Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Psalm 1; Philemon; Luke 14:25-33
This is the third of ten sermons on Living the Christian Life. So much of the time, we know just what we are to do as Christians. We know very well we are to do all of these things. But the problem is how.
That is the subject of this sermon series. It is a sermon series on How to live the Christian life. Two weeks ago we covered kindness and last week we covered developing patience. These sermons are now posted online at the sermon blog listed on the front page of the bulletin.
Today, we’re going to cover loving deeply.
Love. To an outsider looking in, modern American culture is about three things: Making money, using firearms, and falling in love.
Look at our movies, our television shows, our popular books. In the last ten years, we have seen a popular book and movie series (Twilight) based upon a teenage girl deciding whether to fall in love with a vampire or a werewolf. We’ve seen another popular book and movie series (The Hunger Games) about a teenage girl who is torn between her boyfriend and destroying an oppressive government. And our popular television detective shows focus more and more on the personal love lives of the detectives than on the crimes.
Of course, the English word “love” covers a lot of territory. Ancient Greek, the language of the New Testament, used four different words to cover what we use a single word for. For example, the intense, passionate physical love between a man and a woman in the Greek language is eros. The love between two brothers is phileos. The affection between grandparents and grandchildren is storge. And the unselfish, freely given love that God and Christ give to us is agape. Today, I’m going to focus upon agape, because that is the love that is most difficult for us and at the same time, most important for the Christian to develop. Agape – self-sacrificing love.
Christians are to agape each other, just as Christ agaped us.
We all know that Jesus told us that we are to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” We also know that we are to love our neighbor as ourself.
But both of these loves, both of these agapes, are very difficult for us to get a handle on.
It is easy to fall in love with someone. It is easy for a man to fall in love with a woman, or a woman to fall in love with a man. It is easy to grow up with a brother or sister and love them, because they are so familiar. It is easy for grandparents to love grandchildren because they are so cute when they are born, and every time we see them we remember them when we first held them in our arms. It is easy for grandchildren to love grandparents because Mom and Dad are the enforcers and our grandparents tend to spoil us, at least a little bit.
But how do we love God and Christ, neither of whom we’ve seen? After all, most of us feel we’ve become closer to our favorite movie or television stars than God and Christ. Yet it is essential to our continued life in eternity that we fall in love with God.
In our Deuteronomy reading, Moses tells us: “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”
So what are we to do? We are called to love God, but we have great difficulty with this. How shall we then be saved?
Perhaps we can learn some lessons from the world. The world rarely gets it right, but the world can always teach us what is wrong.
The world tells us that love is an emotion, that we are overwhelmed by love, that we are helpless, not having any choice in who we love and who we don’t love. But that is an invention of our time.
In ancient, even medieval times, love was a choice. Love was an act of the will, of the mind. It was when we took our mind and put it in charge, and thus we learned to love the person that our parents had decided was best for us. In Ephesians 5, Paul tells men to love their wives as Christ loves the church. And how does Christ love the church? He chose to lay down His life for the church. Does anyone really think that Christ was caught up by His emotions, and that those emotions had Him come to earth for 30 years, to preach for 3 years, and then to stay on the cross until He died? No. Jesus thought through the consequences of His love before He committed, and then He was and is committed to the love of His eternal life, the Church that is His body, we who follow Him.
As Jesus said in our Luke reading, :
“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Won’t you first sit down and estimate the cost to see if you have enough money to complete it? For if you lay the foundation and are not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule you, saying, ‘This person began to build and wasn’t able to finish.’
Jesus decided the cost before the Universe began, and so He was committed to loving us deeply.
We use our minds to calculate the cost. The man who builds the tower asks the question “can I afford to build a tower?” In the same way, we who look for love often fail to ask the question, “Can I afford to fall in love right now?”
Too many people jump into love with the forethought of the dog that chased the car. What was the dog going to do with the car if he caught the car? If you begin to date, what are you going to do if you fall in love? Or are you just dating because everyone around you is dating, yet you have no job, you live at home, you have no skills, you couldn’t and wouldn’t get married for another ten years even if you fell in love. Only trouble can come from dating before you are ready. You are like a man who decides to build a tower because his neighbor has decided to build a tower.
If we are wise, we look at the cost of love before we take the plunge. A wise young man looks at his own situation before he begins to date a woman. He asks himself, “Can I afford the dates? Can I afford the time? Will this interfere with my studies? If she falls in love with me, is it even conceivable that I’d want to marry her?”
A wise young woman thinks things through. “Do I trust this young man? Am I ready to consider marriage? Do I have other plans? How much time will dating take? Do I have a career plan and what will this do to my studies for that career?”
