Love Never Ends

Text: 1 Corinthians 13

Focus: Love

Function: to see the spiritual attributes of charity

¹If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. ²And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. ³If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

⁴Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. ⁷It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

⁸Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. ⁹For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; ¹⁰but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. ¹¹When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. ¹²For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. ¹³And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

You know, I first became aware of this passage by reading it from The Living Bible at a wedding when I was a youth. It really hit me the poetry of it and the simple way that it spells out what it means for us to love one another, and I am going to include, from the heart.

Even though we have heard it read at countless weddings, I am not sure that I have ever preached a sermon on the passage.

I can divide the categories into three parts, Intentions of of the heart, verses 1-3, the Spirit of love on the inside, verses 4-7, and Love never ends, verses 8-13.

So, let us look at them:

Intentions of the heart, verses 1-3. In context, Brother Paul is addressing the division in the church because, as we mentioned last week, they were proud of their individual gifts. One can almost break it down to the fact that they were proud of what they could do, they were motivated in the Christian faith by the power that the Spirit of God gives a person. In the book of Acts, we see a new convert, not understanding that the Spirit of God is a gift, try to purchase the power of the Spirit with money.

When I was a new Christian, I too, was motivated by the power of the Spirit in the life of the believer. It was at the beginning of the Charismatic movement and I was a full blown Charismatic, praying in tongues, prophesying, casting out demons and laying hands on the sick and actually seeing them recover. I had a lot of faith and power and it lead me to the same pride that the Corinthian church had.

Paul tells them that they may be powerful Christians working miracles, but without a loving heart, the right motives, a changed by the Spirit of Christ inside of us attitude, the works are meaningless. Everything is meaningless without a loving heart.

He even tells them that there are people who give great gifts, but do it for power or show, without actually caring for the person, humanizing them, then it is a meaningless gesture.

I was reading Isaiah 58 at the end of the year last year and got convicted about giving to the homeless on the street corners.

So, instead of ignoring them, like I did, I reserve my tip money in the little cubbyhole of the dash and give.

But that isn’t enough. I realized that I was insincere. I called them bums instead of homeless. So I changed my language and my attitude and now I take a moment to listen to them bless me for the money, and they always give you a blessing, and look them in the eye and acknowledge their humanity.

Paul says, it comes from the heart and I believe we have to overcome the societal pressures against loving them that we have listened to.

Then we switch to the characteristics of love, verses 4-7:

⁴Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant ⁵or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; ⁶it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. ⁷It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Again, all of that is self explanatory except, I would like to dwell on verse 7:

• Bears all things. It is very forgiving, just as God is toward us. Without forgiveness, love is impossible.

• Believes all things. I had a parishioner once who claimed to have a discerning spirit. In my opinion, the person was just critical of others, probably raised with a ton of shame themselves.

  • But Love believes the best about someone else.

  • It is not critical.

  • It gives the benefit of the doubt toward someone.

  • It recognizes that although their actions may have been wrong, their heart may have been reacting to hurt, deluded or some other reason, but their humanity is still intact.

  • And except for some people with sociopathic behavior, most people, even the guys I meet in the prison still have a decent and basic spark of God’s love burning inside of them.

• Hopes all things. He ends the chapter with the three tenets of the Christianity, faith, hope and love, It is almost impossible to love and have faith without hope.

• Endures all things.

  • This takes faith in the God who promises to to judge the earth in fairness, equity and love.

  • How do we endure suffering? Partly by remembering that our reward is in heaven.

And finally the title of the message, Love never ends, verses 8-13.

He speaks of what is happening in our present age, it seems as if prophecies and miracles, tongues and etc have ceased to be common manifestations of the Holy Spirit.

But we sense the Spirit’s presence in worship and in service.

Loving others moves the Spirit of God inside of us.

I spoke of humanizing the homeless so that I can stop resisting the urge of the Spirit to care for the least of these.

I remember taking the youth group to serve at the homeless kitchen in downtown Indianapolis.

