You Might Be a Healthy Christian If... Your Love is Worth Giving Away

Everyone loves love, right? We all like that ooshy-gooshy feeling.

We just kind of feel like that. I don't know. The first time you ever fell in

love with somebody, what did you feel like?

Scared? Happy?

Only person in the world to you. What happens when you are not with her or him?

Do you ever get that really deep pit in your stomach that just like,

man, you can't stand not being with that person.

And there's this emptiness that you have in it. So everyone loves love.

We want to be loved and we want to give love.

The problem is our love is lacking just like we are.

It's often conditional upon our own mood or our loved one's actions,

appearance, or even attitudes.

If our loved one has kind of a sad attitude that day, it takes us down, doesn't it?

When it comes to love, all of us fall a little bit short, don't we?

But some of us are as confused about love as the little five-year-old Carrie

was when she told her teacher this.

Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cologne,

and they go out and smell each other.

We're in a sermon series titled, You Might Be a Healthy Christian If.

During the first week, the sermon was, You Might Be a Healthy Christian If You

Pray Continuously, Even When Times Are Good.

On the second Sunday of our series last week, we looked at, You Might Be a Healthy

Christian If Worship Is More Than a Sunday Feeling.

This morning, we're going to look at being a healthy Christian by giving our love away.

You might be a healthy Christian if your love is worth giving away.

The question before us today is, how do we develop and nurture a love worth giving away?

The answer, of course, can be found in God's Word looking at the life of Jesus.

And so we're going to read from John chapter 15, verses 9 through 17.

John 15:9–17

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.

Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love just

as I have kept my Father's commands and remain in His love.

I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.

My command is this, love each other as I have loved you.

Greater love has no one than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends.

You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants because

the servant does not know his master's business.

Instead, I have called you friends.

For everything that I learned from my Father, I have made known to you.

You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go

and bear fruit, fruit that will last, and so that whatever you ask in my name,

the Father will give you.

This is my command. Love each other.

Jesus had a lot to say about love. and his final night with his followers was no exception.

During the course of that evening, which we see here recorded,

starting in actually chapter 13 of John and carried on through chapter 17 in

what is known as the high priestly prayer,

Jesus uses the L word no less than 30 times in 18 different verses.

Now, if we think of the L word today, people think of another word for that,

but we're talking about love.

It doesn't take a Bible scholar to see that love means a lot to Jesus,

and that this was his central message to his disciples.

So zeroing in on this brief excerpt from the evening that Jesus was preparing for his crucifixion,

it will reveal to us how Jesus felt about a love worth giving away.

And so the first thing that we see in this is we are to receive the love of Christ.

Jesus knew that the time for him to leave this world had come.

He knew that the time he had left with his disciples was very short.

There wasn't going to be much longer for him to be with them,

and he knew that was coming, and he wanted to spend that time showing them the full extent of his love.

He says, I have loved you even as the Father has loved me. Live within my love.

And he loves us too. So here we see that not only must we give love away,

but we can't give love away if we don't have love, and we receive his love, first of all.

Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

Little ones to him belong. They are weak, but he is strong.

And Jesus tells us that we are to love with the love that he has given us. We know that song.

In fact, maybe we should sing that right now. How about that?

Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

Little ones to him belong. They are weak, but he is strong.

Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me.

Yes, Jesus loves me. The Bible tells me so.

You know what the origin of that song, have you ever heard the origin of that song?

It first appeared in the form of a poem in a children's novel written by Anna Warner in 1859.

One of the characters in the story comforts a dying child with the words.

Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

A couple years later, William Bradbury stumbled across that poem,

wrote his own tune to it, and added a chorus.

And within months, the melody spread across North America like wildfire.

A simple poem from an obscure novel became the most well-known Christian song

in the world. If you were to go anywhere in the world, in whatever language

they are speaking, that song is known wherever you go.

In Africa, Indonesia, and China, wherever you go, that song is known in whatever

that language is. Jesus loves me.

This I know, for the Bible tells me so.

It's been translated into more languages than any other song.

The simple song has become so universally known and loved because it expresses

the single most significant and profound truth throughout all humanity.

