A Love Like Jesus’

Good morning, Sacred Mission.

Morning.

Like Jenna said, I'm Scott O'Donohoe.

I'm one of the pastors at the Village Church down in good old Hamilton, Ohio.

It's a joy to be here.

Thank you for your hospitality.

Couldn't think of a better reason to fill this pulpit this morning than to give your elders some rest.

And so I'm glad they're out there able to be human for a couple of days together.

My hope this morning is that the word that we get to look at today and dig into will bring you all some rest as well.

We have a whopping seven verses to get through over the next few minutes.

There's a ton of stuff, though, to dig into.

And so here's the gist of what I want us to see and believe this morning that only the gospel lets us love the way that Jesus does.

That's our main idea today.

We'll break that down a couple of verses at a time.

Three points, classic, right?

All exploring what we need from Jesus in order to love like Jesus.

Sound good?

All right.

So uh we'll look at the first two verses in our passage this morning, verses 12 through 13 and John 15, and this is what Jesus says.

He says, This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.

Our first point today is this that in order to love like Jesus, we have to know his love ourselves.

Uh so the village actually went through the Gospel of John.

Took a couple years to go through that.

We finished that up last year, so it's kind of fun to come back and revisit uh this sweet book.

Uh I've been playing catch-up.

I've listened to the last few sermons here from Sacred Mission.

Your elders have done a great job of teeing up and walking through this thing so far.

And so where we are today, right now, specifically, uh, we are in the last week of Genesis, his final days before he dies.

And specifically this morning, we are in kind of this final conversation that he is having with his followers.

This is uh kind of what these seven verses are a part of.

Jesus' parting words to his disciples.

And everything that he said up to this point, he's been saying, so that they'll believe who he is when he's gone, so that they'll have peace when he is gone, so they'll bear fruit and prove to be his disciples when he's gone, so their joy will be full when he's gone.

That's what Jesus has been saying, and it's why he said what he has said, so that they will live their whole lives differently in light of his presence, even though soon he's going to be absent.

Jesus' words have weight.

He isn't trying to leave his followers with uh with good vibes before he goes.

He's saying things on purpose, with purpose, so that his disciples might live and move and have their very being anchored in who he really is, the Son of God and the Son of Man, even when he is not inside, even when the world has watched him die.

And today, what Jesus is saying, he's saying specifically, so that we will love one another.

That's the move.

All right, that that's the play is that when you leave this morning, you will be able and willing and wanting to love one another, even though Jesus isn't getting in the car with you, right, and going back to your house.

He's not going home with you, he's not going to the office with you, wherever you go, showing you how to do that.

He's not next to you, but he doesn't have to be.

A quick read of the text says, we just have to love like he would.

That's it.

Just look at his example.

And if and if we're not sure what that is, like at its peak, this love is laying down our lives for our friends.

Easy.

Right?

The application's right there.

The sermon just kind of preaches itself.

Take a bullet for your buddy, right, and and you're golden, right?

I don't think it's quite that simple.

If if you've shown up this morning hoping to become a better person, a more loving person, maybe you drug someone here with you this morning, hoping they become a more loving person in some way.

Jesus talks a lot, has a lot of good things to say about loving people.

But this command today, if we sit with it for just a minute, it should create in us a crisis of confidence.

Uh I'm sure most of us saw the footage from yesterday, Secret Service agents uh throwing themselves in front of former President Trump to shield him literally, like laying down their lives for him.

I don't know about you, that is not a thing that I have trained for, right?

That's not an opportunity I ever want to have or plan on having at any point in my life.

And yet, if that's true, how can I, how can I confidently interact and relate with this command if I don't ever do that?

How can I know that I'm I'm loving enough when there's not a life or death situation?

Normal life loving is hard enough.

There's a a bit of a crisis here in this passage, and there should be.

But fortunately for us, there are a few ways that we get to know the love that Jesus is talking about that can put our minds at ease.

And it begins not with us doing the loving, but with him, with knowing the love of Jesus for you.

