Paul's Prayer: Abounding Love

Amen.

Well, good morning, Sacred Mission.

My name is Justin.

I'm one of the pastors here, and what a joy it is to be able to bring God's word to you this morning as we kick off the Advent season.

For some of you who may not know, a lot of times during like the Christmas season, we kind of get stuck in this like Ricky Bobby phase, right?

Have you ever watched Talda Igonites?

I'm sure you have, you just don't want to admit it, but that's fine.

There's this scene where they're praying around a table and he loves baby Jesus.

He wants to talk to baby Jesus.

That's the one he likes the best, right?

And so we kind of get stuck in that where we just look at baby Jesus around Christmas time.

Uh and the reality is Advent was not just created for us to look back at little baby Jesus.

Advent is actually created so that our hearts might look forward and long for Christ the King to return in all of his sovereign power and glory, right?

When he first came, he came as an infant out of the womb of a virgin, swaddled in a manger.

When he comes back for his church, he will be on the back of a horse with a tattoo on his thigh, a sword out of his mouth, fire in his eyes.

It's a very different reality of Christ as he comes to uh fully redeem us as his church.

And so over this Advent season, we're going to look back some, but more we're going to try and look forward so that we as the church can have hearts that long for Christ's return.

And so even when we sing a song like we just did, right?

Come thou long expected Jesus.

How many of you thought back to like a scene of a manger and and you know farm animals around all?

You're kind of thinking like that way.

When we sing that song, we should be thinking the other way.

Come thou long, expect to just come for your church as you have promised that you would in your second advent that we are waiting for.

And so hopefully that creates some of the songs we sing as more worshipful to you.

Uh more something we're looking forward to, not reflecting back on as well.

So we're kicking off this sermon series called Prayers of Promise.

And we're gonna look at four specific prayers throughout the scriptures that talk about uh Christ and our relationship with him.

And uh what we're gonna do is something kind of unique.

We have uh the joyous privilege of being a part of a network of church planting churches called Acts 29.

It's a global network of about uh 800 plus churches, but here in kind of greater Cincinnati, there's a handful of us.

And so we are gonna partner with other Acts 29 churches to have their pastors come and preach here, and I'm gonna preach there.

We're gonna kind of circle around so you're gonna get to hear some voices of other Acts 29 churches, similar DNA, uh like-mindedness, and what the gospel is and how we uh uh actually cause it to go into culture and create transformation and change.

And so we really hope that you'll be blessed by that.

Uh, next week you're gonna have Pastor Aaron Simpson from Freedom House Ministries come here and preach.

Week after that, Michael Graham from the village church will be here, and then I get to close us back up on December 18th as we install uh Jared Martin as our next elder uh in his ordination, which we're excited about.

So we got a lot to celebrate this Advent season.

But this morning we're looking at a prayer from a guy named Paul.

Paul was an apostle, and he planted a lot of churches.

He was one who led the church uh in seeing the gospel really take over uh what we today call Asia Minor.

And so they uh we see like modern-day Turkey, uh parts of Macedonia, so forth, all this region where the gospel started to take root and transform culture.

Paul was a significant person in that movement.

And he's writing in this letter to a church at a place called Philippi.

And this letter uh talks about how much uh gratitude he has for this church, how thankful that he is.

In fact, when we start to really open up and we look at this first five verses of this letter, verses one through five, what we see is that Paul had a joy-filled gospel partnership with the church at Philippi.

A joy-filled gospel partnership with the church at Philippi.

He says in verse one, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi with the overseers and deacons.

This is who he's writing to.

And he, very traditional way of which he writes his letters, he he greets them with grace and peace.

He says, Grace and peace to you through Christ our Lord.

Grace is this unmerited favor uh that we receive from God.

It's nothing that we earn because because we lived our life properly or something that we deserve because we've made the right choices in life.

Grace is a free gift given to us by God that is uh that that allows us to obtain his favor and blessing.

But then he says, peace.

Peace is the product of grace.

Because we were at war with God in our natural state, our heart was bent toward warring against God.

We were enemies of him.

In fact, we we see that there was an issue of enmity that we had between us and our creator.

But because we have been receivers of grace, God did not conquer us in the way that we understand modern warfare, right?

Where they come and they destroy their enemies and they take over their land.

No, God conquers us by extending to us grace, and we are experiencers of his love and his mercy, and through that, he turns enemies into sons and daughters.

And so grace and peace, Paul is reminding them of this reality in this introduction of the letter.

But he gives us a reason for his gratitude.

If we look at verse three, he says, I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all, making my prayer with joy.

And he gives us the reason, because, verse five, of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now.

