Loving the One's You're With

Series   
Living and Loving As Easter People

Part 3
Loving the Ones You're With

Focus Texts
 1 John 4:7-21 
John 15:1-17

What the world needs now is love, sweet love. 

That's the only thing that there's just too little of.

Lyric: Hal David; Music: Burt Bacharach.

All you need is love, love! Love is all you need!

John Lesson & Paul McCartney

________________________________________________________

INTRODUCTION

Many years ago the Miles Brothers recorded the song "You Always Hurt the One Your Love."  Take a careful look at the lyrics to this old song. 

You always hurt the one you love,

The one you shouldn't hurt at all;

You always take the sweetest rose,

And crush it till the petals fall;

You always break the kindest heart,

With a hasty word you can't recall;

So if I broke your heart last night,

It's because I love you most of all. 

___________________________________________________________

  

Point 1
Love in the abstract is always easy.
Loving up close and personal is amazingly hard.

When we get close to someone and try to truly love as Christ loved, the enormity of the call to love become even more apparent.  When loving gets hard. . .  when loving requires self-giving and personal sacrifice . . . when the rewards for loving are not immediate there is a strong tendency to give up on love

_______________________________________

Point 2
Even though loving it very hard for us, 
it is clear that love is the key 
to both our personal happiness
and peace in this world.

In this letter by John, John tells us that the only way we will "see" and "experience" the presence of God, is when we love one another.

 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

In short, we are to love as Jesus loved.

 Love defined by John is not like the definition of love we find in romance magazines and feel good movies moves. It is not self-centered. It is not motives by the need for control.  It is not manipulative. 

We are to love as Jesus loved. Jesus love sets us free as all true does.

  10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

We are to love as Jesus loved!  In my mind and in my heart I know this is true but in the real world it seems we never quite get it right.

When we get really up close and personal, when we try to build a community around the principle of love, we find so many things that divide us. 

At the personal life, many a couple deeply "in love" with each other early in their relationship discover in the course of a few months that while they have much in common, they do not agree on a host of things. 

 Three Stages of a Loving Relationship

 

o      1.  Knight in Shining Armor / The Perfect Princess

 

o      2.  Who Is This Person I Married?

o      3.  A Deeper Love  . . . choosing to love and honor and cherish the relationship in spite of the differences between them. 

ILLUSTRATION:  Congregations in this deeply polarized world are finding it hard to love.

 A consultant was working with a deeply divided congregation. The arguments were fierce and tempers flared. People were showing selfish attitudes that seemed so unlike what we’re called to in Scripture. Finally the consultant said to the group, “Friends, I’m hearing what you want to do in this situation, but my question is: What do you think Jesus would do here?” One woman blurted out in anger, “I don’t care what Jesus would do. I AM NOT JESUS!”

___________________________________________

Question of the Day
Why Is It So Hard to Love 

Even Those Closest to Us?

1.  The closer you are, the clearer the differences!

In that holy space of a "close" relationship weaknesses and faults are all the more obvious.  (Garrison Keller tells the story of one high school senior who chose to write the following in his friends year books:  "Familiarity breeds contempt.")

The closer you get to a person you begin to see how that persons interests, tastes, life experience, values, and overall view of life differs from your own. 

 It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.  Henry Ward Beecher

In the wake of discovering differences between you and others you have come to know more closely suddenly that relationship is threatened because you worry that the differences between you are too great for you to overcome. At that point, love becomes a choice and an act of the will. 

2.  Loving others makes you VULNERABILITY.

 The closer you are to someone, the more deeply you are hurt when there is a misunderstanding or a genuine different of opinion on a matter of importance to you.  You react much more strongly to an unthinking word from a loved one than someone whose opinions meaning nothing to you.

  When hurt, the natural tendency is to distance yourself from the person whose words, often said in hast without any real malice, hurt you so deeply.

 You choose to love and stay in relationship with this person even thought there are times when that person hurts you. 

3.  Loving others requires personal commitment and sacrifice.  Loving another forces you to make some hard choices to maintain that  relationship.  

  If the first mark of a true and living church is love, the second is suffering. The one is naturally consequent on the other. A willingness to suffer proves the genuineness of love.     John Stott

Turn to person next you, and say, "I love you!"  Was there just a bit of discomfort in that declaration?  Why?  When you give your love to someone, you are vulnerable and your declaration carries with it a host of expectations.  To say "I love you." is a commitment requiring sacrifice.

 Loving requires your presence and availability to that person.  It's not enough to say "You were always on my mind."  You have to be there for them.  You have to care for them.  You have to give of yourself to maintain that relationship. You have to keep the promises you have made to that person or the trust that holds you together quickly disappears.

Loving relationships have to be maintained.

 

o      There is a strong tendency to simply DRIFT away from those we love

o      Love is an action verb not a noun.  It requires effort.  (Parable of the Sheep and the Goats - "As much as you did or did not do to the least of these . . . )

o      We have a strong tendency to take those of love us for granted.
 

o      We take our church for granted.

4.  True love requires a spiritual or if you will allow, a "mystical" connection with God who is pure love.

The closer you are to others the more you realize there is a spiritual component to all relationships.  A mystical connection with and through God's Spirit is needed to maintain loving relationships.  The energy and unction to love comes from God who is pure love. 

  It is God's Spirit within us that gives us this need to love and be loved.

  It is God's Spirit that places deep within the very fiber of our being the passionate need to experience the unity and oneness of all things.

When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now.     C.S. Lewis 

____________________________________________

CONCLUSION

In the end, only love remains.

 Why? Because God is love and His love is eternal.  In His love, God gave us life.

Through the witness of His Spirit, he sustains our lives and all creation. We love God because He first loved us. 

Through Jesus, God choose to get up close and personal with us.  He chose not to condemn but to love us.  He loved with the force of his whole being to the point of death. Yet, that death gave birth 

Loving others is hard. It is the hardest thing on earth to do. Yet, in the end, we must love for only love lasts forever. 

 When we make the decision to love we move closer to God. Love changes everything.  

There is a holy space between us that only love can fill.  When we truly love, God fills that space and God's Kingdom comes.  

Let us love passionately until death takes us from this earthly plain and we share the love of God in his Kingdom forever. 

Pastor Milt