The command that we read this morning is not to love one another as Jesus has loved someone else.

It's to love one another as he has loved who.

You.

Right?

The command is to love one another as Jesus has loved you.

Jesus was speaking, when he was saying these words, he was talking directly, personally to his disciples then, and his words are for us, his disciples, today.

And in order for his disciples to love like him, they had to know how he had loved them first.

Not generically, right?

Not just on a cosmic scale, for God so loved the world, but personally, for Jesus has loved you.

How have I loved you, James?

How have I loved you, John?

How have I loved you, Peter?

Love, love like that.

These guys aren't reciting Bible verses.

You know that.

Like they're recalling memories, moments with Jesus.

Jesus had just washed their feet a few minutes ago.

Every bit of dirt and mud and dung dried up and stuck between the bottom of their feet and the top of their sandals.

Right before this conversation started, Jesus got down on his knees and with his hands cleaned each one.

The disciples could look down at their feet and see how he had loved them.

In this bigger conversation, he has patiently answered their questions, comforted their worries, told them what to expect, taught them, confronted them.

Right, poor Peter, uh, who said he would lay his life down for Jesus.

Jesus just kindly told him, bro, like, that's really sweet, but in ten minutes, you're gonna not even pretend to know me, let alone want to lay your life down for me.

That's sweet, but I'm the one who lays his life down for you.

Whenever I sit down with dudes who are married or maybe gonna be married at some point, we talk about being a husband.

Uh, we get to Ephesians 5, uh, where Paul says the relationship between a husband and a wife is like the relationship between Jesus and the church.

And there's a bit of bravado that usually bubbles up when we get to the part where Paul says, Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

Dudes are like, dude, yeah, I'd do anything for her.

I would die for her, I'd give my life for her.

But then we get to the uh nourishing and cherishing part.

Paul says, Husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.

He who loves his wife loves himself.

For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we're members of his body.

Guys are a little uh usually less gung-ho about even what that means.

Those aren't scenes that you see in like movie trailers or whatever, uh, but it still sounds like nice Christian stuff, they're on board.

But then when I ask them the question, so tell me then, you're part of the church, right?

You're a member of Christ's body.

And so how is Jesus nourishing and cherishing you?

The way Jesus is loving you.

How will you love your wife that way?

And 99% of the time, guys can't even make something up, don't even have an answer for that anywhere.

And I'm not saying that's an easy question for anyone to answer off the top of their head.

Uh that's not usually the way we think about stuff.

And that's the point.

That's the point.

I'm not saying it's an easy question to answer, but the text says it is an important question for us to answer if we want to obey Jesus' command, to love one another as he has loved you.

You can't obey that command if you can't answer that question.

So, how has Jesus loved you?

This week.

This morning, on your your drive here today.

How is he loving you through your life right now?

And I I hope that there is scripture.

I hope there's stuff you're reciting in your brain, good theology and gospel running through your mind, but you also get to recall moments and memories, hopefully recent ones.

Like I hope you're mindful of how Jesus is nourishing and cherishing you in your needs, in your life right now as you abide in him, like Pastor Jordan talked about last week.

I I'm not asking you, Jesus isn't asking you to navel gaze, all right, this morning.

He's not asking you to sit around and think about how lovely and lovable you are.

I'm sure you're all very pleasant people, all right.

Uh, but the gospel is the declaration that Jesus loves us in spite of who we are, not because of who we are.

And that by definition is actually a greater love.

You could twist that if you want to, and people do into making it all about us.

But the gospel isn't about how lovable and indispensable you are, it's about how much greater and how gracious Jesus is, who loves us despite the dirt that we all drug in here with us today, despite all of our questions, despite our doubts, how naive and arrogant we are in some ways.

Before we go off trying to love like Jesus, Jesus himself is telling you, start with me.

Know my love for you first.

And maybe you're here this morning and you don't know what Jesus has done for you.

And that's fantastic.

Like we're glad that you're here this morning.

