United Church of God

The Preeminence of Agape Love: Agape Love Series - Part 1

You are here

The Preeminence of Agape Love

Agape Love Series - Part 1

Downloads
MP3 Audio (19.38 MB)

Downloads

The Preeminence of Agape Love: Agape Love Series - Part 1

MP3 Audio (19.38 MB)
×

The importance of the word 'agape' and it's various meanings are covered in this message. This is the start of a new series on the topic of agape love.

Transcript

[Gary Petty] If I asked you to write a list of the most important things in your life, what would you write down? Now, for most of us, the top of the list would be obvious. We would put God, family, maybe the people in our Church, our friends, and later down the list would be, you know, the things we own, our jobs, our possessions, our house, our car, you know, but the top things would be usually God and people, people that mean something to us, they're important to us. And we would say it's because I love them and they love me. In English, the word love has a wide variety of meanings. I mean, you can love your wife, you can love your country, you can love your cat. You can love music, you can love your car, but I doubt if any of us mean the same thing when we say that. And so I love my children and I love my car, and they don't mean the same thing. The word love there doesn't mean the same thing. So the word love in English has a huge variety of meanings. Some say that love is simply accepting everybody exactly the way they are, and therefore there's no judgments, and everybody can just be exactly the way they are. Is that what love is? Then that would solve all the world's problems.

I looked it up in my favorite Merriam-Webster's dictionary, and there was a whole list of things, of definitions, of the word love in English. Three of the most common were a feeling of strong or constant affection for a person, an attraction that includes sexual desire or a romantic relationship, strong affection for another rising out of kinship, their family members. And then the list went on and on and on how that word can be used. Jesus said that the greatest commandments of God is to love God, to love your neighbor, and then He even commanded that we love our enemies. What does He mean? Does that mean that the core basic teachings of Christianity is that we simply love people and have an attraction to people who have dissimilar interests? Does it mean that we are to simply be people of compassion and empathy? Is that all that means? Does it mean that we simply respond to the needs of others? I mean, that's love. Is it how sacrificial is love? How much do you sacrifice yourself in loving others? Or does it simply mean we simply accept everybody the way they are and that way there's no conflict and basically no rules or standards either? What does it mean?

I gave a series of sermons about 10 years ago where I went through this subject. And we're going to go through that again. I started to redo that series, and I started to add so much and take out so much that I don't know how many weeks it's going to take to do this. But if the command of God, the greatest commandments of God is to love God with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul and to love your neighbor as yourself, and we're told to love our enemies, how in the world are we supposed to do it? What does that mean? What does that mean? The Apostle John writes a passage about love that many times we read through and don't spend a lot of time in because it seems, "What is he saying? He seems to be all over the place," but he's not. He's making some very, very important points in a way that John writes. Paul wouldn't write it this way. Peter wouldn't write it this way, but it's the way John writes. So let's go to 1 John 4, and let's look at this passage and break it down and think about all the elements that have to be in here for him to say what he's saying. Because John is writing with an assumption that his audience and that original audience he wrote to in this letter knew exactly what he was talking about and they had all the filler information to fill in the gaps. They had everything that's needed to fill in the gaps here.

Paul does that. You know, Paul writes sometimes, he expected his non-Jewish audience to have an enormous understanding of the Old Testament. And one of the reasons we know that is when you read Paul, there's times where he's quoting parts of Old Testament passages. But he's only quoting a small phrase. So you don't even know it's from the Old Testament unless you know Isaiah, unless you know Jeremiah, unless you know Genesis because he's quoting from all these books, and he expected his audience to know it. John here expects his audience to know an awful lot in what he's saying. So let's start at verse 7. He starts, he says, "Beloved." Now, he's talking to the Church here. We're going to have to expand out what love is, who your neighbor is, all these other aspects of what this actually means. But he's talking specifically to the Church in this passage. So we'll start here and start to look at and define our relationships with each other in the Church. Because this is where it starts.

1 John 4:7-8 He says, "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love."

That's enormous right there. Now, he keeps using the word love so much that we can read through this and say, "Love, love, love. That's all he's talking about. It doesn't mean anything." But we have to step back and say, "What is it he's saying?" The first thing he says is that we must love one another. As we're going to go through this, we're going to see this is not an option to be the Church of God. It's not an option, and it's something we've failed at over and over and over again. It is not an option. We must love one another, and there's reasons for this, because this kind of love that he is talking about comes from God. This is a totally different meaning than I love my dog. It's totally different than even I love my husband or I love my children.