Jesus loves me, and Jesus loves you.

Three years of seminary and a Master's of Divinity degree won't teach you anything

more significant about this one simple song that is sung throughout the world.

Accepting the love of Jesus and living in that love every day is the first and

most essential step in having a love worth giving.

Again, we cannot give away love if we don't have love.

Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

Jesus explains it this way, I am the vine, you are the branches.

Those who remain in me and I in them will produce much fruit,

for apart from me you can do nothing.

In other words, as we draw closer to Christ and stay connected to him,

he funnels his love into our hearts, pouring his love out onto us,

only then will we have a love worth giving because his love is the only perfect

pure love this world has ever known.

To men, love is a mushy-gushy thing, so much so that they're almost repulsed by it.

What macho man would be all gushy and mushy with his love?

And yet, Christ's love is characterized by sacrifice.

There is no greater love than this, that one lays down his life for one's friends.

I'm going to tell this story, and I don't know if this guy remembers it or not,

but I do, because I've got it in my sermon. It's right here.

There is a guy that I grew up with. He was my best friend growing up.

His name is Terry Hillasham.

Terry and I were the same age in the same class in elementary school,

and I could tell you all the girls that he loved and lost, but I won't.

And in Sunday school class together, we were in Sunday school class.

We even were together even tormenting the same girls at Spencer Lake,

Wisconsin, right, Terry?

Terry and I were inseparable as friends in Richland Center.

Early on, we became blood brothers, and I don't know if he remembers this,

but we were on a rock outcropping that he actually owns the land now,

a rock outcropping up on the hill behind his father's house.

We were high above the city of Richland Center, and as I've said before,

we were waiting for Russia to make a move, and we would bomb them with rocks.

We committed to each other as elementary school friends that we would always be there for each other.

We cut the palms of our hands and held them together and became blood brothers

on that rock outcropping up on top of the hill behind Terry's house.

We were joined together in blood, and that's just what Jesus did.

To Jesus, the word love was not a feeling as much as it was an action.

Love is a verb. Love is worth giving away.

Jesus didn't become our blood brother by cutting his palm and clasping it into

ours, but by pouring his blood out on the cross of Calvary to take the punishment for our sin.

Christ's love is not a harlequin romance kind of love.

Love is not just something Jesus wrote about or that the song sings about as we sing it.

It's something that Jesus did.

Jesus loves me, this I know. and we can receive Christ's love.

Every one of us can accept the wonderful, undeniable truth that Jesus loves

you and you can draw close to him, allowing him to pour his love into your heart.

That's the first step in obtaining a love worth giving is to open yourself up

and allow Christ's love to fill you with him.

The second step to return your love is to return your love to Jesus.

In Jesus' day, the rabbis' disciples were generally known as his servants.

They were the ones who followed him around. He taught them by showing them what

he did, and he changed their lives. But Jesus changed the way that rabbis usually did.

He says, you are my friends if you do what I command. In other words, you're not my servants.

You're not my slaves. You are my friends if you do what I command you.

I no longer call you servants because a servant does not know what his master

is doing, but I call you friends because I have made known to you everything I heard from my Father.

In our relationship with God, Jesus promotes us from being a servant to being a friend.

In the song we sing about being joint heirs with Jesus as we travel this sod,

it begs of us, what kind of friend of Jesus are we?

Are we returning his love, the love that he poured out on us?

It's one thing to say, Jesus loves me. It's a whole other thing to say, I love Jesus.

That spells out a complete surrender, an absolute friendship,

a joining with him, a following of him, pouring ourselves out to him.

I wonder how many of us can say that with a complete understanding of what that

implies. Can you say that? Do you love Jesus?

Is your love for him reflected in how you live your life?

Is it reflected in what you do more than what you say?

Many people call themselves Christians, but you might be a healthy Christian

if your love is worth giving away.

We will never be able to love the people that God has put into our lives if

we don't start by loving God himself.

I love him because he first loved me. Jesus said that the first and greatest

commandment is this, love the Lord your God with all of your heart,

with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.