What you need to know is that Jesus is asking you to do something for someone else that he hasn't already done for you.

Long before you set foot in this building, long before you set foot on this planet, Jesus laid down his life for you.

And I don't mean he merely just died for you, he lived for you.

God in the flesh, he took on human nature.

He left heaven, he humbled himself and lived a full 30 plus years of human life, 2,000 years ago, fully God and fully man, loving God and loving man the way that we should, but never do.

We sin, right?

We selfish on our best days.

Like, dude, we navel gaze all day.

At our worst, we are just outright evil.

And for that, like justice served by God means judgment served against us.

And so Jesus not only loved and lived the way that we should, but he then died the way that we should, but don't have to anymore, because he let himself be put on trial and put to death for our sins under judgment, not just as an example for us to follow, not as some moral martyr who's willing to die for a just a good cause, but as a substitute for you, trading places with us, not in the courtroom of public opinion or in the Warren County courthouse or whatever, but but in the throne room of God where you can now stand, boldly, innocent, righteous, blameless, holy, a full member of God's family, a full citizen in God's kingdom, all because he laid his life down for you.

A life for life, his for yours, that you might live freely and fully forever, without the fear that sin, suffering, death, even Satan himself might have the last word, because that Jesus who lived and died for you also rose from the dead in victory over all of it, paving the way for your own personal resurrection.

Jesus' absence today with us in this room isn't because he's dead.

It's because he's alive and he is ruling and reigning right now at the hand of God.

This is how Jesus has loved all of us who by grace alone, through faith alone, believe that Jesus alone is our Savior and our King.

And it's how Jesus can still be loving us today.

He didn't stop loving us 2,000 years ago.

He didn't just love you that one time in that one way, way back then.

He is loving you now in a million ways through the presence and through the power of the Holy Spirit, through the comfort and the conviction of his word through the body of Christ.

And this is our call this morning to take stock of even just a fraction of that love so that we can love one another like Jesus, even when it's hard.

Which leads me to the next way that we get to know Jesus' love.

We get to know the love of Jesus from us.

Very simply, if if we're gonna love people like Jesus, it's life-giving.

We give our lives, which means Christ-like love is going to take life from you.

It's sacrificial.

It's not always fun.

It won't feel natural for you to love people in ways that Jesus wants you to, because in Christ we're dealing with supernatural love.

It's gonna come at a cost.

And not just in the big ways, but in probably more regularly, the really small, normal, everyday ones.

Again, husbands, future husbands, you might be willing to die for your wives.

Who cares if you're not willing to go to work or take out the trash or change a diaper every now and then, right?

However, you divide up the duty.

Surely, if dying isn't too high a price for your bride, then not letting the pots and pans soak in the sink overnight, quiet, uh in front, not leaving your socks around the house, all right?

These things are they should be chump change in comparison, right?

But the reality is, like, we can feel really good about saying we're willing to pay the highest price, take a bullet, throw ourselves in front of our family, and claim all that hypothetical stuff as sacrificial love, but without ever actually sacrificing a thing.

Hypothetical love is love never given and love never received.

Loving someone in your head, like in your imagination, that matters.

It really does.

Like we we get to love with our whole head and heart, mind, soul, strength, all that.

It's it's just that Jesus didn't love us only in his head.

Right?

He didn't love us hypothetically.

Christ wasn't just willing to die for us, he actually did.

And every single recorded moment of his life makes his death the least surprising thing ever.

For those of us who get to look back on history, because Jesus' way of sacrificial, life-giving love didn't just pop out of nowhere in the last few minutes of his life.

It marked every waking moment of his time with his people.

Loving like Jesus is gonna cost you like it cost him.

But when the love that's that's stuck in your head finally makes its way out of your hands, that's when love becomes real.

That's when you can have confidence that you are loving the one another's in your life and living as you were made and called like Jesus.

What love has been stirring in your mind or in your imagination that's just stuck there?

What is the cost that you have to be willing to pay in order to make it real?

