1 Corinthians 13:1-13 July 2009

LOVE IN RELATIONSHIPS

Most people think of love in terms of a kindly, warm feeling I have towards someone else – friend, family, or lover.

When we say, “I find it hard to love someone”, what we are usually saying is that I find it hard to feel anything warm or positive towards that person.

The Greek language has 4 words for love.

Phileo –affectionate love based on things we have in common and mutual attraction.

Storge – family love.

Eros – romantic or sexual love.

Agape – not based on things we have in common, not based on family ties or romantic feelings. It is nothing to do with how we feel; it’s nothing to do with whether that person deserves to be loved, or whether they respond to our love. This is God’s love for us.

Agape love is choosing with our will to act lovingly towards another person and that is why God commands us to love like that– nothing to do with how we feel towards someone. God never commands us to feel anything. In fact we cant control how we feel. Feelings are totally unpredictable, but we can control how we choose to relate to others.

In this passage Paul defines what agape love is:

Love is patient

Ill. A friend of ours had a severely handicapped boy. He couldn’t speak, crawl or feed himself and often he would just lie there and yell. I have to confess that the yelling really made me feel up tight. They had him live with them until he was in his twenties. They had to do everything for him and yet I can’t ever remember his mother losing it with him. I used to watch her relating to him when he was yelling and thrashing about and she would just speak gently and firmly to him. How could she put up with that day in and day out? Because she

genuinely loved him. Genuine love is patient.

How patient are we with others, when they fail, when they bug us, when things don’t happen in their lives as quickly as we would like them to. Do we give up on others too easily? How patient is God with us?

I constantly marvel at how patient God is with me. I let Him down time and again and yet He never ever gives up on me.

Love is kind –

Jesus best described kindness when He said, “Treat others the way you would like to be treated.” Can you imagine living in a community where everyone put this into practice – closest thing to heaven.

Ill. There is a true story of a Christian man who joined the army and on the first night in the barracks he did what he had done since he was a child. He knelt beside his bed and prayed. The other recruits thought this was a great joke and yelled abuse at him. The next night the same thing happened, only this time one of the soldiers threw his heavy army boot at the Christian hitting him hard on the head. The next morning the man who had thrown his boot, found that both his boots had been immaculately cleaned and polished and placed at the end of his bed. That was the last time he ever made fun of the Christian.

It’s easy to show kindness to those who are pleasant to us, to those who respond positively, but agape love shows kindness even to those who don’t deserve it, to those who are unpleasant and unloving towards us.

Jesus showed this same kindness to one of the soldiers who came to arrest him in the garden, when he healed his severed ear.

Love is not jealous – Jealousy was responsible for the first and the worst murders in history. Jealousy is when we resent others doing better than us or getting more

than us.

Agape love can look at someone else’s strengths, gifts and blessing and be happy for them. Agape love does not feel threatened or resentful when others do better than them.

Ill. William Barclay tells of a certain American Pastor named Dr. Spence was a very popular preacher and his church was always full. One day a new young Pastor came to town and when Dr Spence got up to preach he found that only a handful of his congregation had turned up. “Where has everyone gone?” he asked. “Down the road to hear the new preacher.” “Let’s go and join them.” He led his little flock down the road to hear the new Pastor.

Love is not love jealous of the gifts, attractiveness, abilities, successes, possessions of others. Love can accept and appreciate these in others without feeling threatened or resentful. Why? Because we know we are unconditionally loved, valued, appreciated and accepted by God just as we are.

Love is not boastful or proud –

Ill. An American cattle farmer was visiting NZ and asked a Kiwi farmer how big his farm was. “About 1000 acres.” “Well,” said the American farmer seeking to impress the Kiwi, “On my farm in Texas I can get into my 4 wheel drive at sunrise, head west and by evening I am still on my own land.” The Kiwi farmer looked at him sympathetically and said, “I understand, I used to have a 4 wheel drive like that too.”

Boastfulness and pride come from the need to make ourselves look better than we really are. Behind it is the fear of losing face, of having our weaknesses, faults and failings exposed and that is why a proud person will not admit they have done wrong and need forgiveness.

So many relationships are ruined by pride, when one

party will not admit they are wrong and apologise or where one party becomes angry and resentful because the other one has confronted them with the truth about themselves.

