Love (Christian Basics: Week 6)

March 28, 2010
Josh Broward


Throughout the Season of Lent, we have been thinking and talking about the Christian basics. What does it really mean to be a Christian? Well, here in our last week, we come to the most basic part of being a Christian: love. Love is the goal of Christianity. Our mission is to be a loving community that changes our world, and the first part of our vision is to be renewed by God’s love so that we love God, ourselves, and others. Love is fundamental to who we are as Christians and as members of this church.
I love how John Wesley explains this: “If you look for anything more than love, you are looking wide of the mark, you are getting out of the royal way, and when you are asking others, ‘Have you received this or that blessing?’ if you mean anything but more love, you mean wrong; you are leading them out of the way, and putting them upon a false scent. Settle it then in your heart, that ... you are to aim at nothing more than that love described in [1 Corinthians 13]. You can go no higher than this, till you are called to” heaven.1
Well, then, let’s read 1 Corinthians 13:

1 If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. 3 If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.
4 Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud 5 or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. 6 It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. 7 Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.
8 Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever! 9 Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! 10 But when full understanding comes, these partial things will become useless.
11 When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. 12 Now we see things imperfectly as in a cloudy mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. 13 Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.
Of all the Christian basics, love is the greatest. Love is more important than faith or the Bible or hope or anything else. Love is supreme. Without a life filled with love, everything else is beside the point. Everything God wants for us is summarized in one word: love.
Then, why do we find it so difficult to love? Why is it so hard to be patient and kind? Why is it that, no matter how much we pray, we still find ourselves being jealous or boastful or proud? Why do we demand our own way? Why are we so irritable with each other? Why do we keep mental records of the wrongs others have done to us - especially our bosses? Why do we give up on relationships so easily? Why do we find ourselves turning again and again toward selfishness and away from love?

Because we are buried alive. Our true selves are buried deep within us. Our true selves hold our deepest dreams and joys. Our true selves carry our pain and longing and hope and fear. But that is so incredibly scary to us, that we bury ourselves. We push our true selves way down deep within us - far below the surface. And we pile on the dirt. We pile on busyness. We pile on music and computers and games and work and laundry. Anything - so that we don’t have to face who we really are. Anything - so that we don’t have to face what we really feel. Anything - so that we don’t have to think about what we really want and who we really are. We are buried ... deep ... deep ... deep in the ground.
And when our true selves are buried that deep, then our true selves cannot be changed. All of that dirt not only keeps true selves buried, but it also keeps God away. It keeps God out of our heart of hearts. It keeps God away from who we really are.
So we pray, and we go to church, and we ask God to change us, but we only give God access to the surface of who we are. God can only work on the “tip of the iceberg.” The rest of us is buried deep inside us. Our hearts - the deepest parts of our hearts are off limits to God and to us. We don’t even know what is in there. Most of the time, we don’t even know the deep pains and joys that are buried in our hearts. We don’t even know who we are. If we want to know God, we’ve got to start by knowing ourselves. If we want to love others, we’ve got to understand and love ourselves.
This is not “New Age pop-psychology.” This is “Old Time Religion.” This is really, really, old-time religion.

• About 150 years after Jesus, Iraneus said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”
• In the late 300’s AD, John Chrysostom (bishop of Constantinople) preached, “Find the door of your heart, you will discover it is the door of the Kingdom of God.”
• In 400 A.D. Augustine wrote: “How can you draw close to God when you are far off from your own self? ... Grant, Lord, that I may know myself that I may know you.”
• Around 1300, Master Eckhart said: “No one can know God who does not first know himself.”
• In the 1500’s Teresa of Avila wrote, “Almost all problems in the spiritual life stem from a lack of self-knowledge.”
• About the same time, John Calvin the Swiss reformer, said: “Our wisdom ... consists almost entirely of two parts: knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other.”

