How Does Love Grow? | Scott Newman | Part 1 of 1

And a welcome if you're watching online or on demand at a later point in time.

As we get started this morning, I want to invite us to do a little exercise together.

So I'm going to invite us to close our eyes if it feels safe to do so.

Um and don't worry, we're not gonna, you know, no jump scares or surprises or things like that.

So with your eyes closed, just invite you to take a few deep breaths to settle your heart, settle your mind.

And then when you feel ready, I want to invite you to imagine what would your life look like if your every action, your every intention, your every motivation was driven by love.

What would your family life look like?

What would your friendships look like?

What would your workplaces look like?

And now I invite you to zoom out a little bit and imagine not just your own personal life, but the world around us.

Our community, our country, the world.

What would it look like if love was the guiding force behind our life together as human beings?

Take a moment, let your mind wander as you imagine what kind of world that would be, what it would look like.

And then when you're ready, you can open your eyes.

Now, maybe some of you had a hard time imagining that kind of life or that world because it feels so foreign to the world that we actually live in, right?

It's hard to even have an imagination for what a world shaped by love might even look like.

Others of you, I'm sure, were able to see difficult relationships mended, challenging projects made smoother by harmony in relationships, or more security in your life if your if your life was marked and shaped more deeply by love.

Some of you were able to imagine a world without wars, a world with much less suffering, a world that's not marked by things like racism or white supremacy, a world where people don't dominate or exclude each other, a world where people care about each other and want to see everyone else taken care of as well.

What's hard about exercises like this is that when we go from dreaming about what our lives might look like if the world looked more loving, and then we return to our lives and the world as it is, it can feel like this big letdown.

Am I right?

Like, oh my gosh, we are so far away from that.

Because it goes without saying that love isn't the driving force behind the people or the nations or the organizations that are shaping our world as it exists right now.

And while most of us would would like to be loving people, we we try our best to be loving people.

We generally think that we're trying our best.

But if we're honest, we're also painfully aware of how far short of our ideals we often fall.

I think back to the early days of my relationship with with my wife, Katie, and when we were dating, and in the early days of marriage, it was all, you know, strong emotions and all you need is love, and love will get us through, you know, all the things.

And then pretty quickly, it's like you realize, like, oh, I'm I'm doing these things to prefer myself.

I'm doing these things that are actually, you know, pretty selfish and not really loving on the surface of it.

And so we have these big ideals, and pretty quickly we have to recognize and acknowledge that we don't always live up to it.

So, what do we do with this?

Because it often feels at best mysterious or at worst impossible to grow as loving people.

But here's the thing, and I think we all acknowledge this: nothing is more important for our future and the future of our world.

So that's the question for us this morning.

How does love grow?

How do we grow as loving people?

How do we contribute to a world that is more and more and more shaped by love?

It's a question that's central to following Jesus because the Christian life, the Christian vision is quite literally all about love.

So, what I hope that we can discover together here this morning is that love grows as we experience God's love, especially in practices like silence and solitude.

So, this morning we're going to be looking at a passage from the first letter of John.

Now, John was one of Jesus' 12 original disciples.

And even within that group of the 12, John was one of Jesus' closest friends during his time on earth, his life.

So, all that to say, he knew he knew a little something about Jesus and what it means to follow him.

So he wrote this letter to a group of churches in the first century about what it means and looks like, not just to say that you're a Christian, but to actually follow in the way of Jesus.

And surprise, surprise, love is actually really central to following Jesus, the way John sees it.

So we're going to be looking at 1 John chapter 4, verses 16 through 21.

1 John 4:16–21

You can follow along on the screen, or if you prefer, you can close your eyes and just listen along as I read it right now.

This is 1 John 4, starting in verse 16.

John writes, God is love.

Whoever lives in love lives in God and God in them.

This is how love is made complete among us, so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment.

In this world, we are like Jesus.

There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment.

The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

We love because he first loved us.

Whoever claims to love God and yet hates a brother or sister is a liar.

For whoever does not love their brother or sister, whom they have not seen, cannot, or whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen.