This is a law that's a specific law, but now we're going to have to define what that means. Does it mean just compassion from God? Well, we know God's compassionate. What does it mean? What's the fullness of this word in that we must have it and it must come from God, for it is what God is. God is love. Now, we're going to talk about this word in Greek here in a minute, the specific meaning of this word in Greek, well, the specific meaning that John and Paul give it. There is a use of a certain word in Greek that is unique to the Bible. We'll talk about that in a minute. So the followers of God who do not love each other do not know God. Isn't that a stunning statement?

Now, we can say, well, the followers of God who do not keep the 10 Commandments do not know God. We can still make that statement. John actually makes a similar statement about the commandments in 1 John. But here he says if the people of God do not love each other, they do not know God. We begin to understand how enormous this is. He says, "Because God is love." So if we say God is love, in the English word, we could come up with all kinds of meanings to that. And so that's why we can't even look at this in the meaning of the English word love. We're going to have to find out what John means. Because what he's saying here is that the very character of God, in other words, the essential moral, mental, and emotional makeup of God is love.

It's essentially His nature. It's God is love is a dramatic statement. His character, His nature, the essential part of His morality, of the way He thinks, the way He feels, if we use that word feel, I mean He has emotions, He doesn't have adrenaline or any of those other things, but He does have emotions. His emotions is...there's a word that describes this essential part of who He is. It's His nature. And it is this word. So that's why he says, if we don't have this, we cannot know God. Now, as we're going to go through this, we're going to see we can only have it in a limited way because we're not God.

We have to understand if we're going to know God, we have to have this essential nature of God being developed in us, and the first place we share it is with each other in the body of Christ. It's the first place we share. Why? Because we're supposed to be with other people who know God. So part of the problem we're going to go through here is we don't know God enough according to John. We don't know Him well enough.

1 John 4:9 "In this the love of God was manifest toward us that God has sent his only begotten Son into the world that we might live through Him."

So he says, if you really want to understand this love of God, we have to look at Jesus Christ who came to reconcile us to God. Without His sacrificial death, we can't have a relationship with God and we can't know God. It's not possible for a person to have a true relationship with God without the sacrifice of Jesus Christ applied to that person. That's the whole concept of redemption. So he says, if you really want to understand the love of God, we start with Jesus Christ and that reconciliation that takes place. And if we want to know the love of God, what it really means, we have to look at the suffering and death of Jesus Christ and the reason He went through it and the reason the Father let Him go through it.

I mean, there's a reason for that. It's called the love of God. So what is that? Once again, we're back to how do we describe that in human terms? How does that apply to us as human beings? What are we supposed to do? Sacrifice ourselves? I mean, what are we supposed to do if we're supposed to have this same kind of love? Then he says something very important in verse 10.

1 John 4:10-11 “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”

So he says here that we see this expression of God's love in the sending of Jesus Christ. And it's not that we love God. We did not initiate a relationship with God. No human being initiates a relationship with God. Now, that human being may be crying out to God, but if God...they still can't initiate it. Nobody can say, "God, I want to talk to you," and God say, "Okay." What happens is God has to reach out and say, "Okay." In other words, we can do whatever we want and nothing happens. It only happens because God initiates it. That's the love of God. Remember, God initiates a relationship with whatever human being He chooses to do that with, not because they're lovable. God doesn't look down and say, "Oh, that person is so good, so perfect, so lovable, I'm going to choose them." That's not what happens. So, God doesn't choose us because we're... I can guarantee you, I don't want to really offend anybody here, but none of us were called by God because we're the most lovable people on the Earth. We're not.

