Love is the ultimate concern that flows through the pages of Scripture … love is the bedrock of the story … love is what it’s all about.
Faith, hope and love … and the greatest of these is love.
When a young man asks Jesus what’s most important, Jesus replies: love God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself … on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
Owe no one anything except love, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.
Let love be genuine … love one another with mutual affection.
Do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your God.
For God so loved the world … loved it enough to give the beloved son … God’s lamb … to take away the sin of the world.
There is no greater love than this, then to lay down one’s life for another.
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.
When it comes to love, kids see it for what it is … here’s something I picked up from the internet – kids and love:
WHAT MOST PEOPLE ARE THINKING WHEN THEY SAY "I LOVE YOU"
"The person is thinking: Yeah, I really do love him. But I hope he showers at least once a day." (Michelle, 9)
HOW A PERSON LEARNS TO KISS
"You learn it right on the spot when the gooshy feelings get the best of you." (Doug, 7)
"It might help to watch soap operas all day." (Carin, 9)
WHEN IS IT OKAY TO KISS SOMEONE?
"It's never okay to kiss a boy. They always slobber all over you...That's why I stopped doing it." (Jean, 10)
HOW TO MAKE LOVE ENDURE
"Spend most of your time loving instead of going to work." (Tom, 7)
"Don't forget your wife's name...That will mess up the love." (Roger, 8)
"Be a good kisser. It might make your wife forget that you never take out the garbage." (Randy, 8)
At the heart of the Bible, God’s love for us …
And the hope of the Bible, that we might love God, and never be afraid, and love one another with the kind of love God has for us.
Love is always an action word … an ethical word … love rolls up its sleeves and gets its hands dirty.
How do we know that God loves us?
Because God said so?
No.
Because God did so.
God did something about the problem of sin …
God met it head-on, battled with it, died with it on Calvary’s cross … to pay the ultimate price – to undo the damages of sin and recalibrate the universe.
This was no easy thing for God.
Compared to the cross, creation was a breeze.
It was no big deal to create the world.
God said, Let it be!” and it was so … boom, boom, boom, just like that.
But sin required something more … a whole lot more of God … no easy words here, but life on the line … from birth to death and everything in between … Jesus, born of Mary – a little boy, a precocious 12-year old in the temple … and a very ordinary life, the son of Mary and Joseph, until it was time, time for the young rabbi to begin his work.
Time to preach the kingdom of God.
Time to heal and time to love.
Time to forgive and time to give hope.
Time to confront and time to challenge.
Time to overturn a few tables.
Time to take up a cross and carry it to Calvary.
Time to suffer … and time to die.
This was no easy thing for God.
Jesus anguished in the garden.
Jesus cried out on the cross.
This was no cakewalk.
This was hard.
Bloody hard.
Terribly hard.
To die for the sins of the world.
To offer a sacrifice, once for all … a sacrifice, so pure, so good, that it would cover the world with grace … big enough for everyone … deep enough to reach the gates of hell … good enough to reach the gates of heaven … tough enough to face whatever hell would throw at it … strong enough to conquer the human heart.
God at work on Calvary’s cross and in the tomb, going to hell and back again, and then, for us, God at work - in our hearts and minds.
God inscribes the words of love in the deep places of our life – in heart and mind, God writes the covenant upon us – You belong to me, and I belong to you … a tattoo on our soul … and nothing can ever separate you from my love, and my love will hold you forever … every day and every night – in hardship and in joy … God’s love holds us!
So, we have this relationship with God …
Connected to God, and God connected to us … and the connection is love …
So be brave, says the writer to the Hebrews … be brave, be bold … don’t be afraid of God … enter into God’s presence with confidence … because of Christ …
And then two guidelines:
Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful.
And …
Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.
Two remarkable guidelines …
First of all:
Hang on to your hope!
BECAUSE - God is faithful.
It wouldn’t be enough to just say, “Hang on to your hope.”