A third way that we get to know Jesus' love this morning is this.

It's it's to know who it's to, the love of Jesus from us to one another.

Look, we get to love our enemies, right?

We get to love our neighbors, but Jesus commanded his disciples on this night is that they would love this little group of people that is in the room with him, right?

So very practically, sacred mission, you get to love the people in this room with you.

Love the people in your in your mission groups, right?

Love them well.

You don't have to love every other church.

You don't have to love everything you hear about every church in the news.

You don't have to love everything about this church, right?

You are freed from the search for the impossible church.

Because once again, the love of Jesus is a love that loves in spite of who you really are, right?

And in spite of who they really are, right?

Right now.

And that love comes at a cost, dying to preferences, showing mercy, being inconvenienced, being generous, not to make your own version of a perfect church, not to rack up points you can then cash in later in some way, uh, but but in the hopes of making the love of Jesus known here.

In this place, among this people, proving that the love of Jesus really didn't just show up once a couple thousand years ago, but continues to show even today, day after day, week after week, even through you, if you will choose to not overlook the people that he's given you to love on purpose, for purpose, which leads us to our next couple of verses we want to look at today.

Let's read 14 and 15.

Together, Jesus continues, You are my friends, if you do what I command you.

No longer do I call you servants, for the servant doesn't know what his master's doing, but I've called you friends.

For all that I've heard from my father, I've made known to you.

Our second point this morning is this that in order to love like Jesus, we have to know what his love is for.

Uh so my wife and I, we have uh five kids ranging from 13 to 7.

Uh if you're doing the math, don't worry, we had twins the second time around, all right.

So that kind of throws off the average uh a little bit there.

Uh and look, no one tells you how hard it is to be friends, to maintain friendships as an adult, but I forgot how hard friendships can be as a kid.

Uh in kindergarten, first grade, like my kids would come home and talk about some how some other kids like stopped being their friend that day because they were they were playing with some other kid, right?

If you don't play with me, like we're not gonna be friends anymore.

My kids would come home and they'd just be sad, and and I've never been in a physical altercation in my entire life.

I'm not a violent person, but I was ready to roll up on some four and five-year-olds, right, when I heard that.

Like, which one is she?

She's one with the the mermaids on her backpack or the unicorns.

Um but but when we hear Jesus say, I'll call you my friends, if you do what I say, we can inject that same kind of kindergarten pettiness into his words.

If you don't play my way, like we're not friends anymore.

And I I get it, but that's not what's that's not what's going on here.

I don't know how many of you would say you're friends with your boss or with somebody who has some kind of authority over you.

Uh you can be the best of buds, right?

That's totally fine, but it doesn't mean that they stop being your boss, right?

You still have a job to do, and they still sign your paycheck.

All right, that's how that still works.

The same thing is true for Jesus.

He doesn't stop being the disciple's teacher or their master just because he calls them friends.

They might be more than servants to him, which is what he's trying to say, but Jesus is no less their master, and he's no less our king, just because he might bestow upon us the honor of being his friend.

So, how we even define friend here might need a little polishing.

Because in Jesus' mind, it seems like what sets apart a friend from a servant isn't equal authority, but it's a shared purpose.

It's being in on the master plane, being in the know on all there is to know about what's going on.

This was true uh back in the day of masters and servants, patrons and clients, wealthy donors and grant recipients.

They may not smoke the same cigars, right, hit up the same spots, have the same hobbies or interests.

There might be a huge imbalance of power and authority in their life, but what made them friends wasn't being uniform in every possible way.

It was being informed and aligned around one common goal.

And Jesus, from the get-go, has been letting his disciples in on who the Father is and what he's all about and the work that has to be done.

And Jesus isn't withholding something uh here.

He's not threatening to take away something that belongs to his disciples.

Jesus has already given them access to heavenly things.

He's put them on the ground floor of his work for salvation.

And it's up to them as to whether or not they they want to enter into that kind of partnership, that kind of friendship.

