I guess I could have let them go before, right? Well, Groundhog was wrong again, right? We started last week looking at the area of love, not the area of love, but this commandment to love. And I want to kind of pick up where I was a little bit. If you would, go over to John chapter 13. John 13. And we're going to look around verse 34 and 35. John 13. Verses 34 and 35. A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this, all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." Join me in prayer. As we look at your word today. We would ask you, Lord, to speak to our hearts. Help us to recognize the depth of your love. Of how strong your love is, how powerful. Help us to recognize, Lord, all that you've done on our behalf. Show us, Father, by the power of your Spirit, what it means to love. What real love is all about, how you want to infect our lives with the power of your love by the Holy Spirit. And not just infect it, Lord, where it just reaches every part of our being, our mind, our tongue, our hands, what we see, how we hear, that your love would just so permeate our being. That we are walking examples of the God of love. That whenever people see us, Lord, they don't really see us, they see you. They see an expression of your goodness. That they see an expression, Lord, of your love and kindness. And that people will know that we belong to you, Lord. And that not only do we belong to you, But that we're not ashamed of you. That we call you Lord and Master. And that when we live before them, we live in such a way, God, that they see the heart of your Son. And Father, when they see that, they will give glory to you. They will know, Jesus, that you were sent by the Father on a mission to redeem mankind. That they will know, Lord, that you care for them, that you love them, that they will understand that the love of God is so so huge. And that they will receive that love. God, I pray that you would help me and enable me, Lord, by your spirit to communicate spiritual truth. And not just truth for the sake of learning, but truth, Lord, for the for the sake of living it out day by day. of being transformed by your power and your grace. And so, Lord, we commit our time to you. We commit our minds to you. We commit our very being to you right now, afresh and anew. And we ask, Lord, that you administer during this time according to your grace and your purpose for each of us in Jesus' name. Amen. The setting of this command is, I think I mentioned to you, it's Jesus is going to the cross. This is the John chapter 13 and actually there are five verses or five chapters right through here. He is dealing specifically with the disciples. It's the upper room and some of the discourse of these chapters, chapters 13, 14, 15, 16, and part of 17. He leaves the upper room and he heads towards the Garden of Gethsemane. And so he's teaching the disciples primarily. This is not a This is not a mountaintop teaching to the multitude. This is not a place where he's down by the Jordan River teaching. This is with his disciples. This is just with the believers. And he's instructing them about love. He instructs them about a lot of things, he instructs them about the Holy Spirit, the power of the Holy Spirit, he instructs them about him going away, but he's going to send a comforter. But in this particular passage of Scripture, what he says is he's giving them a new commandment. And you have to realize this is probably one of the most intimate times that Jesus had with the disciples. I don't know if any of you have ever been with someone when they were facing death and they were cognitive of that and they were able to think about what was going on, that they were able to actually communicate what was happening in their heart. Most of the time when people see someone in the throes of death, they don't. They're not usually clear minded, clear headed. But Jesus was. He was just as clear minded as at any time in his life, and even though he's facing the horrors of the cross. And he says to the disciples, he says, I'm giving you a new commandment now. When we hear new, What do you think of is new? You think of something that's not been before? In the Old Testament, though, we were commanded to love. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. That was in the Old Testament. So when it talks about love and he says, I want you to and this is a commandment. What's new about it? It's been around for centuries. The newness of it is the way that the love comes about. You know, I, I look at Christ and his love and he says, this is what I want you to do. I want you to love one another as I have loved you. Now, that standard of love had never been around before. There'd been love, but there'd never been the standard of love like Jesus loves. And so Jesus commands his disciples, he commands those disciples at that time, and he commands us as his disciples today. This is my commandment. That you love one another. As I have loved you. Think how huge that love is. How did he love us? With a sacrificial, self-giving, Self-denying love. Jesus denied himself of every pleasure that he was entitled to as the king of the universe. He denied himself of heaven, he denied himself of the pleasures on this earth that he should have had because he's created all things and by him all things consist. And yet he chose as an act of love. To yield his life on a cross for us. Sacrificially. Without whimpering, without crying about it, without being angry about it, without. Without any retribution towards the people that were putting them on the cross. If anything, he's praying for them, Father, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing. Now, just think what kind of love that is, what scope of love that is. to go that far to care for those who hate you that much. And Jesus is now. This is my commandment. That you, my disciples, love one another that way. Now, I think he's primarily