When God has shown us the sin and deceit in our own hearts and we have genuinely humbled ourselves before the cross of Jesus confessing our sins and our need for God’s forgiveness and mercy we know we have nothing to boast about in ourselves. We can only boast about the great compassionate loving God who has forgiven undeserving rebels like us.

When people confront us with our faults and failures – we don’t mind admitting it because we are not out to impress them. We know it’s true and God knows it and together we’re working on it.

Ill. Jane Potene.

v5. Love is not rude….The Greek here literally means

that when we love someone we won’t deliberately do or say things that would embarrass or offend them.

The opposite of being rude is being considerate and if we love someone we will take note of the things that embarrass and offend them and out of consideration for them we will stop doing them.

Ill. I remember once Lois and I were with friends and I was being playful with Lois and had my arms around her and I lifted her off the ground and she said to me,

“Please don’t do that, I feel embarrassed when you do that in front of others.” Because I love my wife, that was the last time I did that in front of others.

Love does not demand its own way.

When our main concern in relationships is to get our own way, we will end up destroying that relationship. The relationship is not motivated by love, but by self-gratification and self-interest and we will use each other to satisfy and fulfil our needs and desires.

How many times have I sat down with a married couple going through difficulties and heard them say, “She or he is not meeting my needs”

Did you marry this person so that they could meet your needs or because you wanted to selflessly and unconditionally love them?

Our culture is so preoccupied with demanding and insisting on our rights that we have forgotten about our responsibilities. The human rights movement says nothing about our responsibility towards our fellow human beings it tells to ensure we get what we believe are our rights regardless of how it might affect others.

The whole advertising industry encourages us to think only about ourselves, our needs, wants, desires, happiness etc, etc. and even their motives are selfish.

When my wants, my interests and my happiness become the main concern in my relationships there will be constant conflict and pain. Marriage, friendships, church.

Ill. In their marriage Barry always made the decisions and did the things he wanted to do while Lyn just tagged along. She felt resentful at times because whenever she suggested something different from what he wanted he would come up with some excuse as to why it wasn’t such a good idea. One day after 25 years of being repressed and controlled by Barry, Lyn couldn’t take it any more and she exploded at him telling him how selfish and inconsiderate he was. Barry thought she had lost her marbles and was making a mountain our of a mole hill. He just couldn’t see how self-centred and controlling he was.

Ill. I know of a church where one man had for years exercised considerable power and control and every time a Pastor would disagree or challenge him he would make life so unbearable for the Pastor that he ending up leaving. There was never unity in the church, new people seldom ever stayed, it never grew and all because one man would not give up his own selfish agenda for power and control.

Ill. I know of churches where people have demanded their own way and have resorted to all kinds of unloving behaviour to get it and have created division, pain and some have even walked out because they couldn’t get their own way. Is this Christian love?

Ill. What will these people say when they get to heaven and they meet believers who suffered, were tortured, burned at the stake and skinned alive for the cause of Christ? Can you imagine telling them, “I had to put up with long sermons, too many choruses, modern versions of the Bible, uncomfortable pews.” A lot of us will be sitting in the back row with our heads down saying, “Forgive me Lord for being so self-centred. Thank you for the privilege of being with these dear brothers and sisters.”

In fact if you are presently experiencing conflict in your relationships, you only need to ask the question, “Is one of us demanding our own way or not getting our own way?”

If we genuinely love someone we will be more concerned about their needs, their welfare, their blessing, their good than our own, and we will be willing to put aside our needs, demands and preferences for their sake.

Ill. In one of the churches I pastored there was a couple who I will call John and Mary. John didn’t have a lot of confidence, was average intelligence and was a bit uncoordinated. Mary, however was very capable, confident, intelligent and a good tennis player. We were at the tennis courts one day and John and Mary were playing tennis. I knew that Mary was a good player and was quite competitive. John on the other hand was not that good, but as I watched them play I noticed that Mary cramped her style to allow John to win. There was something more important to Mary than winning. She wanted to encourage John and build up his confidence to make him feel better about himself.

When did we last put aside our own desires, plans, and preferences for the sake of those we love? When did we last go without so that others could receive and be blessed? That is what it is to love.