And then he goes on to say the second commandment is like under it,

love your neighbor as yourself.

Our love for God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit must be the driving

force in our lives, must be everything to us.

When we talk about prayer, it must be all the time, continually.

When we talk about worship, it must be all the time, continually.

When we talk about loving Jesus and loving others, it must be all the time.

Continually. So how does reciprocating God's love manifest itself in practical ways?

Well, I would say it's not too difficult from any other or different from any

other love relationships.

Our love with Christ and with others is built on trust, communication,

and adoration, and time spent together. We cannot have a trust in God unless we spend time with him.

You know and trust somebody by how much you know of them when you spend time with them.

In other words, through faith, prayer, and worship.

The thing about loving Jesus, though, is that our love for him needs to be all-consuming.

When I fell in love with Nancy, I thought about her constantly while eating

breakfast, at work, waiting in line at the grocery store, pumping gas.

I couldn't stop thinking about that woman.

I wanted to be with her all the time, and by constantly thinking about her,

wondering what she was doing or how she was feeling, I was abiding in my life

for her and her love for me.

In fact, there was one time that I lived in Edgerton, Minnesota,

and she was in Pipestone, Minnesota, about 30 minutes apart.

And we had met at a Christian Bible study, and there was one night she called me up.

She was moving into a new apartment, a house that she and her roommate were going into.

And there was one night she called me up, and she said, I hear footsteps upstairs,

and there's nobody else here. So what do you think I did?

Okay, call the police, have them come over and check. Are you kidding me?

I jumped in my Chevy Love pickup, and I drove over to Pipestone,

Minnesota as fast as I could.

In fact, I got stopped going into Pipestone because I was driving so fast.

And the cop says, where are you going in such a hurry?

And I said, my girlfriend heard footsteps upstairs in her house,

and I'm going to see that everything's okay.

Now, any good cop would say, well, I'll go check it out for you, right? Right.

What he said is, okay, just slow it down a little bit.

But anyway, so I wanted to be with her all the time, and I was her knight in shining armor.

I was going to save her from the dreaded footsteps, because everybody knows

that footsteps can be terrifying, right?

But that's essentially what it means to love the Lord your God with all of your

heart, soul, mind, and strength, and abide in his love for you.

We want to spend all of our time, 24-7, all consumed in Christ's love.

Do we do that 24-7? Do we spend 24-7 thinking about the love of Christ in us

and the love of Christ for us and the love of Christ through us to others?

This goes right along with what Paul says in Romans 12, verse 2.

Romans 12:2

He says, loving Jesus means to take your everyday, ordinary life,

you're sleeping, you're eating, you're going to work, you're walking around

life, and place it before God as an offering. That's the message version.

In the International Verses, it talks about making yourself a living sacrifice.

Holy and pleasing to God in everything that we do.

So now as we continue to receive and return God's love, there's a third ingredient

that completes the recipe, responding in God's love to others,

and that is to give the love of God away.

Respond in God's love to others by giving him his love to them.

We don't rent it to them. We don't sell it to them. We give it away.

We give our love to others.

Well, now Jesus has gone from preaching to meddling. Does he know who my neighbors are?

He wouldn't say that if he knew the people that I had to live around.

He wouldn't say that if he knew who I had to work with.

Does he really know what I have to deal with on a day-by-day basis?

He says, well, yeah, I think he does. I think Jesus went through a lot of things,

more than we could ever imagine.

And Scripture says, and yet he was without sin.

I don't know about you, but mercy is not one of my highest spiritual gifts.

And sometimes, deep down, I get the feeling that I want to go a little Pentecostal

with God's love and lay hands on some people hard and fast.

Get a life. But repeatedly throughout this passage and the rest of this chapter,

Jesus said, this is my command, love each other.

And once we've received the love of Jesus into our lives and returned his love

to him, then we're called upon to respond to Christ's love by sharing his love with everyone else.

Let me say that again. By sharing his love with only those who are lovable.

Wait a minute, nope, nope. What? But sharing his love with everyone.

Jesus was pretty specific about how we should love people.

He said, my command is this, love each other as I have loved you.