speaking to the church, to his people, that we're to love one another that way. But his love is not just for us. It's to go outside the walls of the churches, to go outside the perimeter of the people of God. And it's to go out into the highways and byways of this world and to basically touch the hearts of people who are cold and indifferent towards God himself. And so when Jesus makes this, and notice it's not a suggestion, it's not, you know, I'd really like it if you guys would do this. You know, this is my preference. You know, if you choose to do something else, that's OK. He didn't say that. He says, this is my commandment. This is. And Jesus says, who is it that loves me? He who keeps my word. An evidence of love for Christ is a willingness to follow Christ and to do what he says, regardless of how difficult or how easy. The easy things are just that they're easy to do. The hard things are just that. They're hard to do. How many of you know that sometimes people are not the most lovely people around? Some of you may be sitting next to one of them. I don't know. I doubt that very much. I mean, you're all the best in here, right? But maybe somebody that lives next door to you is not the nicest person. It's easy to love the lovely. It's hard to love the person who just does not like you at all. Calls you names, spits in your face and wishes you harm. Kind of like the people that did that to Jesus. And yet he says, here's the standard. Folks, here's the standard. I don't want you to love them with some kind of worldly love. I don't want you to love them with something that the world calls love. I want you to love them with my love, the way I've loved you. How many of us are there yet? I don't think any of us are there yet, but we can be. We can love people with that kind of love by the power of His Spirit. We can love people that are the most irritating irrational, mean-hearted, mean-spirited people. We can love them with the love of God and see something happen in their life. We can see something take place in their life. We can see the Holy Spirit working in the heart of an individual who doesn't know God. And we can see their whole attitude change either towards God or away from God. Here's what happens. When people are touched by the genuineness of who Jesus is, they will go in one of two directions. They will run towards him and embrace him and embrace all that he has for them, or they will deny who he is and they will run from him and even not only deny him, But they will do the same thing to us that they did to him. In other words, those that are receiving the gospel, those that receive the good news of Christ, those that receive the love of God, find themselves running towards him and running towards others who love God. Those who reject the love of God, those who refuse the love of God, find themselves not only running away from God, but opposing God as they're going, and opposing those who love God. I had an interesting discussion this last week with one of our men, and it had to do with peace. You know, where Jesus says, I did not come to send peace upon the earth, but a sword. Now, we think of Jesus as the Prince of Peace, and he is. But we have to understand that the peace of God that comes, comes and changes radically a person from the inside and changes their focus on the way they live, changes their attitudes towards life and towards people and towards their value system changes radically. their worldview changes radically. It's like taking a person who has no sight at all and giving them sight, and then suddenly they begin to see things that they didn't see before in a clear manner. They begin to see what's important in life, and they begin to see what's not important in life. They begin to evaluate things, and not from an earthly perspective, not through mortal eyes, but they evaluate things Through a heavenly perspective, the perspective that God sees things. And when a person comes to Christ and they give their heart to Christ, they begin to see the Lord is in his beauty. They begin to see the church in its beauty. Yeah, the church has got a lot of faults, but it's God's church. The people that Jesus died for, that the people he took out of destruction and brought him to himself, people begin to see through new eyes. And they hear through new ears. And instead of hearing just the grumbling and the complaining of the world, they begin to hear the moans and the groans of a people who are broken. They begin to hear like God heard the children of Israel when they were in Egypt and they were slaves and just beaten day by day and beaten down and treated as they were slaves in bondage. And God says, I've heard the cry of my people. When a person becomes a Christian, suddenly what happens is they begin to hear things they never heard before. They begin to hear the cries of humanity that are crying out, somebody rescue me. Somebody help me. Somebody take me out of this pit that I'm in that I cannot stand and I don't know how to get out of. The love of God, when it begins to be activated in our hearts by the Holy Spirit, What takes place is we begin to have a new mindset, a new vision, a new hearing, and we see the world differently. We see the people of God differently. We're not blinded in the sense where we don't see the imperfections of the people of God. We're aware of that. But we know that they're the people of God. That they love God, that God loves them. Jesus says, I want you to love like I've loved you. And until we're embracing that with everything in us, we're not what we need to be as believers. Until we embrace the command of Christ to love as He loved, Until that's part of our DNA, part of our makeup, part of what goes through the fiber of our being. This is what I was created for. To love God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength. And to love my neighbor as I love myself. And beyond how I love