See, this is really complicated, what John's going through, the thought process of what he's going through, line by line by line. We did not initiate it. It is our response then that must happen. We must respond to God. Now, this means that you and I were created to be loved. Why did God create us? He wanted children to love. God is love. And that's agapao there in the Greek. We'll go through that in a minute. If God is agapao, He is this, and it is towards others He created others to love. I want you to wrap your mind around that because it begins to understand why you're here. You were created by God so He can love you. And here's one great thing about God. He is not completed or perfected when we love Him back. He's already complete and already perfect. Okay, that's important to understand because if He wasn't, we're in bad shape, because we're not very lovable at times. So if we're not very lovable, and as you think about it, we have problems in our relations all the time because that person isn't treating me right, that person isn't making me feel loved, whatever, that person hurt my feelings. Well, how many times a day does God say, "Oh, wow, you really made me feel good"? How many times a day do we offend Him? How many times a day do we make Him feel bad if you want to use the word feel? How many times a day are we doing something He finds totally unlovable? So He's not perfected by our love towards Him. And we're going to see here in a minute, John says that we can be perfected by His love towards us in this relationship that we have. Verse 12. Oh, once again, verse 11 there, he zeroes in on the Church again, "If this is who we are, this is what we must do." And there's a prophecy that says, at the end time, the love of many, talking about the Church, will wax cold, this element being lost in the Church at the end time. And we cannot afford to let that happen in our lives. He says in verse 12.

1 John 4:12 "No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love has been perfected in us."

Once again, we didn't perfect God. You know, sometimes when you think about when you have a child, when you have a baby, you are more complete by having a baby, right? You are more perfected by having a baby. God is not more perfected by us or this relation. You know, how many child-parent relationship is perfect? Both parts are messed up. Why? Why is husband-wife relationship so difficult at times? Because we need each other to be complete. God doesn't need us to be complete. Be so thankful. Thank God that God doesn't have to be completed by us. But we need Him to be completed. It's part of the core problem with human beings. It's why we use drugs. It's why we abuse alcohol. It's why we mistreat other people. It's why people live such sexually immoral lives. They're trying to get a completion that can't be made or done by those things. It can only be done by God because you're made incomplete. I'm made incomplete. God's complete. In other words, He really doesn't need us. But He created us because He wants to love us.

If we could grasp that, it would change the way we live. He made us. It also changes the way we look at each other. The person next to you is made by God because God wants to love them. That's why He made them. It's sort of hard to be mad at your wife when you think of her as created by God because God loves her, right? See, it changes everything.

1 John 4:13 He says, "By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us because He has given us His Spirit."

You cannot have the kind of love that's being talked about here. Human beings can reach amazing levels of love. People that don't even know God can do amazing things. But what he's talking about here can only happen because God's Spirit is in us, because we can't create this. Only God can create this.

1 John 4:14-15 "And we have seen and testified that the Father has sent us the Son of Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides him, God lives in him, and he is in God."

God is in us, and we are in God. That's very important. That's a whole nother subject. It isn't just God living in us, we're living in God. In other words, there's a connection between us and God through His Spirit.

1 John 4:16-18 "We have known and believed the love that God is for us. God is love. And he who abides in love abides in God and God in him. Love has been perfected among us in this." We know that we are being perfected. And he says, "Here's one of the ways you will know that you're being perfected, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment, because as He is, so we are in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear because fear involves torment. But he who fears has not been made perfect in love." And then he goes back to, "We love Him because He loved us first."

Because God loved us first is the only reason why we responded. If He doesn't give that to us, we have no way to even understand anything because we're not complete. It takes His Spirit to make us complete. I'm going to read this from the New International Version. Here's how they render this. Oops, wrong chapter. Says, "God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God and God in him. Love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment because in the world we are like Him." Okay, he goes back to, "If this love of God is given to us and God's Spirit is given to us, then we are to become like God." Remember, this agapao isn't just what we think about in the English word of love. It is the essence of God's morality, of His mental thinking, of His emotional processing. It's the essence of His nature. That's what this means.

So many times we've been looking at the word love in the Bible, in the New Testament specifically, and missing what's actually being said. Well, yes, I love my wife, I love my husband, I love my friends. But do you do so in the way that God does? Well, no. Ah, that's what we have to be learning. And this gets real complicated as we'll see. He says, "There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment. The man who fears is not made perfect in love." In other words, if we spend all of our time overwhelmed with fear that God is out to get us, God is out to punish us..." Now, God does punish. And God will not abide with evil forever. We talked about Sodom last week and the very fact that God will not abide with evil forever. There's a point He says, "I will not put up with this anymore." One of the reasons Jesus Christ is coming back is because He says, "I will not put up with this anymore. I will not live with this evil anymore in humanity." But he says if we fear that all the time, then we're forgetting why we were created and why you were called. You were created and called by God to be loved by God. He didn't create us to be cattle. He didn't create us to be pets. He created us to be children who are loved by Him and by Jesus Christ. Verse 16. Well, let's go on here. Let's go to verse 20.

