It's All About Love
- Rev. Jerry Lepasana
- Feb 15, 2009
- Series: 40 Days of Love
40 Days of Love Kickoff:
IT’S ALL ABOUT LOVE
1 Corinthians 14:1 (NIV):
1 Follow the way of love and eagerly desire spiritual gifts, especially the gift of prophecy.
Mark 12:30-31 (NIV):
30 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.'
31 The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."
1 Corinthians 16:14 (NIV):
14 Do everything in love.
This morning, we are launching our new curriculum for our Care Group gathering entitled the 40 Days of Love. I want to begin by asking you a question. How would you complete this sentence? My number one goal in life is… Think about that for a minute.
Would you say, my number one goal in life is to be happy? Or to be loved? Or my number one goal in life is to succeed at my career, or to get married and raise a family. If you haven’t ever thought it through, you need to think it through because your answer to that question is what I call your dominant life principle.
What’s a dominant life principle? It’s the most important value in your life. You may have never thought it through but you use it all the time. Every time you make a decision, you decide what you’re going to do base on your dominant life value, your dominant principle of life. For instance if my dominant life principle is to have fun then this evening if I get a couple of invitations on the phone I’m going to tend to choose the thing that’s the most fun to do. It is because that’s what’s most important to me; to have fun. Now, this would only change depending on my dominant life principle. Therefore, it’s extremely important that I think through what is going to be the most important value in my life.
What does God have to say about this? In the Bible in the book of 1 Corinthians 14:1 He says this, “Follow the way of love.” In the Living Bible Translation this reads, “Let love be your greatest aim.” Not status, not success, not possessions, or power or privilege or prestige. He says we should make love as our highest aim – our dominant life principle.
Why should we do that? Because God is love and he wants you to be like him. It doesn’t say he has love. He is love. He created you as an object of his love. And God wants you to be like him. So he created you to learn how to love. Think about it. Why didn’t God just create you to take you to heaven? Have you ever thought about that? Why does he let you spend sixty, seventy, eighty years here on a broken world where there is sin, suffering, sadness, problems, pressures, stress? Why doesn’t God just create you and take you directly to heaven? Why does he put you here on earth? He allows you here on earth in order to learn to love. Life is all about learning how to love.
In fact, one day Jesus was walking down the street and a guy came up to him and he said, Lord what is the most important command in the Bible or what do you think really matters to God? Jesus said, I can summarize the entire Bible for you
That’s pretty clear. He said nothing in the Bible, nothing at all, is more important than these two things. Learn to love God with all your heart and, by the way, learn to love everybody else. He said if you get those two things, you’ve got it. You understand what I put you on this planet to do. Life is all about learning to love. Everything else is secondary.
That’s why you are alive. One day you’re going to stand before God and he’s going to say, “Did you learn to love me? That’s why I sent Jesus Christ so you could learn to love me. And did you learn to love other people too? Because that’s what I put you on earth to do. If you add the last key verse we have in 1 Corinthians 16:14, “Do everything in love.” You realize how sensible this statement is. If God placed us here to love, then we must learn to do everything in love. Does that really mean everything? Yes, everything!
Today, as a church, we want to begin together our 40 Days of Love journey. I thought it would help if we first define the meaning of love. We always throw this word around. I love food, I love sports, I love my wife, I love America. I love God. But what does it really mean to love?
If you try to find definitions out of dictionaries or encyclopedias, the emphasis would either be emotional or sexual. And this is where a lot of confusions lie. I’m sure you have listened to the popular love song of Marvin Gaye – Let’s Get It On. It not about love, it’s about lust. In man’s sinfulness, lust is often expressed more rather than love. So what is love? The Bible has a lot to say about it. In fact, our Care Group curriculum will revolve around trying to understand all about it. To introduce this, let’s look at three important things the Bible says about it:
I WE LOVE BECAUSE GOD LOVES US:
God is love. And all love comes from God. And we love because God loves us.
1 John 4:7-8 (NIV):
7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.
8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
It doesn’t say that God has love. It says God is love. The reason why God wants you to love is because he is love. It is his character, his essence. He wants us to be like him. God is the source of all love.
If God didn’t love there would be no love in the universe. All love comes from God. He is the one who gave us the ability to love. You and I were made in his image so we could do the two things you were put on earth to do. Learn to love God and learn to love other people. Life is all about love.