myself, the way Christ loved me. So, what is love? How do you recognize love? How do you know that it's love and not just mush? How do you know that it's God's kind of love and not just some human attraction? Well, I think that Paul brought that out pretty well in 1 Corinthians chapter 13. So we're going to go over to 1 Corinthians 13 for just a minute, and we're going to look at some of the passages there beginning around verse 4, I believe. But I want to give you some instructions before actually before you go to first Corinthians thirteen. I want you to just see some. Some instruction from the word of God. In God's word, I want you to look at Colossians chapter three, verse fourteen. Colossians three fourteen. But above all these things, put on love, which is the bond of perfection. It's the bond of maturity, it's the thing that makes a person and holds a person in a place of maturity. Above everything else, put on love. Look at, if you would, at First Thessalonians, chapter three, verse twelve. First Thessalonians. 312 May the Lord make you increase and abound in love to one another and to all just as we do to you know Paul saying that. And he's saying that to the church at Thessalonica. May the Lord make you increase and abound. That tells me something that you can have the love of God in your heart. But you don't necessarily have the fullness of God's love in your heart. You can increase. You can grow in your capacity to love other people. You can grow in the capacity of expressing that love towards other people. See, if Christ is in your heart, if Jesus, by his spirit, lives within you, you have love in your heart. The Holy Spirit's there. He is Christ dwelling in you. There is love in you and it's the fullness of love by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit doesn't have just a little bit of love and somehow he has to mature. But what it is, is he dwells in us and we need to mature. We need to grow. We need to be able to express more love. We need to be able to express more of the kindness of Christ and the love of Christ. And so when it says to grow, When it says that to increase, it's just that Paul's praying that this church would increase in love. My prayer for all of us, including myself, is that we increase in love, that our capacity to love grows, that it measurably grows, that we can see a difference in the way that we are loving one another as a group and the way that we're loving the world around us. Now, Jesus didn't say love the world. In fact, the Scripture says, love not the world, neither the things of the world. Now, how do you put that together with loving the world? You know it does say that in Scripture, right? In 1 John, it says, love not the world, neither the things of the world. How do you put that together with God so loved the world? It's talking about The mindset is talking about the ways of the world. It's not talking about individuals. It's talking about the culture of the world, the mindset of the world that is opposed to God. Don't love that mindset. Don't buy into the values of the world of what the world says is important. Don't embrace what the world says is of magnitude. That's the things of the world. Don't love that. Don't give your heart to the world. But do love people as God's creation. Do love people. Love them with God's kind of love. Let it increase more and more. Let it flow out of you more and more. Look, if you would, at Philippians chapter one, verse nine. Philippians one, nine. This I pray, notice Paul is praying, he was praying also in Thessalonians. This I pray that your love may abound still more and more in knowledge and all discernment. Love is not blind, as some people say, you know, love is blind. Well, some kinds of love, human love is blind, it's deaf, it's dumb. I mean, that's what human love is, but God's love is not blind. God's love is not ignorant. God's love is a knowledgeable love. This is the way people are. And this is the way God wants to work in their life to bring them to himself. God's kind of love is a knowledgeable kind of love. It's a discerning kind of love. What does this person need? Not just what does this person want? But what does this person need according to God? Not according to the latest psychology that's going around, not according to what the world says, this is what my needs are, because the world may say, oh, what you need is this. And God says, no, what you need is this. And if we're not growing in discernment about what God says are the needs of people, and if we're trying to meet the needs of people by the world standard, it will never point to Christ. What it will point to is human effort and human effort always fails. always fails, but God never fails. Whatever God starts, He finishes. Whatever God is involved in, when His powers at work, it accomplishes great and mighty things. So, this I pray that your love may abound still more and more in all knowledge and all discernment. By the way, that's a great prayer to pray for your kids. Pray for your husband, pray for your wife, pray for your family members. Pray that God's love will increase and abound in their life. And then their knowledge of Christ will increase. Their discernment will increase. You think that's the kind of prayer that God is about answering? Yeah, because he inspired Paul to pray that very thing. Last one, before we get to first Corinthians, is first Peter chapter four. First Peter, chapter four, verse eight. First Peter, four, eight. Above all things. Have fervent love for one another. For love will cover a multitude of sins. Now notice he says, above all things, in other words, that's a that's a priority. Before you have a nice looking building. Be sure you love each other. Before you have a good sound system or a great worship team or comfortable chairs, before you have a food pantry, before you have anything else, be sure that you love one another. And it's a