1 John 4:20 "If someone says, 'I love God,' and hates his brother, he is a liar." That's another stunning statement in this passage. It's not a passage we go through a lot, is it? Pretty stunning statement. "If anyone says they love God and hates his brother, he is a liar, for who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?"

He said, so if we somehow separate this, "I love God, therefore I can abuse my brother. I love God, therefore I can do this, that, or the other and abuse other people," he says, well, then you don't love God. It's that simple. And, specifically, you're talking about the Church. Believe me, we're going to get into the place where Jesus and others talk about not just the Church. No, this love of God is more than just the Church, isn't it? And we're going to have to see what He means by that and how expansive that is.

1 John 4:21 He goes on, he says, "And this command we have from him, that he who loves God must love his brother also."

It is a command. If we love God with all our heart, all our mind, and all our soul, we will love our brothers and our sisters. And we're going to have to expand that out as time goes on. And that's why it's going to take a while to get through all these sermons. You know, when we look through this passage, we've come to some interesting conclusions that are just...it's implicit and some explicit here in what John is saying. One is we know why we exist. God created us to be loved by Him. He created us because He wants someone to love. We also found out why He gave us free will, because we have to respond to Him in love. If we do not respond to God in love, there is a lake of fire. It is God's desire that all human beings respond to Him in love. That is His desire, everybody to respond to Him in love. So we know that He gave us free will. We know why the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, because John says it's to show us love and to redeem us from the rebellion that we live in against God. And we know through here why He offers us eternal life. We go back and read through that passage. It's because He wants us to live with Him forever. Wow. That's quite a message inside there, isn't it? We know why we exist, why He gave us free will, why the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and why God gives us eternal life. And it's all because God is agapao. So we better find out what agapao means. Now, there's only a few Greek words that most of you know. And probably they have to do with what we're going to talk about today. I mean, I don't know a lot of Greek words either. I have to look them up. And then I have to look up again and again. How do I pronounce certain things? Because I never get Greek or Hebrew exactly right. And as I said before, part of it in Hebrew is because I don't have the [vocalization] sound that I can make pretty well.

Man, there's a sound like you're clearing your throat in Hebrew that I just can't get out sometimes. There are numerous words in Greek that could be translated love in English. There's four major ones. Two of them are in the Bible. One is eros, which means romantic love or sexual passion. Once again, it just meant any kind of sexuality where there was an attraction between two people. Storge is an interesting Greek word because storge means the love of family, that dedication that family has, that children and parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and, of course, the Greek world and is so much today different than the United States where we don't live with extended families. The idea of extended family is central to biblical concepts, and it's central to still some cultures in the world today. So this whole word dedicated to the love of families, they put up with each other, they get mad at each other, but, boy, you better not pick on one of them because you've got to fight the whole clan, right? Storge. Now, eros is very specific, you know, this person towards this person. Storge is very specific. It's the people within a family or a clan. Phileo, sometimes...and there's a...some of these words, if you go through the Greek, there's different...you'll find related words in the Bible. And the reason why, sometimes it's a verb, sometimes it's a noun. So it's going to be slightly different. But so I'm going to use...I'll flip back and forth sometimes between a noun and a verb or a noun, yeah, and a verb just out of because I don't know exactly in that passage whether it's a noun or a verb. I'd have to go look it up.

But phileo is the word you'll find the most often. There are other words that are used. But it denotes friendship and companionship and affection. And it is a very strong bond with another person. One lexicon says this, "It literally means to love with the meaning of having common interest with another." In other words, you may not be... A phileo is somebody that you spend time with because they're a close friend. You can have other friends, but there are people who you're very close to. That's phileo. It's a very strong word, and you will find this word used throughout the Scripture, phileo. And it has to do with this brotherly love. It does tend to be exclusive.

