The Faith To Love

 

Text: Ephesians 3:14-21

Focus: Faith

Function: To see how it takes faith to love

¹⁴For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, ¹⁵from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. ¹⁶I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit ¹⁷and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. ¹⁸I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth ¹⁹and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

²⁰Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, ²¹to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen.

Good morning and blessings to all of you!

Today, we are going to talk about faith and how faith helps us love and how the sacrifices of love that we make are the logical steps of us growing in the Love and faith of Christ Jesus.

So, I titled the sermon, The Faith to Love, because it takes faith to love and live sacrificially like Jesus has called us to do for him and on behalf of the for which Jesus gave his live, So that we may be restored to God.

That may seem odd to you, saying that it takes faith to love.

But love is more than the feeling of emotion that we get when we are with someone we like, those are mental and biochemical reactions that God has given us to bring us that sense of belonging in God’s beloved community.

The great Chapter on Love in the New Testament, 1 Corinthians 13 has perhaps a more accurate translation for the word translated as love, Agape, in the Greek of the New Testament in the King James Translation. The King James translates it as Charity.

And when we think of Charity, we think of giving alms to the poor. But again, Charity means more than that: I describe this charity as an attitude of mercy from the heart towards someone else. And the mercy is holistic. I mean, it is partly physical, caring for their needs. But it is also spiritual, caring for their souls and their relationship with God, and of course, it is also emotional in the way that it cares for the well being of the other individual.

Charity is empathetic. I mean, that it seeks to get to know the other and to understand them and their humanity. That happens because love, or Charity, a heart of mercy, sees the divine in everyone and everything and knows that since God is present in everything, the redeeming power of God’s love is here and present with us.

The Apostle John said that if I have not love, same word, agape, then I do not know God. It says that if I hate someone, I do not belong to God.

And if I have the resources to help someone less fortunate and I harden my heart to their needs, or merely tell them I am going to pray for them, then I am not walking in the Love or Charity or Mercy that God wants me to have.

So, what about this faith to love?

Yesterday at Kairos, we spent the day retreat focusing on what I believe to be the most important spiritual discipline, Forgiveness.

Without forgiveness, it can be impossible to be merciful and loving.

But forgiveness can be very difficult.

I was spiritually and emotionally abused by an arrogant preacher when I was 14. He condemned all of us people who are not sure of who we are sexually and accused us as the reason why God will turn his back on America and give it over to the commies.

It was a sermon, by the way, about Christian nationalism and white supremacy.

But since I was abducted and raped at 11 years of age, when this man ranted on about his own fear of others sexuality, condemning them, I was lead to believe that I too was condemned.

I don’t know what trauma was worse, the rape, or the overwhelming shame that this so called preacher laid on me.

So, as you can hear by me calling him arrogant and a so called preacher, forgiveness for this man is difficult.

And if it is hard for me, it can be very hard for the men who are incarcerated, especially those who are innocent or victims of the color of their skin or harmless use of Marijuana.

My problem is that I suffer PTSD because of the incident and without treatment, I will spend my entire day in a state of panic. And when that monster surfaces its ugly head in my life, I am reminded of the abuse and then I need to forgive again.

It takes faith to forgive. Because in order to forgive, I have to trust in a God, or The God who promises to set everything back to the right.

And I have to rest in the fairness of God’s judgment.

This can be hard.

Because we are forgiven to the extent that we forgive.

And when we have been truly wronged with no recourse for vindication, we have to rest in the ultimate fairness of God’s judgment.

God judges with mercy. God has judged me with mercy and according to out text today has blessed all of us beyond what we deserve and has made it possible for us to live an abundant life as promised in John 3:16..

I am glad I wrote this sermon before I left for Kairos yesterday because it reminded me that the power and the strength to forgive do not come from me or from the strength of my will but they come from God and the power of the Holy Spirit working in our lives.

God does this.

We concede to let God give us the power and the strength to forgive.

My prayer is often this when someone has harmed me and I have to forgive them: “Lord, do not get even with them on my behalf, but give to them the same mercy that you have given me.”

For me, the faith to do this comes from faith in the love of God.

I started to write the mercy of God. But the mercy of God is based in God’s love for us.

And it was proven by the fact that God’s representative, Jesus Christ, suffered without revenge on those who killed him, even forgiving them in them during his own torture.

God does this in us, not we ourselves. We make a simple choice with a simple prayer: “God forgive them as you have forgiven me.”

And for me, it is the gentle process of God’s Spirit leading me, time and time again. And then I notice the pain lessens and I begin to understand my enemies in this situation.

I preached yesterday at Kairos that forgiveness is a spiritual discipline that requires practice. When we pray for the one we are having a hard time forgiving, our attitude begins to change and it might even change them.

When we quit criticizing them and speak blessings, our spirit changes toward them.

And then, maybe we can understand them.

It was funny for me that I preached on this subject to the men at Kairos because I was having an issue with unforgiveness myself. I was deeply hurt by someone in a debate about how we Christians are called to love the other and are commanded to take up the cause of the oppressed. It became somewhat a political discussion, but then it got ugly and the person began wounding me, instead of my argument and I was deeply hurt.

And as I was preparing my Kairos talk, they texted me, and the Holy Spirit revealed my hypocrisy and called me to repent for my unforgiveness. And as I spent the night awake praying about it, God showed me the other person’s fear and anxiety. I was able to see the other side of the argument. And it make forgiveness much easier.

The Holy Spirit will lead us that way.

And so now I think about what I called “that arrogant preacher and I realize that it was not as much arrogance but was fear. Fear causes most prejudice.

But fear is something the Holy Spirit can overcome and I believe in the power of prayer at times like this.

Paul tells us in this passage that we are truly blessed by the power of the Spirit in our lives.

Let us live in communion with her.