fervent love. It's an on fire kind of love. It's a zealous love. It's a it's the kind of love that really wants the best for the other people. Above everything else, be sure that love is top place on the shelves. Any time as believers in Christ that we are more concerned about anything else than the love for God and the love of God working through us. If we're more concerned about anything else before those things, we've got our priorities wrong. Because Jesus said that his commandment was to love. The scripture exhorts us to love over and over again. It tells us to grow in love. And whenever we put priorities up that are above that, what's happened is we have taken away the priority of God and we've put our own agenda in there. And when we put our own agenda in it, guess what? God doesn't bless it. God blesses what he knows is the very best. What he's called for. He blesses that he blesses the work of our hands when the work of our hands reflect the attitude of his heart. When what we do reflects the way God is, he blesses that. But when we choose to do religious things and they can be great things, here's the thing that we have to understand is the people of God. We can do great things. Nothing wrong with them. I mean, good things. But if they're short of moving into love and growing in love, what happens is it actually will tear us down instead of building us up. Because if we're following our priority instead of God's priority, he will not bless that. He just won't. God blesses the work of our hand when the work of our hand is really the desire of his heart. and the goal for our lives according to Him. So now we can go over to 1 Corinthians for just a minute. 1 Corinthians. Now these are some characteristics of love, and I'm not going to have time to go through all of them this week, and next week I'm not going to be sharing on this, so we'll try to move through some of them. 1 Corinthians chapter 13 verse 4, love suffers long in his kind, love does not envy, love does not parade itself, is not puffed up. Now let's start with the first one. Love suffers long. Some of you say, yeah, I've been suffering for a long time. You know what that's like. What it is, is this is a passive word. Passive means It's not something that you're doing. It's something that you are not doing, but somebody else is doing something to you and you just don't do anything in response. You don't respond to it. Love suffers long. It means basically that when someone comes against you, you're not coming back at them. You're willing to. You're willing, if you would, to another word for this is patient. You're willing to be patient with people now. What's your patient quota like? Love is patient. Some, I think, translations even say that. Love is patient. That means it doesn't lose heart. It doesn't give up right away. It endures misfortunes and troubles. Now, I ask you this question. How do you deal with adversity in your life? Adversity is when it comes to troubles. problems that arise, especially when those problems or adversities come from other people. It's one thing if your car breaks down. It's another thing if somebody let the air out of your tire. Right. OK, so and this is what it's talking about. Love is patient. It's long suffering. And when things aren't going right and when people aren't treating you right, it bears up under offenses and injuries that those things that people Bring and lay at your doorstep and you feel the brunt of it. It bears ill treatment. And it bears it without attempting to retaliate in some way, to get back at. Now, a lot of us would never get back at somebody physically. We'd know, no, that's wrong. I shouldn't do that. But what goes through our mind when people treat us unkind? When life is just really handed us lemons, what goes through our mind? Do we suddenly begin to accuse God or accuse others or begin to be impatient with them? Impatient with God? God, why haven't you fixed this? This kind of love is willing to endure another's unkindness as long as necessary. Did you catch the last part? As long as necessary. In order that God might win the victory through it. He's already won the victory, but in order that his purposes can be accomplished. Love is patient. It will put up with all kinds of stuff. For the sake of the one who's given you the stuff. You know, I think one of the things that happens is many times we have things happen to us. Other people bring stuff and lay it at our doorstep or whatever. And what takes place is we start thinking about me. Poor me. Why me? Why not somebody else? How could you do this to me? How could people treat me this way? And very seldom do we stop and think, what is God trying to accomplish in the life of this person that just did this to me? What is God wanting to work in their heart? How does how does what they did to me fit into God's plan to reach their heart with the goodness of his love? Because if they loved him, they wouldn't do what they just did. They wouldn't say what they just said. So how many of us stop long enough to say, Lord. Give me grace to endure this and help me to see what you're doing in this person's life. Help me to recognize your handiwork in the midst of all of this. Because that's what love does see when Jesus went to the cross, he wasn't looking at the stuff that people were doing to him. He was looking down the road at what his suffering was going to accomplish, what was going to happen because he endured the cross. Think about this for a minute. When it says in Hebrews, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy, the joy, get that word, the joy that was set before him, not the cross that was set before him, but the joy that was set before him. endured the cross, despising the shame. He didn't like the cross, but he despised the shame of the cross. But what kept him there, what gave him the strength to endure the cross, what gave him the power to overcome