I mean, Jesus Himself was closer to four of the apostles than He was the other eight because it shows how He spent more time with them. It doesn't mean He didn't love all of them. It means there are of them He just sort of was closer to as a human being. He just was. We all have somebody we connect with. You know, it's not everybody with the same connection. That doesn't mean you don't love everybody. It doesn't mean everybody's not your friend. It just means there's... You know, we all talk about, "Well, I got a few special friends." Phileo would mean that special friendship. And it can manifest itself in being very unselfish, very unselfish. You know, sometimes you'll see people who have a greater expression of phileo. Now, they'll give themselves, say, to a community and spend their lives serving their community. And that's a form of phileo love. They just expanded that out to this group of people. So it's a very important type of love that we have. Now. Let's go to Romans 12 to show you how this can appear in the New Testament and the way they have to translate it. Romans 12. It says in verse...let's start in verse 9.

Romans 12:9-10 "Let love be without hypocrisy, abhor what is evil, cling to what is good, be kindly affectionate to one another with brotherly love and honor giving preference to one another."

Now, it's interesting here. He goes in through here and gives detailed, Paul does, explanations of how this carries out in real life. But when he says that love be without hypocrisy, that's... I'm trying to remember, is it agape? Yeah, it's agape. It's a verb. Let agape be this way. Agape, agapao, when we read John, all the times you see the word love there, it's one of those two variations, agapao or agape. So let agape, the special form of love, be without hypocrisy, be kindly affectionate to one another in brotherly love, that's phileo. In other words, we are to have an emotional connection to each other inside the Church. Once again, he's talking about inside the Church here. That's where we're just sort of zeroing in on on the Scriptures we're covering today. Inside the Church isn't just supposed to be this Godly love, but we are supposed to have a connection of real friendship with each other. And he goes on and talks about how you do that, how you have this brotherly love.

So, eros, storge, when we look at these words, phileo, they can all be expressed naturally by human beings. They are the highest forms of love that we can do. And they can be very sacrificial. And every once in a while, a human being can even reach this level of agape. But what John's talking about is agape isn't something that happens in someone's life one time when they do something. It is part of who we are. Just like remember, agape is describing the essential nature of God. So when he says we must become that way, we must become and take on the essential nature of God. Now, agape in Greek has huge amounts of meaning, and it was used in philosophy a lot to mean sort of the greater love. It can be ambiguous. In fact, you'll find agape or agapao used a couple times in the New Testament, and it has nothing to do with the love of God, because the word, which is so broad. But what you find is this broad sort of philosophical word, Paul and John and even in the Gospel writers take this word and zero it down and give it a Christian meaning. It's interesting, I was doing some research for this week. And I went onto a site where it's just people who know Greek. And, unfortunately, they were writing in English. And they were discussing how agape... "Are we going to discuss the ancient Greek meaning or the meaning that the New Testament Christians gave to it?" because they expanded it out and it now has a Christian meaning.

It now has a Christian meaning that is very interesting because if you knew Greek, I mean, they went to a Greek world. Greek was the main language that the scriptures were written into. When they went to those people, those people looked at how they're using agapao and said, "Wow, that's really interesting. They're taking this word and making it part of their religion. They're making a part of their understanding of God, and they're expanding it out in great detail." So we must not think that everybody in the first century who spoke Greek would have used these words this way. Because they didn't. They don't use that word that way in all parts of Greek today where people speak Greek. But it is primarily, even in Greece today, if you went to Greece, agape and agapao is used primarily in a Christian sense because they are Bible readers there.

They have the Bible, so they have a Christian meaning to the word. So that means we're going to have to explore Paul and John and other places to even know what the love of God really is but, more importantly, how do we break that down if we are loved by God, we are supposed to have the same love, what does that mean? How does that carried out in day-to-day activity? How do we do that? I mean, we're not God, right? How do we take the essential nature of God and we're supposed to be carrying that out in our relationships with other people? You know, we all think of love as a positive emotional reaction to another person, right? I mean, we know sometimes that's not true. You don't want to get up and change the baby's diaper in the middle of the night. But you do it. And then when you're done, you look at the little cooing baby, and it's like, "Oh, I love you," we have this positive emotional reaction too. But what about agapao? Matthew 5, we're not even giving definitions yet, we're just looking at how complex this becomes in the way it's used in the New Testament.