And if they do, if they are his friends, then they will do what he said.

And what that all rolls up into is in this in this one command to love one another.

Which means something pretty significant.

It means that your love for one another, sacred mission, advances your heavenly father's purposes for you and for the other people in this room.

Listen, Christians don't love people to be nice.

All right, I my parents did a good job of teaching me manners.

I think I vividly remember reciting robotically whenever there was a uh an adult uh around, they said, Hi, how are you doing?

I would say, fine, thank you, how are you?

Just robotically, like Pavlov's dog.

They taught me to do that over and over again.

I held doors for minutes that seemed like hours, right?

Until the last person was gone or someone relieved me of duty.

I was dumped by girls because I was too nice.

All right.

There's nothing wrong with being nice, right?

Don't be jerks.

We shouldn't be jerks either.

What I'm telling you is that Jesus doesn't want you to love one another just to be nice.

He wants you to love one another because he loves all of us in this room.

And while he's not here, one of his primary ways of loving the people in this room, the person next to you, is for you to love them the way that he would if he was here right now.

You want to make it easy for the people in this room to answer the question how has Jesus been loving me?

Give them the answer yourself by letting Jesus love them tangibly here and now through you, head to hands.

That's his purpose.

And if you're his friend, then make his purpose yours in the way that you love people.

And maybe you're not washing dirty feet.

All right.

It's probably not what most of you are doing.

But you can watch, maybe wash dirty dishes, dishes, the ones that are still sitting in the sink, right?

Uh soaking for a while.

You can invite someone to coffee, send a text for no reason.

Ask people questions, answer people's questions, offer comfort, even when it feels awkward and you don't know the right words to say.

Go out of your way to encourage, be generous when it's inconvenient, confront a loved one gently and humbly.

Confess your own sin.

Repent.

Seek reconciliation.

Those are not nice, neat, polite things.

To some of us in the church, this might feel rude, right?

Invasive.

Hey, my faith is private.

All right?

Like you stay over here, I'll stay over here, and we'll just kind of like hang out together, all right?

Is that okay?

Or outside of the church, this can also feel rude.

Love is love.

Just let me be, right?

So long as you love me the way that I want to be loved.

But the kingdom's not private.

And we don't get to define love.

All right.

And that's not bad news.

That's actually good news because Jesus is building his kingdom that everybody is invited into by his love, which is greater than the cheap, self-serving, uh, selfish imitations that we try to come up with here in this life.

And so we are not talking mere manners here.

We're not trying to be nice.

We're trying to love boldly, expectantly, purposefully, because we're not just servants doing tasks and saying things because it's the polite thing to do in front of Jesus.

Instead, we get to partner with Jesus, the King who is the friend of sinners to build a people marked by love for one another, because he loved us first.

And that will always come at a cost.

Which leads us into our last couple verses this morning.

If you will read 16 and 17 with me, Jesus continues.

These things I command you so that you will love one another.

Our third and final point this morning is this that in order to love like Jesus, we have to have what his love takes.

Years and years ago, I worked for a nonprofit in Hamilton as a grant writer.

I wrote grant proposals for other nonprofits in Butler County.

Uh and I wrote those two foundations outside of Butler County to bring money in to fund shelters and after-school programs and all kinds of stuff.

Uh, and I did to keep track of my hours that I worked, uh, every block of time that I spent on a particular project because my my job was paid for also by a foundation, and they weren't trying to pay me to do whatever, to answer the phone or check the mail or whatever.

Like they were paying me for the very specific purpose of writing grants.

They had a mission, and they only wanted to fund that mission.

Fair enough.

Now, I am not an administrative person.

All right, like I I'm not a spreadsheets guy, that is, that is my wife.

All right, I'm terrible at keeping keeping track of anything.

And so the end of the month would come and I would be like like pulling random notes that I have from different places and looking back at my calendar, basically doing a forensic investigation of my own life over the last four weeks to figure out what I had even been doing for the last month, and I would then send it in.