And he has given us this command anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister.

So what's going on here?

Big picture, what John is saying is that the God that we worship, the God that we believe created everything and came near us in the person of Jesus is a God of love and compassion.

And God's desire for all of us is that we would participate in God's own life of love.

And as a result of that, become more loving people in the world ourselves.

And we know for a fact that this is happening because we stop being defined by things like fear and performance and achievement, and we start loving others the same way that God has loved us in Jesus.

Now that's the big picture, but there's so much more to dig into and unpack here.

So let's break it down even further.

And so we got to start with how love is the reason for everything.

Love is, if you're wondering, love is the ultimate reason for everything.

John tells us that God is love.

And it's really telling because he doesn't say that God is loving, he says that God is love, which is the same thing as saying that love is God.

So if you've ever been unsure, then I want you to know this morning, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that at the heart of the universe is love.

God is love itself and has so much of it that he can't help but spill out into the created world and things that God loves very, very much.

So one of the greatest practitioners of love in the history of the Jesus movement was a man named Ignatius of Loyola about 500 years ago.

And in a paraphrase of what he called his first principle and foundation, Ignatius said this.

Because that is what we're made for.

And the reason that we know all of this is because God came close to us in all of our brokenness and all of our suffering and all of our pain came close to us in the person of Jesus and revealed that God is ultimately a God of love and compassion.

Listen to how the Apostle Paul puts it in in Romans chapter 5, verses 6 through 8.

Romans 5:6–8

Paul says, For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.

Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die.

But God proves his love for us in this that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

So God is so committed to us experiencing love and overflowing with that love ourselves that God came near to us even when we were fully walking away from him.

And in Jesus, God died so that death and sin and brokenness and suffering could all be defeated, so that you and I could experience love forever.

Thomas Merton, who was a writer in the last century, summed this up really beautifully about 60 years ago when he wrote this.

He says, To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence.

For God is love.

Love is my true character.

Love is my name.

Now, all of this sounds really amazing, and it is.

It's the best news there could ever be.

And it's the birthright of every single human being.

But then we have to stop and ask ourselves if God is love and we were created and redeemed in love to be caught up in God's life and experience that love and overflow with it, then the question we have to ask is why don't we love well?

Why isn't love shaping our lives and the world around us more?

And I think there's obviously a lot to unpack with that, but I think central, one of the biggest things that impacts that is that we live in a world that's dominated by fear and by shame.

I mean, think about fear.

Because I think many of us, if not all of us, if we're honest with ourselves, how much of what you and I do on a daily basis is driven by fear.

We're afraid of what people might think of us.

We're afraid of not having enough.

We're afraid that what little we have might be taken away from us.

Or if you don't believe me, just think about how much fear has driven the world of politics.

I mean, it's always been the case that people have used fear as a tool to gain more power for themselves, right?

But think about just how much of the political messaging over the last decade or so has been preying on our fears, right?

Fears of people who are different.

Fears that nameless someone's, I don't know, wants to come and take your guns or your money.

Fears that unless you vote for a specific candidate, that democracy will end.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that there aren't scary things in the world or that scary things haven't happened or even are still happening right now.

But when someone takes the scariness of the world and leverages it and stokes our fears, makes us more afraid in order to get more power for themselves, that's not a good sign.

That's not good for us or the world.

And it leaves us more afraid, more burnt out, and less able to love.

And that's ultimately how in things like injustice take root, when we're more motivated by fear than by love.

Then the groups with more power and control in the world will almost always end up harming those groups with less power, all in an effort to try to keep themselves safe.

I mean, it makes sense, it's understandable, but that's how bad things happen.

So that's fear.

But then we're also formed by a culture of achievement that tells us that we're only worth what we're able to accomplish.

And this preys on our shame.

We have so many voices, internal and external, telling us that we're not enough, that we don't have what it takes to make it in the world.

And so, how do we tend to respond?

Well, in our culture at least, the main way that we respond is overwork.