Matthew 5:43-45 In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.'" Now, it's interesting, we don't know exactly what he said. He may have said this in Aramaic. He may have said it in Greek. Greek was used in the Middle East at the time, but Aramaic was the primary language. But God chose to have the New Testament recorded in Greek. So the Greek words become very important. "You shall agapao your neighbor and hate your enemy." He says you've heard that. That's the word that's used there. "But I say to you agapao your enemies..." Actually, I think it's agape because I think it's a verb. But once again, I'd have to go look it up. "Love your enemies. Bless those who curse you. Do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you." Why would you do that? Why would you treat people nice who are treating you badly? Verse 45, "That you may be the sons of your Father in heaven, for He makes the sun shine on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust."

He says, "Because in doing so, you're acting like your Father in heaven." Now, the Father in heaven does bring punishment on humanity. You and I don't get to do that, okay? You and I don't get to bring punishment on humanity. He can because he's perfect love. We're too imperfect to do anything like that. But the important thing here is this is just like what John was saying. This is so similar to what John was saying. He says you love your enemies because they were made to be loved by God. And if they fail, God will take care of it, so you will be like your Father in heaven.

Matthew 5:46-47 "For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others? Do not even the tax collectors do so?"

So he says, you know, there are...the worst people you can think of, of course, the worst people in the Jewish society were tax collectors. They worked for the Roman government. But we can just put in here anything. You know, members of the mafia. You know, Italian families tend to be very close. Storge is very important, I mean, if we use the Greek word to Italian families. I grew up with Italian families. You know, the Mafia protected its family. That's not agapao. He's saying so you could be a very loving person in many ways, but you're no different than people who are absolutely in rebellion against God.

Matthew 5:48 He says, "Therefore you shall be perfect just as your Father in heaven is perfect."

In other words, once again, where does our perfection come from? It comes from the love of God working in us. That's why we have to have His Spirit. We were created to be loved by God, and we have to be recreated to be lovable. Because we're not. And that's the great thing about it. We say, "Well, how can God love me?" And God's answer is, "Only I can fix that." See, we hold back what God can do because we feel like we can't be loved. And God says, "Of course, you're unlovable. Why do you think I said Jesus Christ to die for you? Now, if you want to be like me..." Now, he didn't use the word there, phileo. He didn't use that word. In other words, oh, you're being persecuted by this person. They're your best friend. No, they're not. But he says go pray for them, that God will bring them to repentance, that God will help them repent, help them see their error. Go pray for them because your Father in heaven loves them. They were made to be loved by Him. That's why He created every human being. That's why I get so upset... I know I talked about it last week. I get so upset with abortion. It doesn't matter how the child was conceived, what sin or whatever, once it's conceived, it's a child created to be loved by God. It's a child created to be loved by God.

And so we find out this is going to get real tough. I mean, let's look at what we just learned from this passage here, agape or agapao. Now, I'm getting where I'm mixing up the verbs and the nouns. I'll just say agape. Agape involves a way of thinking and is based on motives defined by God's motives. That's what Jesus just said. Do this because your Father does it. Well, my motives a lot of times have nothing to do with God. They have to do with me. And maybe I'm just unique in that. I don't think so. Agape involves self-sacrifice. Agape isn't contingent upon how other people treat you. Oh, that's the hard part. I mean, that's what Jesus just said. This person's persecuting you. Don't persecute them back. Agape is unselfish, outgoing concern for everyone, everyone. Agape isn't always based in carrying out actions that are based on our natural emotions. Sometimes we have to go and do the exact opposite of our natural emotions to fulfill agape. We have to go against our natural emotions many times to fulfill agape. Where do we find an explanation? It is very unfortunate that this passage of Scripture we're going to go to next it's been made into a couple of different songs over the years. It's sung at weddings all the time. It's become a cliche. It's become a cliche.