The way that the Philippian church partnered with Paul in the gospel brought him immense joy and filled his heart with gratitude.

And this wasn't actually normal for Paul.

Usually when Paul's writing an epistle, he's he's kind of angry, right?

He he corrects them, he disciplines them.

We'll give you a taste of what a normal kind of introductory of a letter from Paul looks like when he wrote to the church at Galatia.

In Galatians 1 6, he says, I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.

That's just the intro.

Galatians gets way worse, right?

He says some things that like you really don't even want to say in front of your children to the church at Galatia because he's correcting them and he takes the gospel eternally seriously.

But here, with the church of Philippi, he finds sincere thankfulness in his heart.

Because for Paul, this was a joy-filled gospel partnership.

But then he goes on, and he kind of helps us understand some of the content of what she's going to be writing in this letter.

And he we see in verses six through nine that Paul has a confidence in Christ's work and their fruit.

Confidence in Christ's work and their fruit.

Verse 1, he says this.

He says, and I am sure of this.

What Paul's communicating is that he is fully persuaded of a certain outcome.

Right?

He has confidence in this reality, that, he goes on, he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

This is what Paul is fully persuaded of.

What he is putting all of his confidence into is that Christ Jesus, who began a good work in the church at Philippi and the saints there, will actually see it to completion.

That's kind of something that we're talking about this morning is this image of completion, this idea of completion, a completed work.

We uh uh co-planted a church around 11 years ago in uh the urban core of Cincinnati.

And for most of that 11 years, we were inside this giant art studio space.

It was about a hundred, some thousand square feet full of artists.

And uh through my time there, I got to meet a lot of the artists and I got to see them in their work.

And every single one of them, if they were painters or sculptors, they started with some kind of blank canvas, right?

They had nothing in front of them.

And then all of a sudden they started the process of this pursuit of completion.

And all throughout this process, it was messy, right?

There was times I would walk into a studio and I start talking to them and they have like a rough sketch laid out, and I'm like, man, this is gonna, this is not gonna be a good painting.

I can tell you that right now.

You couldn't really make out what it was.

It was real rough, it just had some geometric shapes and lines and stuff.

Then they might start adding color to it, and you're like, oh, okay, that might turn out all right, but I still don't, you know, it's like still rough.

But then we would have these things called art walks.

And art walks was when the artist showed off their completed image.

And man, sometimes, uh not not like every artist in this building was great.

I don't want you to think that we were sitting in like some kind of a museum of fine art and they were just amazing.

Some of them were not that great.

Some of them were amazing.

And when you saw that completed image, you were just you're you were just taken back by, I did not see that this could be the image of completion that you saw in your mind.

Paul's helping us to try to understand this nature of completion, this image of completion here.

Because he says, He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ when he returns in his second advent.

What's awesome about this is that the source of our righteousness is also the author of righteousness for the believer.

Christ is our righteousness.

He is the one who perfectly obeyed the will of the Father, who fulfilled every aspect of his law and statutes, and he obtained for himself the fullness of righteousness that God demands.

And by grace, we receive that righteousness.

And so in our salvation, Jesus begins this good work, and the beginning reality of that good work is that he imputes, he gives to us the righteousness that he obtained in his own perfect work.

But we're still messy.

We don't look like the final completed image yet.

We're in this process of sanctification, but our trust, our confidence is not in how good we are, how much we obey, or how well we do at really listening to what God has us to do.

No, our confidence, like Paul, is in Christ first and foremost, because he who began the good work is he, Paul is confident that he will complete it in you.

The author of Hebrews says it this way in chapter 12, verse 2, uh quoting from the NASB translation, he says, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

Even in that passage right there, the author of Hebrews is letting us see something.

It's a confidence in Christ's completion.

And it's not just in the language that Jesus is the author and finisher of our faith.

It's in the language that he sat down.

Christ was able to sit down at the right hand of the Father because his work was completed.

And Paul, knowing that, is able to create this real sense of confidence that he will surely even complete in us all that he has set forth to.

Paul gives us, though, a reason, not just in Christ, but also in the church of Philippi as to why he is persuaded of this truth.

We see this in verse 7.

It is right for me to feel this way about you all.

Feel what way?

That he is confident that he who began a good work in you will see it to completion.

It's right for me to feel this way about you all because I hold you in my heart, for you are all partakers with me of grace.

Partakers with him in grace.

Grace is not just the origin of our salvation, it is also the reality of us being carried through in our sanctification also.

Paul had a confidence that in its primary reality was rooted in Christ, but it was evidenced and seen in the fruit of the church.

If Paul didn't have both of those things, I believe that he would not be so easily persuaded to have such confidence.

A tree without fruit, the Bible says is to be cut down and tossed into the fire.