If I'm afraid that I'm not enough, then I'm gonna exhaust myself trying to prove myself through my accomplishments, through my earnings, through my relationships, through my possessions, that I'm enough.

Maybe if I can gather enough, then I'll be okay.

But the problem is, as I think most of us know, at least at some level, that this just ends up chewing us up and spitting us out.

It doesn't leave us in a better place.

So rates of anxiety and mental health challenges are skyrocketing, and it's due not only, but in large part, to the culture that we've created, where we imagine that we have to prove ourselves.

And so we're forever running, terrified that if we stop, those voices telling us that we're not enough are gonna catch up to us, or even worse, that they're gonna end up being right.

That's what we're scared of.

And the problem with this is that the focus is all on me.

How do I avoid feeling shame?

How do I prove that I'm enough?

And usually that means that I need to tear someone else down so that they're not there to threaten my sense of worth or my advancement in the world.

So, how do we grow in love?

Remember, love is the core of our identity as human beings.

So it's less adding on to what we already are, and it's much more subtracting all of the extras that have just sort of accumulated and piled on to our identities and our lives as we as we as we've lived on the earth.

So it's subtracting those things and returning to the purity and the simplicity of who we've always been.

Created by God in love.

You don't need one more thing to add to your already crammed schedule.

You need permission, you need encouragement to take time away and discover that when we allow ourselves to stop, when we're able to drop everything that previously gave us a sense of worth and identity, that we find that we're already as loved as we could possibly be, without having to earn or do anything for it.

So let's talk about how love drives these things out fear and then shame.

John tells us in verse 18 of our passage this morning that perfect love drives out fear.

So into a world that's terrified of everything different, everything that threatens our grasp on things that make us feel steady in a chaotic world, Jesus comes and he offers us a perfect love, a love that always has been, a love that always will be, that never fades or dims, even when we're running away from it at breakneck speed.

Love is always there.

And here's something I gotta acknowledge as a pastor.

In general, the church has done a really poor job of helping people know and experience this perfect love.

Why do I say that?

Well, look at how fearful we are as a Christian culture.

We're terrified of the world around us.

Growing up in Christian culture, I was terrified because people told me to be terrified that secular culture, whatever that means, was going to end up hating Christians to the point that we were going to be persecuted, and our rights, our livelihoods, and maybe even our lives were going to be taken away from us.

And we were so scared of these things happening that what happened?

We ended up becoming the very thing that we were afraid of.

And Christians, unfortunately, not across the board, but in many cases, have often been the ones persecuting others, taking away others' rights, livelihoods, and sometimes even to our shame, people's lives.

So why are we so fearful?

Why are we so scared?

Well, we've been discipled into it.

In the evangelical movement that I come from, and many of us come from, what ends up happening is that we end up bringing people to faith through fear.

See, we paint these scary pictures of eternal torment.

And because really, to be honest, who who wants to be tormented for all eternity?

So many people, including many of us, sort of come to faith as a way to ensure that they never have to face God's wrath or anger or torment for all eternity.

And I mean, who would want to in their right mind?

But what's the problem with this?

The problem is that this is never, ever where the Bible brings us.

John shows us this morning that our faith should be about embracing a vision of a God who is love itself, a God who will never stop loving us, who can't do anything but love us.

And yes, God loves us so much and respects the image of God in us so much that sometimes God will allow us to live with the consequences of our decisions.

Paul makes it clear that that's what oftentimes gets called the wrath of God, is really just the consequences of our own bad decisions.

But love, pure and perfect and mature love, is the beautiful thing that's supposed to attract us to Jesus.

Not fear of a divine torture chamber for all eternity.

So when we finally come to know and experience this God, the God who loves us and came near to us, to our woundedness and brokenness in Jesus, the God who died so that we could live, it begins to dissipate the fear that drives so much of our lives.

So then invites us to stop achieving as well.

Love invites us to stop achieving.

That this means that we can stop the rat race of our lives.

Now, I get that we have jobs that we need to provide for our families.

We all exist in a system that's really, really broken because it's fed by continual increasing consumption.

