May 4, 2008
George J. Saylor
This morning we come full circle. We draw to a close our series on Signs of Belonging by talking about Sharing God’s Love. Every one of us, every one who puts their faith and trust in Jesus is then called to share in the life and ministry of Jesus. And let me be abundantly clear on what I mean by that- God showed us the ultimate love by sending his Son Jesus into the world to be our savior. The ultimate love we can experience is in accepting the gift of that salvation, that life, in Jesus. The ultimate expression of love is in sharing this love, sharing Jesus, telling others about Jesus, inviting others to know Jesus. When I say share God’s love, I’m not talking about some vague concept or feeling- I’m mean we tell people about God’s love for us in Jesus. We tell them who Jesus is and we invite them to give their life and faith to Jesus.
We should share God’s love for two reasons- first, because Jesus commanded it. Simply put- Jesus said go out into all the world and make disciples. Second, we should do so because we are compelled to share the best news and the best thing that’s every happened to us. Jesus commands us, and our own experience of Jesus compels us to share the best news the world has ever heard- there is forgiveness, there is freedom, there is peace, there is a God who loves you. It’s the most amazing news the world has ever heard. That’s it, and that’s what we’re talking about today.
Let me begin by making three observations.
First, we did not make this stuff up. We did not invent these signs of belonging. We did not pull them out of the air because they sounded good, or because they made a cool memorization trick by all starting with the letter S. These signs all come directly from commands in Scripture, and I almost hate to say it, but they are nothing new or novel or extraordinary. In fact, they couldn’t be more ancient, more foundational, more time tested and time honored than just about anything in the life of the Jesus follower. Simply put, these are our signs because they are the life-blood of the church. Without these signs, with these things, it’s lights out on the Jesus movement. Without the church lifting up and living these signs, the whole thing falls and dies. That’s how important these are.
My second observation is this: because each of these is a command for us, they are all deeply interconnected and interdependent with one another. There is a thread that ties them all together. They feed off of one another. And together they can do infinitely more than they ever could alone. They have this synergistic effect on each other.
Does worship seems stale? Embrace your identity to be a steward and take your worship into all of life. Invest your time, a talents, put something in the offering. Honestly, it’s amazing how much more we care for a church when we give to the church. It’s simple kingdom economics. You’re not sure how to be a steward, read the bible. Your reading of the bible seems a bit out of place, try doing some service. Your service still leaves you empty? Maybe you’ve gotten to the point where your serving people quietly, but inside you are chomping at the bit to tell them about Jesus, well, it’s time to share God’s love with someone. The more you engage in one, the greater your love and desire for the others will grow. You can’t continue in one sign without naturally be drawn into the others. And the converse of this is true as well. If you resist some of the signs, some of these practices, the ones you do practice will become vacant and meaningless.
Now here’s the third and final thing: nowhere is the synergistic effect of the signs more evident than in the sign of sharing God’s love. It works like this: There should be a sort passive sharing of God’s love flowing through your life if you are practicing the other signs. If you are practicing worship, and stewardship, and reading the bible, and serving folks, your are going to be a great witness for Jesus. You are sharing God’s love. You will have eyes to see, ears to hear. You will have the words to say and the lifestyle to back it up. You will have everything in place in your life to be the kind of person that God can use to share His love with your neighbors. If you did nothing but live the first four signs, you’d have opportunities to live out the fifth. It would simply become unavoidable.
But sharing God’s love becomes so much more when we actively begin looking for opportunities and ways tell people about Jesus. And when we actively start telling people about Jesus, when we start inviting them and bringing them to church, we’ll be drawn back into the other signs. If you are sharing your faith, sharing God’s love, you will be drawn to worship, because you will need your spiritual batteries charged. You’ll start reading your bible because you will need guidance and wisdom. People are going to ask you tough questions, really tough questions, like why is their suffering in the world? Does God really love everyone? What does God think about homosexuality? What about all the other world religions, or people with no religion at all? You’ll be asked questions that rock your world, and all the sudden, reading the bible is going to make a lot more sense. You will engage in service, because you won’t want to be a hypocrite! As you seek to meet the real spiritual needs of people, you will be compelled to meet their physical, emotional and relational needs as well.
I can promise you this:
if you obey the command to share God’s love and seek to engage in sharing your faith with others, your relationship with Jesus will become alive and active in ways you’ve never imagined. Sharing your relationship with Jesus with others, sharing the love you have for him, will do more to energize your faith and your life than anything else.