The Bible says in 1 John 4:19 “We love because God first loved us.” Circle “God first.” God is always first in everything. He takes the initiative. The only reason you can love God or love anybody else is because God first loved you. And he showed that love by sending Jesus Christ to earth to die for you. He showed that love by creating you. He showed that love by everything you have in life; it’s a gift of God’s love. We love because God first loved us. We have to start, if we’re going to talk about learning to love other people and becoming great lovers, we’ve got to first understand and feel how much God loves us. That’s what I hope would happen during this love journey in our Care Groups. I don’t want to just talk about love, read about love, discuss about love. I want you to experience the love of God. When you feel that unconditional love you’re going to start cutting people a lot of slack. You’re not going to be as angry as you’ve been. You’re going to be more patient. You’re going to be more forgiving. You’re going to be more merciful. You’re going to let other people have grace as you have experienced it in the Lord.
1 John 4:16 says this “We know and we rely on the love that God has for us.” Do you know the love of God? Do you rely on the love of God for you? If you don’t, you would have a hard time loving other people. It’s easy to love people who love you. That’s no problem. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about loving the unlovely. Loving the difficult and the demanding. You can’t do that until you have God’s love coming through you. Love happens because we are loved by God.
II LOVE IS A CHOICE AND A COMMITMENT:
Love is a choice and it is a commitment. You choose to love or you choose not to love. It is a choice. Today we’ve bought into this myth that love is uncontrollable. That it just happens to you. No. That’s not true. Love is a choice and a commitment. In fact, even the language that we use is this language that it’s uncontrollable. We say, “I fell in love.” Like it was a ditch. You were just walking along one day and bam! You fell in love.
Attraction is uncontrollable. No doubt about it. But attraction is not love. It can lead to love but it is not love. Love is a choice. When a couple decides to get married, both have made a choice and a commitment. In their vows they said to each other, “I choose you above everybody else in the world. And I choose you for the rest of my life.” That’s a choice and that’s a commitment.
Deuteronomy 30:19-20 (NIV):
19 This day I call heaven and 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
20 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.
This passage is clearly saying, “Choose to love the Lord your God and commit yourself to him.” That same principle is true about all relationships. You must choose to love God. God will never force you to love him. You can destroy your life if you want to. God won’t force you to love him. Because love can’t be forced. Love is a choice.
It’s the same thing with everything else. I choose to love you and I choose to commit myself to you. Love is a choice and is a commitment. When people say, “I just don’t love him or her anymore,” as if they don’t have any choice. No. You’re choosing not to love him or her any more. Love is a choice and a commitment.
III LOVE IS AN ACTION NOT JUST AN EMOTION:
When the emotion is gone does that mean love is dead? No, not at all. Because love is an action. It’s something you do. Love is a behavior.
Love can cause emotion. In fact it causes the strongest emotions in human
Emotions are often uncontrollable. If love were just an emotion then God couldn’t command it. But love is something you do. It produces emotion but it is an action. Here is a more specific verse: 1 John 3:18 (NIV):
18 Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.
Love is something you do – Love with action. Let me say a two things about love in action:
A. Acting in love when you don’t feel it is the highest form of love.
It’s actually a more mature love when you act loving toward a person when they’re not responding to you or you don’t feel it. It’s easy to love somebody who loves you. But real love acts and does the loving thing when they don’t respond or when you don’t feel it. Anybody who had children would know that when they were little babies and you get up two or three times in the night to take care of them, you don’t do it because you feel like it. No, you do it because it’s the loving thing to do.
B. It is always easier to act your way into a feeling than it is to feel your way into an action.
It’s always easier to act your way into a loving feeling instead of waiting for the feeling to come and then you’re going to act loving. It is possible that some marriages are suffering because the emotional flame has gone out. You’re living separate lives in the same house. How do you rekindle that romance? How do you rekindle the feeling of love? You act your way into a feeling.
In the second chapter of the book of Revelation, Jesus says to the church of Ephesus, “You have left your first love.” Then he says three things “Remember what it was like at first, repent [that means change your mind] and do the things you did at the start.”
What he tells the church is the same thing for renewing the love in a marriage or any other relationship. You remember, you repent and you do the things you did at first. The reason the love went away is you stopped doing the things that created the love feelings in the early days. If you say, “I’ll wait until I feel romantic to be romantic,” it’s never going to happen. It’s kind of like prayer. If the only time I pray is when I feel like it, the devil makes sure I never feel like it. Actually I need to pray when I don’t feel like it. That’s when I need it the most.
We all need to learn how to love. I hope I don’t give you the impression that by simply attending the Care group gatherings you would be a loving person. No. I pray that as we learn together what we need to do, we will practice consistently what we would be learning. And then practicing it, we hope to develop the skill of doing it better for the glory of God. I really believe God wants all of us to be good lovers – loving Him, and then loving others.