In 1 Corinthians 12, the Apostle Paul tells the people in Corinth that they have received a lot of gifts from God, a lot of gifts from God. And they had been given these gifts through God's Spirit, but they were a divided Church filled with all kinds of sin. Now, this is interesting. Gifts from God can produce failure. Spiritual gifts from God can produce failure in people. What do we do with those gifts? So let's go to 1 Corinthians 12. And let's go to... Because this whole chapter is about gifts that God has given people and how the Church there was struggling with unity because everybody's fighting over their gifts. So he ends this discussion of how all these gifts given by God are supposed to build unity in the Church, not division. Hey. And then let's pick it up in verse. 27.

1 Corinthians 12:27 He says, "Now, you are the body of Christ and members individually." So you're collective, but you're still an individual. "And God has appointed these in the Church, first apostles, second prophets, third teachers."

He says, you know, there's actually people given certain positions in the Church to carry out what God wants done in the Church. After that miracles, there's gifts given. Some people receive a miracle from God and the next person doesn't. That's a gift from God. It's not always because that person is more righteous than the next person. These are gifts from God through His Holy Spirit then gifts of healings and helps. You know, there's lots of helps given. There's all kinds of...all of you here, there's people...all of you have something you can give and help the Church with. Every person in the Church, and this is part of the reason of this chapter, has some gift from God to contribute to the congregation. Everybody does. You're supposed to find out what it is. They're supposed to do it.

Now, unfortunately, there's people that I gave a sermon on this a couple years ago, but my gift is I want to sing and yet the person, a stanza has 100 notes, they can't hit two of them, okay? But I'm supposed to sing, and that's my gift. Sometimes we don't know what our gifts are. We need some help from others. And then there's times you let somebody sing because their heart is so much they want to sing and you let them sing. They just want to so much. You let them do it. And we all smile and thank them, right? He says there's administrations, and there's lots of things that people help with with administration of the Church. I mean, I don't take care of all the finances. I have people in both congregations that help me administer the finances. Varieties of tongues. And, of course, they had issues there where they had speaking in tongues and interpreting of tongues, of languages.

1 Corinthians 12:29-31 "Are all apostles, are all prophets, are all teachers, are all workers of miracles? Do all have gifts of healing? Do all speak with tongues. Do all interpret it. But earnestly desire the best gifts." He says there's nothing wrong with wanting gifts from God's Spirit, but then the next statement, "And yet I show you a more excellent way."

He says I'm going to tell you something that is more excellent than being an apostle that's been written by a man who was an apostle. I'm going to tell you something that's more excellent than being the greatest servant in the congregation. It's more excellent than being the greatest speaker. It's more excellent than being the greatest singer. It's more excellent than any service that you do. I'm going to show you something more important than any of that, more important than if you've been given the gift of healing, more important than that. And that's how he launches into 1 Corinthians 13. Let's pick up verse 1.

1 Corinthians 13:1 "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but hath not Agapao."

He says... Now, this is hyperbole. Speaking in tongues was a big thing in that Church. You read through this, and their whole Church was divided. They were fighting over speaking in tongues. It was confusion during services. People were speaking in different languages, and nobody knew what anybody else was saying.

1 Corinthians 13:2 And he says, "I can speak with all the different languages on the face of the Earth. I could even have private conversations with angels. And if I don't have this, I am spiritually nothing."

I mean, this is a punch in the face to the people of Corinth. There's no Church in the New Testament that seemed to have this gift of tongues at the extent they did. And yet he says you're nothing.

1 Corinthians 13:1 He says, "I have become a sounding brass or a clanging cymbal."

He says, "I'm just like a kid beating with this..." You know, you ever have a... My sister, I might have told you this, when her kids got old enough, I paid her back for all the things she did to me. I bought all of her kids, she only had six of them, cymbals and drums, it was wonderful, and little flutes, and it was just this hideous noise. It was wonderful.

Yeah, I did do it for them. Anyways, I have repented. I have repented. "And though I have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge..." Wait a minute, what if I understand every prophecy in the Bible? That's what he's saying. In this hyperbole, he needs to... Paul will do this. He'll use hyperbole to make his point. If I understand every prophecy in the Bible, if I understand everything in the Bible. If I could speak Greek, oh, yeah, he did speak Greek. In fact, everybody here spoke Greek. Or I knew Hebrew. Well, everybody in Jerusalem practically knew Hebrew. These people are way ahead of us in those things.