And if that doesn't happen, then everything falls apart.

And that system is destroying not only us, but our planet as well.

And alone, we can't change that system.

Sometimes we have to find ways to survive within it.

But what we can do, and what Jesus offers us this morning, is resist that culture of achievement by intentionally allowing ourselves to stop and to experience God's voice of love, especially through practices like silence and solitude.

So I want to tell us this morning about uh a group of men and women called the early church, uh, the desert mothers and fathers of the early church.

So they lived about 1,500 years ago, and this was a really interesting time in history because the the Roman Empire, which had given uh, which was brutal, but had given so much stability to the known world, Europe, North Africa, Asia, Middle East, uh, was beginning to crumble and fall apart.

So things were not looking good.

At the same time, recently, um Christianity had become the official religion of the world of uh of the Roman Empire.

It became the state sanctioned religion.

And so what happened is that rapidly, Christians who went from being a persecuted minority where it really cost something to follow Jesus, now it didn't cost anything.

And it actually increased your social standing if you were a part of the church.

And so all kinds of people that had never been a part of the Christian community were now joining it.

And so these women and men in that culture where things were starting to break down when following Jesus didn't have any real cost, said, We want to escape from all of this and find a way to actually follow Jesus and experience his love for us.

So what they did was they went out into the desert in Egypt.

Some of them lived alone as hermits, some of them lived together in communities.

This was the beginning of what we call monasticism, monks and nuns and things like that.

But it was the radical way of saying we want to follow Jesus.

We want to get away from the noise, from the culture that is telling us that we have to continue to be busy, from the culture that says, just show up and it's okay.

We want to experience the love of Jesus.

And so what they did was they worked a little bit, but they spent most of their days in silence and solitude, listening to the voice of Jesus.

And what they discovered was that as they listened to the voice of Jesus in silence and solitude, they began to see the lies that fear was telling them, that they didn't actually have to fear so much of what the culture and the world around them said they needed to fear.

And they discovered that their worth wasn't defined any longer by what they produced, that they had worth and value simply because they were alive and breathing.

So pausing and practicing silence and solitude on a regular basis helps us experience how loved we are by God without needing to do anything.

And one of the crazy things about the desert mothers and fathers was that even though they went out into the wilderness, and if you read the stories of their lives, I mean, they said and did some crazy things.

So I'm not saying we need to just go off and become like them or we need to leave the world and, you know, go become monks and nuns and stuff like that.

But what happened was that they gained such a reputation for godliness and wisdom that people would come from all over the world, all over the Roman Empire, to meet them, to talk with them, to seek their wisdom.

And so it actually became sort of unintentionally this really missional activity that they did, where they got to influence people in really high places simply because they went out and listened to the voice of God and experienced his love.

So I want to invite us this morning to a practice of silence and solitude.

This doesn't mean that we all need to go out into the desert, that we all need to leave our jobs or anything like that.

It can be simple.

It can start with as little as five minutes a day to simply pause and to spend five minutes not being productive, not needing to do something to prop up our sense of identity or our worth or our value, simply allowing the voice of God to remind us that we are loved just as we are.

And in that silence and in that solitude, that's where love grows.

Because it reveals how false our fears are, that they're constantly lying to us.

And it reveals that we never needed to perform or achieve in order to be loved or to be someone in this world.

We discover that we already have all of God's love that we can handle and more simply because God created us.

And when we're secure in that love, when we make space in our lives to experience the fullness of God's love for us that's ours without having to achieve anything, then that love can't help but overflow outwards towards others.

And this is how God's love changes the world.

That love spills over to our neighbors.

And this is what John talks about, where he says, we cannot love God and hate our neighbor or hate our brother and sister.

Ignatius, who I mentioned earlier, he has two really key observations about love and what it means to love our neighbor.

He said, first, that we see love more in our actions than our words.

It's all good to have loving words and to have loving intentions, but what matters is what we do with them.

Are we showing love to our neighbors and how we live with them?

And the second observation is that love always wants to extend towards other people for their benefit.

Love is always seeking the benefit of other people.