There is a reason why fifty or a hundred years ago most colleges were limited to either men or women, but not both. Dating takes time and money. Dating takes lots of both that are wasted if we aren’t ready and able to marry.
And so we decide whether or not to love. And that is based upon our calculation of the costs – and the benefits.
The wise person recognizes that life has some easy times and some difficult times. Like a rollercoaster, there are times when we are feeling great – and other times we are scared out of our wits. And so it is with love.
If we believe that love is totally emotion, out of our control, then we will fall in love and fall out of love and never get to the good part, the rich, wonderful time when our love has become deep, the deep, rich love of the man and woman who have been in love for fifty years, who have endured the time the house burned down, the times he lost his job. The months she recovered from the car wreck, the neighbors who cut down their flowerbed, the time the car broke down in Louisiana when the tropical storm came through, the cute blonde secretary at work that always flirted with him, the time their son ended up in jail for drug possession, and the loss of their granddaughter to that awful disease. For that deep love that the couple has makes newlyweds look silly, the confidence they have in each other makes the Marines look like a sandlot pickup team, the meaning that they give a slight touch on the neck, the quietly whispered word “Richmond”, the special reason why every anniversary there is a piece of Colby cheese on the plate cannot be duplicated in any less than decades together.
And the way we get there is through the will. Our will. Our will that we will stay in love. We used our mind to calculate the cost and now we use our will to stay in love through the difficult times. And our love deepens.
And so we come to loving God and Christ…
Is there really a difference between loving God and Christ – and loving another human being?
Michael Buble has a great song. “I just haven’t met you yet”. He talks about the great love of his life and yet he hasn’t met his love. Yet.
It is a great song for those who would fall in love with God and Christ. Listen to it.
Let’s work through the steps…
A wise person calculates the cost. What is the cost of falling in love with God and Christ? The cost is simple – Jesus Himself tells us in our reading from Luke:
“those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples.”
The cost of falling in love with Christ is that you must give up everything you have. But isn’t this also the cost of falling in love with anyone? In the wedding ceremony, the couple pledges “with all that I am, and all that I have, I honor you.”
The couple getting married pledge to give up everything to one another. And truly, the couple that honors that pledge will stay together, while the couple that only partially honors that pledge will soon split. It is a matter of who is more important, our self or our spouse. We have to open up ourselves, to take the chance that we will be hurt deeply, to accept that we are vulnerable if we are to have a chance of finding a deep, lasting love. Those who put invulnerable barriers around themselves will never experience deep love, because love has to flow into our innermost being – and from our innermost being to another, or it remains a surface affection. Invulnerable barriers block the love flow.
Let me give you an example. If you want a puppy to love you, you must pet the puppy. Yet, the puppy might bite you. You must take that risk if you want the love of the puppy.You have to pet the puppy.
C.S. Lewis wrote the deep children’s novels we call the Narnia series. In one of them, a child looks at the Christ figure of the novels, a huge lion known as Aslan with a bit of fear. “Is he safe?” the child asks. The other, wiser person replies, “No, he’s not a tame lion. But he is good.” Jesus, the Son of God, is the same. He is not tame – He and His Father created the Universe and they can destroy the world with a word and if they choose to do so, there is nothing you can do to prevent them from doing exactly what they want to do. But Jesus is good and wise. Supremely good and wise. Always remember that.
And if we are truly to become a disciple of Christ, we must give up everything we have for Jesus. Re-read your Gospels. Multiple times Jesus says that we must give up everything for Him. John 12:25: Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” A couple of weeks ago, you heard Jesus tell the rich young ruler to sell all his possessions and follow Jesus.
Why is Jesus so all-consuming? Perhaps there is a family resemblance. Didn’t His Father – our heavenly Father – say, “You shall not worship any other Gods before Me?”
In December, 1941 and into the spring of 1942, hundreds of thousands of young American men walked into Army recruiting stations around the country and said, “I’d like to volunteer for the Army.” And before they joined up, they had to take an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. They understood when they joined that their lives were now the Army’s, to spend and to use as the Army deemed best. That might mean they got a free chance to visit London and Paris – or it might mean they were in charge of a shovel in southern Georgia digging a new latrine for all the troops to use. It might mean they would be flying in the Army Air Force – or it might mean they would be shivering in a cow barn in a place called Bastogne in Belgium, surrounded by German tanks. When they signed up, they surrendered their life to the Army and they went and did what the Army told them to do. Sometimes the Army was wise about this – and sometimes the Army was not very wise. Yet those soldiers still volunteered and went where the Army sent them.
When you choose to follow Christ, unlike the Army, you are turning over your life to the wisest, most loving personality in the Universe. If you listen to the Holy Spirit’s direction, you will always be guided in the manner that is best for you and others. But here’s the rub – it won’t always be easy.