all the words that came against him, was he looked to the joy that was set before him, the joy of a people that would know God, the joy of people that were redeemed from their sins, the joy of people set free from the bondage of the enemy, the joy of having a people It would be his people that would love him and experience the depth of his love. Looking to Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. See, love that is patient or love that is long suffering can only be that way when it's not focused on itself. Because love of God doesn't focus on herself. The love of God focuses by the Holy Spirit on others. And so the evaluation to take today really is how much self-focus and self-thought do you give yourself? How much do I give to myself? That I think about myself and I think about what people have done and I think about the way they've treated me. And it captured my imagination and it leads me down paths that are destructive instead of letting the glory of God capture my heart. And the love of God. The last one I'm going to deal with this morning, because we're going to get through these, but not today, obviously. Love is kind. Love is kind. That's also in that verse, verse four. Now, that's the other side of the coin. That's the active side, the one the passive side doesn't retaliate, but the love that is kind is active. It does something. It's one thing if you're enduring wrongs and ill treatment, that's one thing. But it's something completely different to show kindness. To those who have been unkind to you. See, love isn't just say, well, the heck with them, the heck with what they did, the heck with the way they treated me. I'll just ignore it. The world does that. Or the world tries to get vengeance. Whether I'm trying to get vengeance on those who have done unkindness to me, or whether I'm just trying to ignore them. I'll just avoid them. I won't get close to them. I won't be by them. I'll just, the heck with you. That hasn't gone far enough because the love of God is kind. It does good to those that despitefully use you. You say, wow, how can that be? It cannot be done in the power of the human effort, the human psyche. It can't be done in our own strength. That can only be done by the power of God's spirit as we're yielded to him, as we recognize my inability My inability, my inability, but if it was on ability was a word, it would be that, too. I like what you've been from says you've been from says it this way. Love. I think he's a disgrace, but love is giving someone what they need the most. when they deserve it the least. Giving someone what they need the most when they deserve it the least. Isn't that what God did? God gave us what we needed the most when we deserved it the least. And if love is working in our hearts, if we're loving one another, As the Scripture says, even for Christians to love one another, this is my commandment that you love one another. It means that I am giving to you what you need the most when you deserve it the least. I'm treating you the way that you need to be treated, not the way I feel you should be treated. Now, that doesn't mean that you're always patting somebody on the back and making them feel good, that's not what it's talking about. God doesn't pat us on the back when we're walking in rebellion. He corrects us as a loving father. He doesn't just say, oh, that's OK, whatever you did is OK. He confronts us with it. But he does it with such grace and such kindness and with such a redemptive heart. See, if what we do is not with a redemptive heart, not wanting the best for that other person, it's soulish, it's selfish, it's self-centered. So the question comes down, how are you doing with your long suffering? How are you doing with your kindness? And usually those things come out most in the relationships that we're in the closest with and our families. With our husband, wife, our kids, our parents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters. It usually comes out most around people that we let our hair down with. It is real easy to come in on Sunday morning and all of us come in with our Bible and we look real good and we smell real good most of the time, some of the time. But what you know with. But love isn't the exterior stuff, it's not the external, it's the internal. And those internal things come out most. When you're around people. That you trust the most. Usually it's your family. Because you figure, well. We're a family. And then you let some stuff go in the families that you would never do in public, you'd never let anybody see you act that way, speak that way, treat them that way in public. But God's not interested. Well, I shouldn't say God's not interested in the public. God is more interested in the private. the inner, the internal part of us, our heart. Man looks, the scripture says, at the outward appearance. God looks upon the heart. He's always trying to get into the heart, deal with the heart issues. So as we look at this issue called love, loving one another, for some of you, it's going to be delightful. God's going to open your eyes to things you've never seen before, and you're going to suddenly find yourself walking in joy that you've never had before. For some of you, it's going to be very painful because you're going to see a dark side of yourself, a side that's not real pretty, a side that's kind of ugly as a matter of fact. But you know what God does? God makes beauty for ashes. God takes stuff that's ugly. And he refashions it as we allow him to work in our hearts, he refashions us. And he reforms us and he takes away that ugliness and he he places instead the beauty, the beauty of the Lord, the goodness of God. And that's what we need to look for, not just the pain of the spiritual surgery that goes on in our hearts, but God, you're setting me free, you're giving me liberty to love like you love. That's what we're going for. OK, let's stand together.