We’re not strong enough, big enough, or smart enough.
Real hope is not just a human thing.
It’s a God thing.
It has to be.
Because the human thing is too crazy.
For the last few days, a dear friend of ours has been living a nightmare …
She wrote to me late last night about her brother …
"Rev Tom...John has not been found...his boat was found capsized "washed ashore" on Thursday. He went out Wed. at 5:00 AM…they have called off the search…49, father of 24 & 17 year old sons…his 24 year old is a Captain on a freighter ...this is so not real to us. John is a lover of the ocean and fishing…freak accident as the storm came up quickly and the waves were huge…we "think" he was trying to call for help but did not have a signal per telephone company…family is still searching the islands...his cooler and life jackets were found about 100 yards from the boat...The boat was beaten up pretty badly my older bother told me tonight…Prayers for my 89 year old mother that just realized today that it was John her son...this is her fifth son that she has lost...Peace I pray for...hope all is well your way....thinking of Josh and his new adventure...hello to Donna...prayers please Rev. Tom...Patti"
We need more than our human stuff.
We need God!
Hang on to your hope because of God.
Because God doesn’t give up on any of us.
God doesn’t give up on the world.
All the sorrow and all the sadness … all the hatred, all the war, all the greed … but God doesn’t walk away … God loves the world, and is at work in all things … for good!
That’s what we confess.
That’s our hope.
Not in human resources.
Not in our cleverness.
Not in our science.
But in God.
God!
This is our gift to the world.
This is our ultimate concern: to know God’s love, and to share that love with the world.
Because God’s love is the real hope of the world.
But we can’t do it alone.
I can’t do it alone.
You can’t do it alone.
But we can do it together!
Here’s the second guideline:
We need one another.
The simplest admonition – meet together regularly … in worship and Bible study, in prayer groups and ministry teams, mission trips and justice projects …
The greatest enemy of faith is separation from one another … when the Devil has us running around like chickens with their heads cut off, faith dies … when we’re too tired, too preoccupied, too full of ourselves, to show up here for the sake of one another, faith evaporates in the heat of the day; faith slinks away in the fears of the night.
All that’s left are a few words and the broken fragments of love.
I like how the text puts it to us:
Provoke one another – push hard on another … I think of a good coach who pushes a young athlete to excel … a teacher who sees what a student’s mind could be … a good manager guiding a young salesperson.
We mentor one another.
To be more today that we were yesterday.
The text puts it to us:
Don’t neglect meeting together, as is the habit of some.
The greatest temptation – that we try to follow Christ by ourselves, by our lonesome … all on our own.
But, you see, that’s the very opposite of love, isn’t it?
To try to go it alone with God is to contradict God.
To seek God without a commitment to God’s people – we might as just tell God we’re not interested in God’s family.
But it’s worse than that:
If we turn our backs on one another, we cut ourselves off from the lifeline.
We deny ourselves the privilege and the power of the other person helping us.
And we deny to others the value and gifts of our life for them.
To want God all by ourselves is just plain selfish.
Because God is love.
And the ultimate concern of life is to love …
To love God …
And to love one another as Christ has loved us.
We’re all in this together.
We need one another.
Together we stand, or divided we fall.
We encourage one another, as we see the day approaching.
Because time moves on … history is always fateful.
If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.
Every day takes us one step closer to God.
The inevitable sweep of time.
To the finale!
The end of life, God!
Period.
God!
The finale!
With that reality in mind, we press on with the kingdom of God.
Time is precious.
Let’s not waste it.
So we devote ourselves to ultimate things!
Things that count!
Things that shape our life in the highest and best of all possible ways.
We hold on to our confession of hope - because we know in Christ God is utterly faithful.
We hold on to one another in the fellowship of love, to make one another stronger in faith and service.
Our ultimate concern:
To love God with all that we are.
And to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
Amen and Amen!
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