Philippians 2:5-8 “Your attitude should be the same that Jesus Christ had. Though He was God, He didn’t demand or cling to His rights as God. He put aside those rights and was willing to be seen as nothing. He took the humble position of a slave and appeared in human forma and humbled Himself even further by dying a criminal’s death on a cross.”

Why did Jesus do this? Because He was thinking not of Himself but of you. He was willing to step down to where we are in order to lift us up to where He is.

Love is not irritable.

In other words, when we love others we don’t take out our bad moods on them. Once again we may not be able to control how we feel but we can control what we do with our feelings.

We Christians talk about the Spirit controlled life or we ask God to take control of our life. This concept is not found in the NT. Neither God the Father nor the HS want to control us. God doesn’t want puppets or machines, He wants sons and daughters who will take control of their own lives, be responsible for their moods, attitudes and behaviour and by their own choice live lives that honour Him.

The only time we find control in the NT is among the fruit of the Spirit which is self-control.

We may be having a hard day, we may even be feeling

physically unwell, we may be struggling with depression, but we still can choose how we will relate

to others when we are feeling that way.

Ill. A builder asked a work mate to drop him home one night because his car had broken down. The day had been so frustrating for him He got a puncture driving to work which made him late, at work his skill saw burnt out and then his work vehicle wouldn’t start. When his work mate dropped him off he was about to drive away when he saw his friend go up to a tree by the front door and stand in front of it for about 30 seconds before he went inside. He was very curious to know what he was doing standing in front to the tree, so the next day he asked him. “That’s my trouble tree. Whenever I arrive home from a hard day feeling irritable and frustrated, I hang those frustrations and problems on the tree. They don’t belong in my home with my family so I leave them there. Oddly enough they don’t seem to be so bad when I come to collect them the next day.

Ill. A first year university student approached another student who was crippled and asked him what was the

cause of his physical condition. “Infantile paralysis,” replied the young man with a smile on his face.

The other fellow asked, “How can you be so positive and cheerful with a disability like that,”?

“Oh,” replied the polio victim, “the disease never

got into my heart.”

We can’t control the beauty of our face, but we can choose the expression on it. We can’t control life’s difficult moments, but we can choose how we respond to them. We can’t control the negative atmosphere of our world, but we can choose the atmosphere of our mind.

Love is not irritable. It does not take out its bad moods on others.

Love keeps no record of when it has been wronged.

Ill. Franois Mauriac tells the story of an old man who spent the last decades of his marriage sleeping down the hall from his wife. Thirty years before their 5 year old daughter was ill and his wife accused her husband of not being sympathetic. Neither the husband nor wife apologised to each other, they both believed the other should take the first step. Every night he waited for her to approach him, but she never did. Every night she lay awake waiting for him to approach her, and he never appeared. Neither would break the cycle that began years before, neither would forgive.

Ill. In her memoir of a truly dysfunctional family Mary Karr told of an uncle who remained married to his wife but did not speak to her for forty years after a fight over how much money she spent on sugar. One day he literally had the house cut in half and moved one half behind some pine trees on their acre section. There the two, husband and wife, lived out the rest of their days in separate houses.

C.S.Lewis once said, “To love is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung possibly broken.”

If you get involved in any relationship you will get hurt simply because the people in the relationship are just

like you – fallible, flawed and imperfect.

Think of the amount of times we have offended, failed and grieved the Lord and yet how has He treated us.

His mercy is new every morning. No grudges, no withdrawal, no isolation, no spitefulness – Just mercy, forgiveness, love. More than that .. Isaiah 43:25 “I am the one who wipes out your offences because of who I am and I will not remember your sins anymore.

The truest test of love is when we choose to forgive and forget.

Sometimes Lois has apologised to me for something she said or did and I have struggled to remember what she was talking about and I am sure that is the way it should be. We keep no record of the wrongs that have been done to us.

Isn’t it wonderful that every time we approach God He doesn’t drag up the past and throw it at us? He accepts and receives us as though we had never done a thing wrong, because Jesus went to the cross and paid the penalty for our sins with His own life.

It is never glad about injustice

Moffat translates it this way, “Love is never glad when others go wrong.”