Jesus knew this. Jesus lived this. This is why loving others, sharing God’s love, was so vital important to Jesus. This is Jesus sure fire, never miss plan for personal growth, and teh growth of the church.
"A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another." John 13: 34-35
Jesus’ command is for you to love one another. Let me break that down for you because I realize here that this command can be very confusing, like so much of Christianity and so many of Jesus’ commands. First he says, “You.” Now let’s just make sure we’re all still on the same page, because I think right out of the gate is where a lot of us mess up. Now we have to ask ourselves, “Who is you?” Now I want everyone here to look to the person to your right, say good morning. I realize some of you on the ends are talking to a wall. Either way, that’s not you. Look to you left- that’s not you either. Now think about the most wonderful loving person you’ve ever met or know- maybe it’s your mom, you remember her caring for you when you had the chicken pox. Maybe it’s your dad, taking out hiking and biking and swimming and fishing. I don’t know who it is, but whoever it is, that other person also isn’t you. Who does you apply to in this command? YOU. That’s right. This command that you love one another applies directly to you.
Now if the first part is confusing, I realize that this next part in nearly impossible for someone without theological training to grasp and carry out. But we'll still try. Ok now, remember a few moments when you looked at the person to your right, and the person to you left, the person behind you, the person in front of you. Hold onto your hats now- those people, they are one another. It’s true. They are the one another! I know, WOW. Really, it’s so complex maybe you should just leave this to professionals like me.
Jesus continues- “love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” This is love- you, willing to lay down you life, willing to do anything, for the person next to you. Jesus says I’m not going to even bother trying to explain or define love for you. But I’ll do something even better. I’ll show you what love it. I’ll live the ultimate love for you. And that’s exactly what Jesus did. Jesus laid down his life for his friends, for us.
John, the man who wrote these words from Jesus, was so transformed by them, so transformed by Jesus that he actually began to live it out. We find him later devoting his life to living out this command. He wrote 3 other letters in his life that made it into the bible. In that first letter he writes primarily about this command. He rhetorically asked the question, “What is love?” And he gave the answer- God is love. Not that we first loved God, but that God first loved us, and sent his son, Jesus, as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we ought to love one another. And this is how we know what love is- Jesus laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for one another.
This command isn’t radical in its originality, in it’s depth or insight. It’s only radical in its application. This command is radical when it’s lived out. It’s radical when it moves from our heads, to our hearts, to our hands and feet. That’s worth saying again- it’s only radical when it moves from our heads to our hearts- as the old saying goes, the journey of 18 inches is the longest journey of all- getting things from and idea, to a value; from a concept, to a conviction, from this teaching, to the actual application to our lives. Because only when it does that, only when it gets to our hearts, will it get to our hands and feet. And if it doesn’t go to our hands and feet, well it hasn’t gotten to our hearts. Because the heart effects everything else. Just as the heart pumps the blood that flows to every part of our body, so the heart will pump this command to love one another, to every part of our body.
So all I want to do for the rest of this morning is get this from our heads and into our hearts, so that when we leave here we are compelled to share God’s love with our hands and feet, with our words and actions. I want you to get the love God in your heart, because it’s the most wonderful thing that has ever happened to me. And if you get the love of God in your heart, I know you share it with others, because you won’t be able to do anything less. Because while Jesus calls this a command, the truth is that we are only compelled to live this out when we’ve experienced the love of God. When we’ve experienced the love of God we can do nothing less than want to share it with everyone.
When I was engaged in full time campus ministry I made it a habit to meet people in the food court. It was central, public, and just downstairs from my office. I would meet with students, or just try to meet more students. One day a girl approached me said, “Hey, Christian guy, what’s your name?” I must admit that I was taken a bit off guard both by her comment and appearance, as I had never meet or talked with her, or noticed her, because she was, if anything, noticeable. I think I just said, “Uh, I’m George, who are you?” She said her name was Mandy, and without any prodding she told me that she was a Neo-socialist, ethnically Jewish, but religiously agnostic, lesbian art major (yes, I was so surprised to hear she was an art major), and one other thing, she was putting herself through school working as a stripper. I said, “But really Mandy who are you?”
It was great- she cut through about a month of chit-chat and conversation in the first 30 seconds.