So when we've sat in and experienced the love of God, we begin to then overflow with that love into the world.

Where John says that in the world we are like Jesus.

People literally see Jesus through our lives when his love is overflowing out of our lives and in the ways that we act towards other people.

So in the same way that God loves everyone, we will increasingly love everyone, especially, and this is where it gets hard, especially those people that we would rather not love.

So I want you to imagine right now, you can close your eyes or you can leave them open, but imagine a group of people in your mind that you have a hard time loving.

Could be an individual in your life, could be a whole group of people, could be people that you see on online or on the news or whatever.

Imagine that people.

What does God's love for them look like?

What might God's love expressed through you to them look like?

A real love, not just in words or thoughts and prayers, but in actions, and in a real willingness on our part to extend ourselves for their sake and for their benefit.

What would that look like?

Now, of course, I want to invite us this week to pause, to practice silence and solitude, to become aware of those places in our lives where we can show love to individuals or even groups of people.

But I want us to imagine, I want to dream together for a second.

What would happen if if our whole church, Santa Cruz Bible, or even better, all the churches became known as places that showed that kind of inclusive love?

Not to the people that we think are worthy of it, but to the people simply because they exist, simply because, like us, they were created of love, from love, and for love.

How would the world look different?

I think the world would look very different.

It wouldn't change the fact that there are bad actors out there, it wouldn't change the fact that there are scary things happening in the world, but to know that there are millions, maybe even billions of people all over the world that are committed to God's love overflowing from their lives, how much good could we do?

How much would it look like heaven come down to earth if we live that way?

As we close today, I want to offer us one final practice, and that's the practice of communion.

Now, communion is something that we do on a, on a, uh twice a month here at Santa Cruz Bible.

It's uh it's it's we call it a sacrament.

It's a way for us to experience the presence of Jesus through sort of a ritualized meal.

We all we're all going to get a little piece of bread and a cup of juice in a second, and it's a reminder of Jesus' last supper with his disciples.

And around that table, Jesus invited his disciples to come and experience not just a little cup of juice or a little piece of bread, but those were symbols of Jesus' own love and Jesus' own life flowing into us.

Because we have to acknowledge that apart from God's love, like John says, we love because he first loved us.

So without his love flowing into our lives, we have nothing to offer ourselves or the world around us.

And so this morning, Jesus invites us to his table to receive the resources and the nourishment that we need to be those people.

Because gathered around a table is where Jesus so often met with people, where he could see people face to face and listen to their stories and share their laughter.

And so today, metaphorically, we're gathered around a table, the table of Jesus, because this is where he has promised to be for those who want to meet him.

So I invite you this morning, accept Jesus' invitation and feel welcome at this table, no matter who you are, because Jesus Christ, who here offers us a foretaste of eternal life, invites you to be his guests.

So in a moment, the worship team is gonna come and they're gonna lead us in a final song.

And when you're ready, there's three tables around the room, two on the sides, one in the back.

When you're ready, you can go and receive the communion elements, a little piece of bread and a little cup of juice.

Take them to your seat and hold on to them because we're gonna receive those together after the song is done.

But I invite you, you uh you can either sing along with the words to the song, or you can sit and reflect and practice a moment of silence and solitude and receive the voice of God confirming just how loved you are, just how much God loves you.

So let's pray as the worship team comes to lead us in our closing song.

So, holy three, we thank you for Jesus, who was born among us incognito, who grew up without privilege or status, who walked the way to heaven through the back streets of the world, who told the deepest truths in ordinary language, who touched and healed, blessed and disturbed without fear or favor, who showed inclusive love in all its unconditional glory, and who for all this was crucified, died, and was buried, and who for all this and for all of us rose again, who, though high in heaven, is present with us here and now.

So, God beyond holiness, as we do what Jesus once did, let your spirit move among us to settle on this bread and this cup, that they may become for us our true spiritual food.

And let that same spirit stir our souls so that as we share this sacrament, we may recognize our Lord and receive him, that he may be in us and we in him forever.

Amen.