I asked the youth to look each patron in the eye, call them ma’am or sir and ask them if they would like to have what I am serving them instead of laughing it up with my friends, dumping the food on their plate and hoping for the ordeal to get over with.

The youth were all filled with the Holy Spirit when they did that. You could see it in their faces and afterwards they described this warm feeling inside of them, like their hearts were burning. It reminded me of the description of the road to Emmaus when the disciples said “were not our hearts burning inside of us?”

Hope is important, it allows us to have faith. Faith is important, it allows us to love unconditionally. Faith moves mountains. But both of those pale to the importance of Love.

It is the primary motivator for the moving of the Spirit in our lives.

I pray hard for this Church. And more than anything, I pray that the Spirit of God keeps moving in our presence more and more. I see it in the love you have for others. Let it increase, it is divine.

The Body

 

Text: I Corinthians 12:12-27

Focus: The body of Christ

Function: to help people acknowledge their part in the body of Christ.

¹²For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. ¹³For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

¹⁴Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. ¹⁵If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. ¹⁶And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. ¹⁷If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? ¹⁸But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. ¹⁹If all were a single member, where would the body be? ²⁰As it is, there are many members, yet one body. ²¹The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” ²²On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, ²³and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; ²⁴whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, ²⁵that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. ²⁶If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.

²⁷Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.

Today we are going to talk about the body of Christ and what it means for us to be a part of it.

Although what we already read is self evident and really doesn’t need an explanation, my goal this morning is to help people acknowledge their own part in the body of Christ and to see how significant you all are.

So let me re-read our passage from The Message translation.

^12-13You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body. Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body. It’s exactly the same with Christ. By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything. (This is what we proclaimed in word and action when we were baptized.) Each of us is now a part of his resurrection body, refreshed and sustained at one fountain—his Spirit—where we all come to drink. The old labels we once used to identify ourselves—labels like Jew or Greek, slave or free—are no longer useful. We need something larger, more comprehensive.

^14-18I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not less. A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge. It’s all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together. If Foot said, “I’m not elegant like Hand, embellished with rings; I guess I don’t belong to this body,” would that make it so? If Ear said, “I’m not beautiful like Eye, transparent and expressive; I don’t deserve a place on the head,” would you want to remove it from the body? If the body was all eye, how could it hear? If all ear, how could it smell? As it is, we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where he wanted it.

^19-24But I also want you to think about how this keeps your significance from getting blown up into self-importance. For no matter how significant you are, it is only because of what you are a part of. An enormous eye or a gigantic hand wouldn’t be a body, but a monster. What we have is one body with many parts, each its proper size and in its proper place. No part is important on its own. Can you imagine Eye telling Hand, “Get lost; I don’t need you”? Or, Head telling Foot, “You’re fired; your job has been phased out”? As a matter of fact, in practice it works the other way—the “lower” the part, the more basic, and therefore necessary. You can live without an eye, for instance, but not without a stomach. When it’s a part of your own body you are concerned with, it makes no difference whether the part is visible or clothed, higher or lower. You give it dignity and honor just as it is, without comparisons. If anything, you have more concern for the lower parts than the higher. If you had to choose, wouldn’t you prefer good digestion to full-bodied hair?

^25-26The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don’t, the parts we see and the parts we don’t. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance.

²⁷You are Christ’s body—that’s who you are! You must never forget this

That last line is important. You are Christ’s body, you must never forget that.

This passage is in context of the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the way that they should work to equip the body of Christ for service. Wherever we go, the Spirit of God goes with us, we represent Jesus in everything we do.

Verse 14: “I want you to think of how this all makes you more significant, not less.”

Every individual believer is just as important as the next. He actually says that the members that are the most important, like the stomach (a literal translation from the Greek), is never seen but is more important to living that the beautiful eyes are. The one working hard in the background, who is never seen or acknowledged is the one that God deems more important than the preacher who is up front leading the congregation.

The body cannot exist without all the members doing their jobs. I love the way he says if we emphasize one member over the others, then we get out of balance and become like monsters. It isn’t what God intended.