And Jesus' love for his disciples was not some sort of Hollywood sort of kumbaya affair.

Didn't say, sit around the fire and sing some choruses together.

Jesus showed his love by giving himself up.

And when he told us what the greatest thing was, it was for us to take up the cross and follow him.

This commandment knocks the walls out of any definition that would limit the

scope and intensity of love.

We are to love others as Christ loves us.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is not about some church-going Samaritan who

happens to know all the love of Jesus.

This is a man who was the outcast of all around, and he was the one that showed

love to the injured traveler.

When our non-believing friends and neighbors show more love than we do,

we've got something wrong.

In this political season, when we don't show love, we've got something wrong.

At another time, when Jesus was teaching about loving God with all of his heart,

soul, mind, and strength, as I said, he told that story about the good Samaritan.

And he said, who is this man's neighbor?

And they responded, the one who helped the wayward traveler,

the injured traveler, is the one who lived out the love of God,

even without professing it. He lived it out.

And in telling the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus was revealing something about himself.

He had come to a people who hated him so that he might show them the extreme

sacrifice of love and dying for them.

And now, just hours before issuing this comprehensive command,

Jesus demonstrated his love for his disciples.

The spring showers would have most likely turned the Palestinian dirt into thick

sludge, possibly several inches deep.

Country roads and even the city streets would have been caked in mud,

mud which would have oozed into the open-toed sandals of the disciples as they walked.

And so it was customary for a homeowner's servant to use a basin of water and

a clean towel to wash the dirty feet of everybody who entered the house before they sat down to dinner.

And as the disciples reached the upper room, they probably spotted the towel

and water basin easily enough, but there were apparently no servants around.

So while the rest of them gathered around the door and around the table,

tracking mud through the house, Jesus prepared to do something wonderful.

The Bible said he rose from the table, took off his outer garment.

Tied a towel around his waist, and then he poured water into a wash basin and

began to wash the disciples' feet one at a time, drying them with the towel around his waist.

Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, got on his knees in front of his disciples,

his followers, and washed their filthy Palestinian feet.

It's almost too much to believe, but it's even more amazing when we realize

that this was not only a demonstration of humility and service,

but a demonstration of unrelenting love.

Jesus was putting himself lower than those who followed him,

took on the very nature of a man becoming a servant and becoming obedient to death.

Greater love has no one than this, that he laid down his life for a friend.

And Jesus said, and I have called you friend.

Philippians 2, verses 5 through 17, which I read before, your attitude should

Philippians 2:5–17

be the very same as that of Christ Jesus, who being in very nature God,

did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing.

Taking the very nature of a servant, he became, who was made in human likeness,

and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death,

even the worst of all kinds of death, death on a cross.

Meaning he was a criminal or implied to be.

Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that was above every name,

that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under

the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

And as we seek to grow in our capacity love, to have a love truth truly worth giving,

we need to consider a love that reveals itself in action a love that surrenders

and sacrifices and serves, a love that dies to self and to others.

Paul said, I die to self daily.

So that by all means, some might be saved.

I believe that Jesus wants his church more than anything else to become a community

that is consumed with a love for God and for others.

We need to be a church where others will be able to come here and immediately

experience the love of Christ, especially as lived out by us.

Everyone needs to be accepted in our community.

First, they need to belong. Then they learn to believe. and then they can learn to behave.

Every person in this community of believers and every person in this community

of Richland Center needs to be so overwhelmed with the presence of God's presence

and his compassion for others that we cannot help but exude his love into the life of others.

Our thoughts and actions outside of this place should be so filled with the

Spirit of God that people will observe how we live and wonder what's with us.

Oh, wait a minute. They'll wonder who's with us.

And they'll know we are Christians by our love.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day that we come to worship you and we

give you thanks for this time.

We pray, Father, that you would help us to be healthy Christians in our prayer

life, in our worship life, and in our love life, love for others.

And help us to know that there are people that may not seem lovable,

but they are still created by you and in your image, and we need to help them

be restored to relationship with you by complete and absolute love.

In Jesus' name, amen.