And it made it way more stressful than it had to be.

That's my fault.

But one thing I didn't have to worry about was whether or not I would get paid.

It didn't matter if I'd poured my heart and soul into a project and it turned out to be a dead end.

Or if I pulled in a decent chunk of change for someone.

If my time and energy were spent working towards the mission, their mission, they would fund it.

I I wasn't friends with the foundation, like, you know, go out for happy hour or whatever, but in the eyes of Jesus, there was this boss, employee, patron, client, friendship rooted in a shared purpose.

And whatever I needed to do to move that purpose forward, they would pay, right?

They'd fund it.

That level of confidence that we'll have what we need to do what we need to do is how I want you to hear these final few words of Jesus today.

Love, Christ-like, cruciform, life-giving love comes at a cost.

It can take a toll on you.

You might know that going into it.

Or you might not know it until you're on the other side of it.

Some of you, I hope, are maybe this morning thinking about real relationships that you have or real opportunities in your life where God is calling you to love more deeply or to keep loving deeply, but you may not know if your love really matters.

If it's being received.

You might not know where to begin, uh, the right words to say where you're gonna find the time, the risk that it has to take to make yourself vulnerable again, open to being rejected, afraid to pour your heart and soul, not into a project, but into a person, only to feel like you've hit a dead end.

Been there?

Done that, doing that, it's life.

If you find yourself here this morning, or maybe you have a friend who's in a place like that, Jesus' words here should be medicine for the soul.

Because what love takes, God gives.

Where there's uncertainty, he gives assurance.

And Jesus gives it to us in three ways this morning.

Where love takes, Jesus gives us an assurance of his decision.

Specifically, his decision to choose you to be his disciple.

The disciples uh weren't walking around looking for Jesus before they met.

They didn't update their resume and tailor their cover letter to convince Jesus they were qualified to follow in his footsteps.

Jesus was the one who saw them and sought them out and called them to follow.

The same thing is true for us.

It doesn't matter if you Googled a church to find or to check out, however, you found your way into this building this morning.

The only reason you're here is that the Father and the Son and the Spirit has orchestrated your attendance today.

And if you're a believer, your story didn't begin with you choosing God.

It began with God blowing your mind and reviving your heart and making you alive with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Rest assured, you did not connive your way into the kingdom.

None of us in here are that smart.

You're not a phony.

You're not an imposter.

You you might think when loving feels hard that if you are a real Christian, like it'd be easier.

That that's not how that works, that's not how this works.

Right?

You might think that if you if you really belonged, you'd be making bigger waves for Jesus by the way that you're loving people.

We read in Acts that 3,000 people came to know Jesus in one day.

We don't know who 2,995 of those people were.

We just don't.

And so look, when the cost of love makes you question your qualifications for the kingdom, it is sobering to remember that what you're questioning is Jesus' decision to bring you aboard in the first place.

But I promise that Jesus knew what he was doing.

He knows what he's doing now, right?

And in his kingdom, he doesn't call the qualified, he qualifies the called.

Secondly, where love takes, Jesus gives us an assurance of our fruit.

Not only uh that we're gonna bear fruit, but but that that fruit is gonna abide, it's gonna stick around.

Like, but we can't love.

We can't love expecting Garden of Eden level results.

Right?

Years ago, my wife and I put in a garden in our backyard, looking pretty good, went away for a weekend, and then what happened while we were gone is we came back, the remnants of a hurricane like we had this past week swept through southwest Ohio, and everything was flat, right?

The garden was just flattened, everything except the zucchini, which I hate.

It was the worst harvest ever.

Uh, and it just kept growing.

We just kept getting more zucchini.

Likewise, we love, we we pour ourselves out with the hope of yielding a certain harvest, right?

We picture it in our head.

Like what it looks like, how the people that we love like Jesus will finally breathe a little more deeply.

They'll live a little more freely, they will trust Jesus a little more tightly because of the way that we've loved them, but that doesn't always happen.

It rarely pans out the way we think.