The problem that brother Paul was addressing in the Corinthian church was pride by some members boasting that their spiritual gift was more significant than others and he wanted them to admire all the works of the Holy Spirit and see the obvious need for all the parts of Christ’s body functioning together.

I have often preached the passage with a call to action because people were expecting others to pick up the slack and were not using their own gifts. I have had to remind people that we are here to serve others until Christ Jesus calls us home.

Rarely have I had to preach it as Paul wrote it where I had a member in the church who thought his or her gifts were more important than others. It has happened on a few occasions.

But what I love about the passage is the way it enables us to serve in God’s kingdom.

I find it empowering to know that God needs me.

I remember a men’s work day at the Church where we were roofing the steeple and it was very steep. They tied a rope over the top and sent me up there since I was only 138 pounds and I knew what to do.

I was part of the team, part of the Church. It felt so good to be included in the mission and the body of Christ. God needs us and fills us with His Spirit when we are serving God. It is a great source of refreshing joy for me.

And that wasn’t the only time the church encouraged me as a child. The Bible says that if we are faithful in a few things, He will make us faithful over much.

I got to teach the 2^nd grade boys SS class for the summer when I was 16. They were probably desperate. But I still vividly remember how the Holy Spirit, for the first time, opened up the meaning of scripture to me as I was preparing to teach those young boys the story of David and his life. It was a joy to be used of God.

And I guess that was the beginning of the spiritual gift that God has given me and it happened because the Church was willing to allow me to be a part and use discover my gifts.

Thank God for His calling on our lives. It fills us with joy. So, God is calling us to be faithful with our gifts and encouraging of others use of their own gifts.

Walking With God

 

Text: Psalm 139:1-6

Focus: The believers walk

Function: to help people find an honest prayer relationship.

¹O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
²You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
    you discern my thoughts from far away.
³You search out my path and my lying down,
    and are acquainted with all my ways.
⁴Even before a word is on my tongue,
    O Lord, you know it completely.
⁵You hem me in, behind and before,
    and lay your hand upon me.
⁶Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
    it is so high that I cannot attain it.

The focus of our sermon this morning is the believers walk with Christ.

Although the words are not the same, it sort of reminds me of Philippians 2:12b, “work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”

In this Psalm, David talks about what it means for him to be living in a relationship with God and how God tests his heart and works to keep him honest in his relationship with the Living God.

David was walking with God. He lived his life knowing the God existed and was sovereign in his life.

I posted a meme to my Facebook wall last week that said: “When we say `feed the hungry, welcome the stranger and put down your weapons’ we are not being leftist or woke, we are merely quoting Jesus.”

Even though I value hard work as the way out of poverty, because of views like this, I get accused of being a liberal. If liberal means “generous,” then I gladly wear that badge. I see God as a generous soul with grace and giving and God expects us to be generous also. In the sermon on the mount, Jesus said: ³⁸give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back.”

There is no specific reference to what we are to give in this passage, but when we look at the life of Jesus, we see Him giving grace to people whom others didn’t think deserved it and He fed the 5,000, He fed the 4,000 and He told us to feed His sheep. Giving generously is living by faith and walking with God.

But, I am not a classic liberal theologian. It seems to me that classic liberal theology has denied the idea of being born again.

And I cannot deny that when I asked Jesus into my heart, He came inside and caused me to know Him. I know by faith that I have been filled with the Holy Spirit and God witnesses it to me every now and then.

You see, God knows our heart. David speaks of how God “hems him in.” (Verse 5)

It is a metaphor for the way that God protects him and keeps him honest in his relationship with God. That does not mean that David did not have his times of doubts and failures. God’s love covers a multitude of failures and brokenness in our lives.

When David says that God hems him in before and behind, it reminds me of how God allows us the freedom to be who we are specifically, but at the same time, God is leading and directing our lives for God’s purpose. To walk with God is to give our lives to Him for Him to use for His purposes. Look at Romans 12:1: I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

We are separated from this world and have become an holy people. Holy means that we are dedicated to God. That is why we are generous, loving, compassionate, forgiving and peaceful in our lifestyles.