A couple begins dating and they like each other. There are chocolates and roses and movies and dinners. It is all fun and play. But at this point, there is always the understanding that they can stop dating at any moment, they can run away from each other. And then later, they may become engaged. At this point, there is an understanding that only some major event will separate them, will lead them to run away. Today, some couples choose to live together, but the church has historically seen that to be a mistake, because the couple has not really committed to each other. Each still has that lurking fear that the other may choose to run away for almost any reason. That lurking fear creates tension which keeps the couple from truly relaxing in their love for each other. Will you commit or not? Will you overcome your fears?
The next step is marriage.
Now, married, the couple has promised to stay together for the rest of their lives. They now live together and work together, the chocolates and the roses and the movies and the dinners are few and far between. Instead, they work in the house, they work in their garden, they work together and grow deeper in love. Far deeper in love.
In the old days, this was what happened. But over the last hundred years or so, people have begun to break that promise more and more often, to the point where almost half of marriages end in divorce. Of course, many more couple break up who have chosen to live together. And that is sad, for both people are hurt during a divorce or a break-up. We all know that divorces hurt people. It seems that many people get bored with the marriage when the chocolates and roses and movies and dinners stop.
So knowing all of this, why is it that so many people choose to date Jesus Christ? So many people make the little decisions every day to hold back large parts of their lives from the one person in the Universe who will never hurt them, who will never betray them, the one person who always has their best interests at heart, who is good and wise and loving all the time? Why don’t you give your entire life to Christ?
For some people, it’s because they don’t realize they’re supposed to give everything to Christ. They think that they are to be wooed by Christ and the church, that they are to receive chocolates and roses and movies and dinners. But instead, you see, everything is to be at the call of the Holy Spirit, nothing held back, ready to do what you are asked to do, ready to move if called, ready to step in and do God’s will as the body of Christ on earth. In this, being in the church is similar to being in the Army.
For other people, the issue is that we look at the people around us and see other people dating Jesus, so we think this is what is supposed to happen, like middle school or elementary school students with their first crush, meeting their first love at a school dance or exchanging texts with him or her. Those middle schoolers and elementary students don’t understand the sacrifices and work that real love demands, they don’t understand the difficulties of sticking to a relationship, they operate their relationships like games – and we do the same in our churches, treating our churches like we do our restaurants – how’s the food, how’s the entertainment, how’s the air conditioning today? – not realizing that the church is not a chain store, but it is a family business and we are part of the family, with our part to play, our chores to do, our responsibilities to do the Father’s will.
We are not customers, you see. We are the employees. We cannot really fall in love with the Father unless we work in the business with the Son, for it is when we work together beside Jesus to bring another family out of despair that we learn to love each other and Jesus and we develop that deep understanding of each other, like the couple that has been happily married 50 or 60 years. Are you dating Jesus or are you part of His family?
Deep love, agape, the self-sacrificing love that Jesus gives us flows from Him. We can only love Him because He first chose to love us. For Jesus, love and sacrifice are all tied up together. Jesus is not the suitor who brings chocolates and roses to your door. Jesus is the suitor that says, “Wear your jeans! Let’s spend the day together working in the garden.” As long as you sit here looking for chocolates and roses and movies and dinners, you are just dating Jesus – and He knows it.
When you get serious and choose to work in the garden with Him, to help Him pull weeds and plant seeds and prune the apple trees, to listen to hurting people, to give of your time, talents, and treasures, to tell His story to new people - then He’ll know you are serious about Him. And it is then that He brings out the surprising treasures that He only gives to His friends that are in love with Him. It is as though you’ve worked in the garden all morning and He stops and shows you where the bluebird nest is. It’s like He walks over behind a stump and shows you an amazing set of orange and white mushrooms growing between purple violets and yellow dandelions. It’s as though he calls you into the back room of a shed and there is a refrigerator in which He has hidden a pitcher of ice-cold pink lemonade and a plate of chocolate raspberry brownies.
But He only does this to those who choose to give up their lives to Him, to the people who have decided that the only real purpose of life is to follow Jesus, to those people who are willing to work in the garden with Him. For we must learn to work and learn to sacrifice and learn to stop worry about our self and instead worry about what the other wants if we want to experience deep, deep love.
For, you see, Jesus gave up everything He had for us. He surrendered His life to pay the fines for all the things we have done wrong in our lives. His Father loved Him so much He restored His life to Him. Eternally. But then, Jesus turned around again and said, “Those who follow me shall also have eternal life.” He gave us that eternal life He has. In return, He asks us to follow Him – to join Him in the garden.
And that is how to love deeply. That is how to be a disciple of Christ.
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