So the world's under a curse, right?

Eden has weeds, hurricanes happen.

Which doesn't mean our work in Christ is cursed.

It just means we've got to love sowing seeds more than seeing results.

Our fruit isn't results.

I'm gonna say that again.

The fruit that Jesus promises isn't the results of your love.

The fruit that Jesus promises is the love that Jesus produces in you, that you offer others in hope that God might do something marvelous with it in their life.

You will bear fruit if you abide in him.

And your love itself will abide because of him.

It's not gonna rot on the vine.

No love that you have ever shown in Christ will ever be worthless or wasted, no matter what you have or haven't seen happen in your lifetime.

Your job isn't to make people enjoy the fruit of Jesus, it's to bear it.

So that if and when God goes to work in their life, there is something of the love of Jesus in front of them, right there to see and to stir them towards the Lord.

So love, regardless of results, and rest assured that it won't go to waste.

And lastly, where love takes, Jesus gives an assurance of the Father's faithfulness for us.

You can ask God for whatever you want.

Can.

But not everything you ask for is something that He will give you, uh, unless you're asking for all that you need to love the people around you.

That's what Jesus is saying here.

It's a big deal.

And look, you can ask him to make loving easier for you.

You can ask him for that.

You can ask him for results.

You should ask him for results.

Pray for whatever the Holy Spirit lets you imagine life looking like, what friends and family might look like, what the city might look like in the wake of Jesus' love from you to your brothers and sisters in this room.

Just don't confuse those things with what you actually need to love people.

Do you know what you need to love people?

You don't need people to be different.

You don't need your circumstances to change.

You don't need to know that it's definitely going to go well.

You don't need a few more minutes to figure out what you're gonna say.

You don't need one more book, one more podcast, one more blog.

As helpful as those things can be, what you need, what you literally can't love without, is the assurance of what you already have.

What you can't lose, and what won't ever change, no matter what you think of yourself, no matter what might happen, the faithful love of Jesus.

That he can use that love to change hearts, to reconcile relationships, that love that can lay dormant for decades in the most stubborn of hearts and suddenly can burst forth at a moment's notice from the Lord.

And it's that love that came to you first, so that you wouldn't have to walk around laying down your life for other people as if no one has done the same for you, as if you don't live right now by the very life of another.

Jesus.

If you know the love of Jesus this morning, you don't need to walk around like you are spiritually bankrupt, unloved, as if in your prayers you're you're turning in timesheets, wondering if God's gonna pay out.

Because in the gospel, God's already prepared every good work of love that you will ever do before you ever stumble upon it, and every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places is already yours before you even ask.

What do you think that you need in order to love that maybe is just a want?

And what do you actually need that you already have in Christ?

So we've come full circle this morning in a command that comes from Jesus.

We are moved to a confidence that comes only from Jesus.

He hasn't called us to lay down our lives like martyrs for some cause that we believe in greatly, but that never gave us anything.

That is not Christian love.

Even if in the story that you're telling yourself about your life, no one else loves you.

If you're hungry for love in all your relationships, Jesus has loved you first.

We get to receive that.

We get to live in light of that, and we get to lay our lives down in that love.

And we get to ask the Lord every day for an even bigger vision of his love for us in Christ.

God, help me see it for what it really is.

Show me again what it looks like.

So even if I don't know the perfect words, know the perfect strategy, even if I'm tired and don't want to get burned again, I might be ever more able and willing and wanting to love my brothers and sisters because I have known your perfect love for me, and I want them to know it too.

He's not going to say no to that prayer, because he's already said yes to it and to you and the gospel.

And he will remind you of that, even in his absence, by the Spirit that is in you and among us this morning, by the people that are around you, through the love that you share with one another, and by his word that he speaks over you, that he's speaking over you right now, and that we get to sit under today the gospel.

Only the gospel lets us love the way that Jesus does.

Because Jesus is our gospel.

So if you would, we get to pray like that right now.

Would you join me in prayer?