Brother Paul calls this separation “a living sacrifice.”

Sacrifices, you know, must die. But not us. We are going to live forever. The sacrifice that we make is to give up a life of fighting and striving for ourselves for a life of giving and living for others.

In our text, verse 4, David tells us that he believes that God is able to know his thoughts to the extent that God knows what he is going to say even before he says it. For a second he breaks into worship and exclaims that the knowledge of God is more wonderful that an human can understand.

David is saying that God knows the intentions of our hearts and because of that, we cannot get away with lying to God.

We may tell everyone else that we believe, but God knows what we really think. We can’t lie to God about it.

Let me make this personal. It is hard for me to wrap my mind around the idea that God knows the thoughts and intentions of the hearts of over 7,000,000,000 people at the same time.

But then, I don’t understand why the sun just doesn’t burn itself out, that is what happens with fires eventually.

God knows that I don’t understand or that I have a hard time seeing the possibilities of what it means to be a supernatural being with that kind of capability.

God knows both that we struggle with faith, and that there are areas in our lives where our faith is strong. God knows us and God still loves us. And to me, that is one of the beauties of this passage.

David lived by faith.

One of my favorite stories in the bible is the story of David and Goliath. Not that I enjoy war, warfare, or killing, but I love the way this child walked by faith.

In 1 Samuel 17, we read how Goliath came at him mocking him, laughing at him and then calling down curses on him in the names of his own gods and David just stood there and faced him.

I wonder what Goliath was thinking as David was whipping up the stone in the slingshot right before he let the stone fly. Apparently, to him, it did not appear that this child was any threat.

But David kept his place. I love his answer to Goliath, “you come to me with sword, spear and javelin, but I come to you in the name of the Lord of Hosts…”

In the face of death, he rested in God and one wonder where that kind of courage comes from?

When David was preparing for battle and talking about it with the King. The king tried to give him the best armor an Israelite soldier can have. He had the option of trusting in human strength. And David said no, that he would trust God rather than mankind. David then told the king that he knew that God was with him because in his youth, he walked with God.

He had an active relationship with God and he lived by faith.

And when he sinned with Bathsheba, God hemmed him in and didn’t let him get away with it. God forgave him, but God also allowed the circumstances in his life to reflect the fact that David needed God’s guidance continually to keep himself from falling.

He failed by committing adultery and then murder, and God forgave him because in his heart he trusted in God.

I picked up a passenger last week who immediately asked me if I went to church. I said I was a preacher and he said, “Ask me how I knew that! I could feel the presence of the Holy Spirit in your car the moment I stepped in.” He shared with me his story of waywardness, prison and then he accepted Christ as his Savior and everything changed for him. I hope to include him in our next Kairos team.

That encounter reminded me that wherever WE go, God goes with us.

Let me end with the first verse, “...You have searched me and known me….”

God, knowing that David was far from perfect, still accepted him because he lived by faith.

So we too walk out our faith in fear and trembling by living in love for others, as Jesus said we would.

Where the Spirit Rests

 

Text: Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Focus: baptism by Holy Spirit

Function: To help people see how Jesus and we are baptized by the Spirit

¹⁵As the people were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts concerning John, whether he might be the Messiah, ¹⁶John answered all of them by saying, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. ¹⁷His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

²¹Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, ²²and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved;

Happy New Year everyone. Epiphany is past and we are looking forward to God’s blessings in our lives as we struggle to serve God daily in our walk with Jesus. Thanks for the week off last week. The game was exciting, but the outcome was not as good as the Ohio State bowl game.

In one sense, it is too bad that we missed the celebration of Epiphany. The coming of the sages who worshiped Jesus is proof of the fact that God’s salvation is for the world entire. Even in that pagan religion God left a witness to God’s plan to save the world through God’s own flesh and blood, Jesus Christ.