Jesus said what God wants is simple. Love God with all of yourself, and love your neighbor as yourself. Here is the simple truth. To love God and to love people, we have to bring out our true selves. We can’t love God with everything we are if we don’t even know what’s going on deep within us. We can’t love our neighbors well if something deep within us is driving us to be irritable and impatient and unkind. We’ve got to bring our true selves out into God’s light so that God can heal us with his love.

How do we do this? Well, really this is a life-long journey. The Christian way is all about stripping off our “old false” selves and learning to let our “new true” selves live and shine out God’s love. Let me suggest four basic practices that will help us live out God’s love from deep within our true hearts.

1. Slow down. In his book, Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Peter Scazzero says, “Almost everyone is busy. Whether a teenager or a senior citizen, a mom at home with small children or a corporate executive, a teacher or a student, rich or poor, Christian or not, we are overscheduled, tense, frantic, preoccupied, fatigued, and starved for time.”
If we ever want to know our true selves, then we have got to get away and alone. We have to spend time with ourselves - just us and God. Silence and solitude are key ingredients for knowing ourselves and being changed by God. SLOW DOWN! Slow down and quietly reflect with God on what is going on in your heart and live. This will radically change your life.

2. Stop pretending. Many of us go through life thinking that negative emotions are bad. We think it’s wrong to be sad or angry or afraid, so we bury those feelings. We pretend we aren’t feeling what we are in fact feeling. We push it down. We cover it up. We bury it. ... We bury ourselves. Peter Scazzero explains it like this: “When we deny our pain, losses, and feelings year after year, we become less and less human. We transform into empty shells with smiley faces painted on them.”
Be honest about what you are feeling. Ask yourself why you feel that way. Ask yourself how that connects with your past history. It’s OK to feel angry or sad or lonely or anxious or afraid. But ask yourself what is really going on. Dig a little whole and let your true self speak about what is really happening within you. In their book The Cry of the Soul, Dan Allender and Tremper Longman challenge us: “Ignoring our emotions is turning our back on reality. Listening to our emotions ushers us into reality. And reality is where we meet God ... Change comes through brutal honesty and vulnerability before God.”

3. Follow your heart. Yes, of course, not everything that feels right is right. I know that. You know that. But what we forget is that our hearts know things that our minds can’t express. Listen to your heart. Let the real you shine through. Who are you really? What are your real dreams? What are you deeply passionate about? Find the answers to those questions. Live from those passions and dreams, and you will live close to the God who put those passions in you.

4. Love boldly. I just finished reading The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. I know ... I know ... that’s not a very manly book to read. But I’ll be honest. I loved it! This book tells the story of a group of women who are learning how to be themselves and who are passionate about loving each other boldly. Don’t be shy with your love. Give hugs. Give kisses. Give compliments. Laugh together. Cry together. Spend time together. The true you longs to love and be loved. God made us for love. When we love, we live close to God. In fact, as 1 John says, “If we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us” (1 John 4:12).

In the 18th and 19th centuries, there were repeated outbreaks of cholera. One of the symptoms of cholera is a drastic drop in blood pressure. Sometimes, in fact, a sick person’s blood pressure would drop so low that they appeared to be dead. This is what gave rise to the classic Monty Python quip, “I’m not dead yet.” In efforts to keep sanitary conditions, people were promptly buried after death. However, it sometimes happened that people would actually be buried alive. Later, when their blood pressure rose again, they faced a horrifying death of suffocation inside their own casket.
As an attempt to solve this problem, in some places a new tradition emerged. People were buried with a small rope running from their coffin to a bell in the graveyard. That way if they woke up, they could ring the bell to tell people that they were actually alive. Then, the towns people could come and dig them out.
We have buried ourselves alive. Our true selves are deep within us longing to get out. God is ringing the bell of our hearts asking us to go deeper. God is working within us, trying to get us to dig down so that he can set us free. God wants to set the real us free so that we can love and be loved. This is what the Christian life is all about.
Let God love you. Let God love the real you - deep inside. Then, we will be set free to love God with all that we are. We’ll be set free to love and to be loved with boldness and joy and life.