  It needs to be tended.  Even more than that, how about what God does?  “Without life springing from the earth, without rain, light, and heat descending from the sky, [the gardener] could do nothing.” (Lewis, The Four Loves)

This is true for our lives as well.  We need to open wide our hearts and let God work there believing that He can and does.  Then, we need to act in the grace that He gives to love Him and love others.

What if we experience or are experiencing the feeling that God is far from us?  A.W. Tozer gave two rather simple instructions on this point.  First is that there may be many causes to a temporary break in our connection with God.  The key is to realize that God really hasn’t gone anywhere.  The cure is faith.  We just need to trust God in the dark until the light is restored.

Secondly, if our sense of remoteness from God continues even after prayer and what we believe is faith, it is necessary to look to our hearts for potential wrong attitudes toward God or even downright evil thoughts (putting other things ahead of God, pursuing things which are contrary to God’s nature).  If we dwell on these kinds of things which are unlike God, it will tend to put a psychological gulf between us and God.  We must put these things aside, return in belief, and the sense of nearness will be restored.

Remember, God was never away in the first place!

Let us worship God in love.  Let us be fully dependent on Him.  Let us endeavor to keep His commands remembering that His commands are not burdensome.  Let us love one another.  May God be praised!  Let’s pray.

Lord God, thank You for loving us first.  We are filled with joy because of You.  I pray for each heart here to be connected to You.  May each one believe in You and be saved.  You are our Friend and You are so much more than a Friend.  We worship You because You are worthy of worship.  All praise to You now and forever.  In Jesus’ Name.  Amen.