They worshiped Him and presented Him with extravagant gifts. And then we see Jesus become a refugee whose parents love Him enough to flee from their home, risk their own lives to find a place of protection in a foreign land.

It reminds me that Jesus said to welcome even the least of these, including the immigrant. For when we do, we welcome Jesus Himself. And Jesus knew the stories of how His family had to flee to find political asylum in a foreign land. I worry about speech that promotes our prejudice against immigrants, words like “Illegals” when Jesus calls them neighbor. I worry that we place our love for our nation above our love for Jesus and His command to care for the least of these. I worry that that kind of speech will bring the displeasure of God on our land. When we love the least of these, we love Jesus Himself.

Jesus was and is the anointed one who came to redeem the world entire. And in today’s scripture, we learn that Jesus did not change the world, raise the dead, heal the sick, cast our demons, extend mercy to the outcasts, befriend sinners and lead them back to God in human strength alone. Jesus worked in the power of the Holy Spirit. It came that day, and rested on Him.

Today, we celebrate the baptism by the Holy Spirit of Jesus Christ .

John the Baptist went around the countryside as a man who was sent to get people ready for the radical nature of Jesus Christ and His ministry.

John preached a radical message as well. He preached the message that people needed to turn around from evil lives, live a life of love for others and get ready for the coming of the Kingdom of God and the time of the Messiah.

John was a bold and stern preacher. He preached what was called a hard word and people listened. And when some came with insincere motives, the motive of looking like the fit in but were not pure in heart, he called them out.

“What shall we do?” People asked John and he replied with a hard statement, if you have two coats, give one to someone who has none.

You know, I found it to be a big sacrifice and very hard to have a wardrobe designed around one coat. He is telling us that we we will have to give up our excess if we want to be participants in God’s coming kingdom.

Jesus didn’t make it any easier for us as well. He told us to put our hands to the plow of labor for the Lord and never look back until we get to heaven. And the Apostles confirmed it with words like “present yourselves as living sacrifices for Christ…”

Boldness and passion are given to us by the power of the Holy Spirit.

As we mentioned, John started it with preaching a baptism of getting ready, but he told us that Jesus will baptize us with a baptism of fire that will cleanse and empower us.

And then John baptized Jesus and the Holy Spirit literally came down from heaven appearing like a dove, I imagine a bright white light floating down and resting on His head. Jesus was then filled with the Holy Spirit and even though He was divine before hand, as we saw two weeks ago when we looked at Jesus as a child demonstrating extraordinary spirituality and wisdom in the temple of God, Jesus was now fully empowered to do the work that God gave Him to do.

We have an alternate reading for today if we so choose. Acts 8:14-17

¹⁴Now when the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them. ¹⁵The two went down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit ¹⁶(for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus). ¹⁷Then Peter and John laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.

A little background: The book of Acts starts with Jesus telling us to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit, Acts 1:8. Then, in the 2^nd chapter it describes the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit fell on the 120 gathered in the upper room somewhere and the Church was officially born.

People were believers already. They had already came to the place where they trusted that Jesus was their Savior. And then, at a separate event for most of them, the Spirit of God fell on them. Most often, like the baptism of Jesus which was performed by God’s messenger, John, in this case, and the laying on of hands by the apostles as the case of Peter and John in the text in Acts. This passage is significant because the Spirit of God went beyond the Jewish population to include gentiles like us.

The Church was started by, and designed to be run by the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

It will lead us beyond hatred and strife to fulfilling the Law of God by causing us to love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves.

It was prophesied by Ezekiel in Chapter 36: Vs 25-27. Hear the word of the Lord: ²⁵I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. ²⁶A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. ²⁷I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances.

He starts out with the power of baptism, the sprinkling of water, the cleansing power of the Holy Spirit which ignites the power of the believer to serve the Lord by God causing them to be re-born, new in Spirit, transformed by the Love of Jesus, New Creatures, us, ready for the glory of God.

May we seek the filling of the Spirit continually in our lives.