There is something mean in our corrupted human nature that likes to listen to gossip and gloat over other peoples failures. The media thrives on this stuff. When someone in the public eye fails or makes a mistake they have a field day dragging this stuff out before everyone. People almost get a delicious feeling out of seeing others fail. Somehow we think it will make us look better if we focus on the faults and failings of others. Somehow we don’t feel quite so bad about our faults when we hear of others failing. This is a false sense of our own self-righteousness. We deceive ourselves – because in God’s eyes we are no better than the worst criminal.

Ill. Erich Honecker was deposed as the Communist leader of East Germany when Germany was unified.
Honecker was widely hated by the Germans because of the oppressive measures he applied under communism. After he was ousted from his position, he was not allowed to live in his luxury home. He was ostracised by his people and most Germans were delighted to see him suffer. A Lutheran pastor had compassion on the homeless Honecker and offered him free accommodation in his home. This was surprising because Honecker had persecuted the church. Because of this the pastor received offensive phone calls and when people in his congregation saw what he had done they threatened to leave his church and some of them did. They rejoiced to see Honker suffer, the pastor motivated by the love of Christ would not.

Are we really saddened when others fail or do we secretly gloat over their shortcomings and use it an excuse for gossip? That is the test of whether we are really motivated by agape love.

Love rejoices whenever the truth wins out

I have spoken from time to time about how deceitful the human heart is and how we have developed ways of avoiding the truth, getting around the truth or twisting the truth.

Ill. It reminds me of guy who was a qualified meteorologist, and got a job as a weather forecaster on a TV news program. He became something of a local joke when a newspaper began keeping a record of his predictions and showed that he’d been wrong almost three hundred times in a single year. The TV station eventually fired him, but he moved to another part of the country and applied a similar job in another TV station. On the application form was the question what was your reason for leaving your previous job. “The weather didn’t agree with me.”

Many of you have heard the saying “Love is blind”. This means that when you love someone you tend to overlook their faults. But if you really love someone you couldn’t honestly allow things to remain in their lives that are morally wrong, harmful to them and to others. That is why Paul says in Eph 4 that a sign of maturity is being able to speak the truth in love.

Sometimes we are avoid confronting those we love with the truth because we are afraid of being rejected, or losing their love. If that is the case our concern is not really about them, it’s about us….not genuine love.

Sometimes parents are so emotionally dependent on their children that they won’t lovingly confront them with the truth they need to hear and the child can grow up believing that their offensive behaviour is okay.

Ill. David Goetz tells of how his wife’s honesty was like a slap in the face but it was what he needed. He was standing in the kitchen one morning and exploded because his father wouldn’t lend them some money for a deposit on a house they wanted to buy. Dave’s face reddened, he pounded the table and yelled “Dad always does this. He favours my brother and gives me nothing.” His wife Jana said, “This reaction has come up time and time again. Every time the subject of your family comes up, your face reddens and you explode. I don’t know what to say anymore. I think you need to talk to counsellor about this problem.”

Dave said, “I felt hurt, even betrayed, by Jana’s forthright comments. But I couldn’t shake her words. A few weeks later I found a counsellor who, in the course of several months, helped me discover source of much of my unresolved anger. I was forced to look into the fiery furnace.”

Jana’s truth telling launched me on a journey that invited the presence of Christ into a back corner of my soul. She had exercised a love that wasn’t pleasant, but she had served me by telling the truth.

Speaking the truth in love is not easy, but if we really love someone we will take the risk – love doesn’t hide the truth but rejoices when the truth wins out.

It’s my prayer that we believers will have a greater

understanding of what true love really is and realise that every day we have a choice to love or not to love, to treat others in a loving way or not. This is nothing to do with how we feel; it is all to do with our choosing to obey the Lord and treat others in a loving, kindly way. We believers have no excuse for not loving others.

Jesus said, “A new commandment I give to you that you love one another as I have loved you. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” This love is more than gooey sentimental feelings or talk it is active, practical love.

1 John 3:18 “ Dear children, let’s not merely say that we love each other; let us show genuine love by our actions.”

There is a challenge to take with us into your week. The real great thing about it is that God not only commands us to love like this but he has promised to supply us with this very love. Romans 5:5. All we need to do is begin to act lovingly towards others and the Holy Spirit will give us to the love for them. You will actually find that your heart soon will follow your actions. “Faithful is he who calls you who will also do it.” 1 Thess. 5:24