1 Corinthians 13:2 He says, "If I had all this," and then he says, "and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains, but I don't have agapao, I am spiritually nothing."

He says, God says, "Big deal, you can throw... You have enough belief that you asked me to throw mountains into the sea, and I do that for you. But I don't have much purpose in throwing mountains into the sea." I mean, how could this be greater than faith? Now, we'll have to get clear to the end of this chapter, which we will through the series of the service, to understand what he means by that, okay? Where faith and this love combine together, the love of God combine together. They combine. They're not opposites of each other. He's using once again the argument that, you know, I can show you my greatness by my faith. Okay. Or I can show you my greatness by my knowledge. Okay. And I can show you my greatness by I understand all the prophecies.

He says, okay, even if you do, if you don't have this, you haven't made it. You're not what God wants you to be. Are we supposed to have knowledge? Yes. Are we supposed to have faith? Yes. Once again, we have to go close to the end of the chapter to put it all together. But he's making a very important point here.

1 Corinthians 13:3 "And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor and though I give my body to be burned, but have not agapao, it profits me nothing."

Wait a minute, if I give all that I have to the poor, doesn't that prove that I love? Yes. But why are you doing it? Why are you giving all you have to the poor? Motives become very important in what we do here. Yes, we should give what we have to the poor, but, once again, he expands it out. What if I give everything to the poor? But if I'm doing it for the wrong purposes, to God, it means nothing. I mean, you know, if I give my body to be burned, what if I give myself up to be a martyr for God? Doesn't that prove who I am? Not if you're doing it to prove who you are. I mean, there are people who have pursued martyrdom or persecution in order to prove how great they are to God. And he says, if you're just doing that, then you're proving how great you are to everybody else. You haven't proved anything to God. You know, to truly be a martyr is because you've given yourself over to God and to the will of God, and you're going to be martyred because you won't compromise with the will of God.

To do so to prove how great you are, he says God's not impressed with that. So this thing of this Godly love, it's huge. And in no place in here does he use phileo, doesn't use it at all, or philia, or any of the other different philo, or all the different words that are used. He doesn't use any of those words here. They're all the same thing. He's talking here about this concept, and this is where he breaks this down even finer than John does. If we're going to use agape to mean the love of God, to mean a definition of God, the very essential morality, mental processes, emotional processes of God, then we've got to understand what that means when you break it down into we have to have it in our lives. And that's what he does for the next verse 4 all the way up to verse 10. We're going to have to tear apart all those bits and pieces of how this now breaks down and to how you and I are supposed to act towards other human beings. And that would mean inside the Church. It would mean inside our families. It would also mean our neighbor. Just everybody we come in contact with, how are we supposed to treat them? As a person created by God to be loved. Now, they may be messed up. And you know what's interesting, and we'll go through this and show, if you have the love of God towards somebody, sometimes you can't be their best friend. There's reasons you can't be their best friend, because you can't have that kind of relationship with them. You just can't. And if we have the love of God, eros becomes very narrowly defined. You just can't go out every Friday night and try to have a different eros experience. It doesn't work that way. All the other definitions of love become defined then by this one.

We’ve got a big job ahead of us, and it's going to take us weeks and weeks to do it. But one thing we have to stand up against, a Christian belief that's throughout so many Churches anymore, that love just means you feel good about other people. That's not what it is. Because you would never feel good about someone persecuting you. It's a whole different way of looking at life here. And we need to make sure that this doesn't die out in the Church because we have been called to learn this and to be examples of this. And we're not very good at it all the time. I'm not very good at it all the time. I know that. In fact, I almost didn't give this series of sermons because I started to look through it and I thought, "Man alive. I'm going to get and preach a bunch of things I'm not good at." Well, whether I'm good at it or not isn't the point. The point is what God says, and all of us have to learn it. All of us have to do it.

So, it's important, and we're going to spend the next number of weeks, however many weeks it takes, might take a break here and there to do something else, but we'll keep coming back to this till we finish this as we go through in depth 1 Corinthians 13. We do have the men's Discovering Biblical Manhood meeting tomorrow at 9:00. And for those that are involved in that, don't forget that. And then after services, we'll take about a 10-minute break. We'll go ahead and have the meeting. And then after the meeting, we'll go down and have some food.