She said to me something like, "I’ve seen you around here a lot and I get a really positive vibe from your spirit." At this point I assure you I was no longer the “evangelist” making others feel uncomfortable around me. I was pretty much freaked out. At that point on the outside I’m trying to act totally cool, like I have this conversation everyday of my life, I mean, I can hardly keep track of how many artistic agnostic lesbian Jewish socialist strippers I hang out with. Inside I was praying dear God, I’m going to need you help on this one. Whatever it is your doing wherever else in the world, you are going to have to stop, focus on me for a moment, and lend me a hand. Because here’s why God, as if you didn’t know this- there’s a girl sitting her with me who you love, who you died for, and she is crying for help. She just put it all on the table with me because somehow she knows I’m a Christian. Somehow she knows this about me, and she was the one who walked across the room to me, and opened a door for me, and right now God, I think I’m standing in here as your man. I think right now I’m your representative. And I really don’t want to mess this up. I really want to be available right now, right here, for something, even something miraculous.
It must have been an awkwardly long silence for me to think all that. I must have said something really smooth, like, “Wow,” but we struck up a conversation, and a friendship. We began to get together on occasion to talk. She just jumped right in and started asking tons of questions. Most I couldn’t answer. Some I think I handled pretty well. And I listened to her story. And it was quiet a story.
I’d like to tell you that Mandy had a radical conversation. That she came to put her faith in Jesus, she accepted the love and grace and the relationship offered to her in God through Jesus. She broke free of some of the very dangerous and self-destructive habits she addicted to. But you know what, she never came to our campus worship service. She never came to a small group. She never really engaged with other Christians as far as I know and she never made it back to school after that first year. And we lost touch. But she gave me the privilege, the privilege, to share my beliefs, and my deepest conviction that life can only truly be found in Jesus. Was that a failure? Did I fail in sharing God’s love? How would you even gauge success and failure? I think by the end of that year Mandy knew I would be her friend no matter what she said or did or didn’t do. I think she heard things about God no one else had ever told her. I think she saw the unconditional, unbounded love of God in a small way in our friendship. Ad she knew I believed in God who would love and accept her without condition.
There’s a Mandy in your life. Will you share God’s love with Mandy? There are Mandy’s all around us. We brush shoulders with her everyday. Someone who’s crying out for love and looking for relationship, and desperate for direction? Maybe as I say this, you know exactly who that person is. Is it someone at work, someone who serves you coffee, someone who lives in the same development, someone in you family? Is there someone who needs to know the love of God? Of course.
The question isn’t, does God love them? They question isn’t, did Jesus die for them? The question is, are you the one who might get the privilege of showing it to them? Are you the one who gets the thrill, who gets the joy, who gets the honor, who gets the blessing, of just taking the time to love them? Will you just take the time to share God’s love? Tell them about Jesus. Invite them to worship. Even better, bring them. One thing I’ve noticed is the huge difference between saying, I’d love you to come to church with me sometime, and saying, would you come to church with me this Sunday?
I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I’ve been told on numerous occasions that I’m a natural salesman. But I don’t think I’m a natural salesman. I actually know I’m horrible at it. But I’m a natural sharer. There is something in me that can’t keep great news and great things bottled up. If I get a great pair of shoes, I’m all running around, man check out my shoes, I love my shoes they are the best shoes I have ever had, you gotta get yourself a pair of these shoes, can I take you to the store so we can get you a pair of these shoes? We share great news all the time- we’re always telling each other about great restaurants and sales and shows.
But do you want to know what the greatest thing I’ve ever experienced is? Greater than any pair of shoes, greater than any restaurant I’ve eaten at, greater than any show I’ve ever seen? It’s the love of God in Jesus. It’s the relationship I have with Jesus simply by accepting the gift of love he offers me. The gift of forgiveness, of freedom, of life.
But finally, I realize this- before I can ask you to share the love of God, I have to first ask you, have you experienced the love of God? Because I bet there are some Mandy’s here today. And I just want to tell you, that God loves you. He loves you enough that he sent his son to us. And his son, Jesus, loves us enough that he gave his life for us. That’s love. And because of that love we can know God. We give our lives to Jesus, we put our faith in him, and he comes into our life.
This is the love of God- it’s not a definition, it’s not a three step program, it’s Jesus, it’s the relationship he invites us into. It’s the forgiveness he offers us. It’ the freedom he gives us. In Jesus we have a living example of perfect love. In Jesus we look into the eyes of love. In Jesus we see the invisible God of love. The God who made us, the God who came to us, the God who died for us, the God who redeems us, the God who gave himself for us and offers us his life. Friends, this morning I’m not going give you a definition of love. I’m going to try and do you one better. I just want to point you toward the God who is love, and invite you to start a relationship with him.
No comments:
Post a Comment