In Jesus' earthly ministry, he actually walks by a fig tree that's not bearing fruit in the season that it's supposed to, and he curses it, and it withers.

And it was a portrait, an image of what it looks like for us to say that we are Christians, that we love Jesus, that we trust in his gospel, that we follow after him, but we have no fruit in our lives to show evidence of it.

Paul saw the reality of these two harmonies, Christ's sovereign work and the faithful fruit of the church.

And this provided sure evidence for Paul that Jesus was both working in them and would finish the work that he started.

He goes on to say in verse 8, for God is my witness how I yearn for you all with affection of Christ Jesus.

This confidence gives Paul a deep and genuine affection for the church at Philippi, a confidence founded first by Christ's work and supported by their fruit.

But in verses 9 through 11, we come to the prayer of Paul.

And this is really the core of the message this morning.

And what we see in 9 through 11 is a prayer for the image of completion.

A prayer for the image of completion.

You probably don't make a habit of thinking about your mortality or finiteness.

I'd imagine most of us don't just sit there and ponder on that daily.

Maybe some of you do, right?

And I think there's a health to actually doing that.

I think Paul was someone who thought about the reality of his mortality, who thought about the truth that he was a finite person.

And I think that Paul was a person who contemplated and reflected on the reality of what was awaiting him in glory.

Do you ever think about like what will it be like?

What will you look like in this completion, this day of Christ Jesus our Lord?

Paul is going to help us understand what we might appear to be, what we might look like.

And he does this through this prayer.

Paul girds his confidence with a prayer for the believers at Philippi.

And he does it for this reason.

His prayer is this, that your love may abound more and more with knowledge in all discernment.

This is the first part of his prayer.

That here, while we are on this earth, living out the Christian life of which we have been called into by grace, he prays that our love would abound more and more with knowledge in all discernment.

The love that Paul is talking about is this agape love.

And throughout other sermons, we've talked a lot about what this love means.

But for some of you who might be new, we'll review what agape love.

The Bible knows multiple different types of love, right?

It would not understand the way that we say we love our spouse and we love certain foods, right?

It wouldn't understand those as the same type of love.

We only have one word, but the Bible has uh multiple words to try to explain these differences of loves.

This agape love is what we're called to as believers in Christ.

And here's what it means.

Here's our functioning definition for agape love.

The steady intention of the will to another's highest good.

The steady intention of the will to another's highest good.

This is the love that Paul is praying would abound more and more in our life.

Not a love that's both that's based off emotion, whether you feel it today or you don't feel it today.

Not a love that's circumstantial on what's going on in your life or what you're experiencing or trials that you're going through.

It's a love not based on anything that would sway it to change.

And that's the beauty of God's love for us.

God's love for us is not circumstantial, it's not emotional.

There's nothing that sways it to change because God's love for us is the very substance of his will, that he sets his love on us out of the intention of his will for what?

For our highest good.

What is our highest good?

But him.

God's purpose in loving us out of the intention of his will is that we would have all of him.

Because in him, in worshiping him, in obeying him, in following his law, and adoring him, in serving him, and being in relationship with him, we actually are able to obtain the highest good we could ever imagine or dream.

This is the love that God wants us to put on others.

A will, a willful love, an intentional love that seeks the highest good of the people we place it upon.

But Paul says something very interesting in this prayer.

He says that your love may abound more and more.

We might get that part pretty easily, but he says, with knowledge and all discernment.

With knowledge and all discernment.

Here's what I want to submit to us this morning: that there's two perspectives we could hold when we look at this uh language of with knowledge and all discernment.

So I want your love to grow more and more with knowledge and all discernment.

Perspective one is that knowledge and discernment are actually the agent that causes that love to grow.

It's the source that causes love to grow within us.

Imagine something being filled with something, right?

If you have a kind of empty ball and you have to fill it with there so that it might grow, right?

This is what we would look at as the first perspective that knowledge and discernment are the agents of growth for that love to actually abound more and more.

The second perspective is that with determines accompaniment.

It's something that is necessary to make that love complete or whole.

So I pray that your love would abound more and more with, accompanied by knowledge and all discernment.

Because by itself, love is somehow incomplete.

Either perspective instates knowledge and discernment as critical to the love that we are called to have.

Our love into perfection of which it's called to.

Imagine it this way.

Many of you have probably experienced in your life really immature boys, right?

Have you ever experienced really immature boys?

Yeah, some of you are really immature boys.

That's fine.

There's time for you to grow up.

But here's what happens.

What happens when a boy grows into the stature of a man, but he fails to mature into what a man is called to be?

You might have the growth, but you don't have the maturity, right?

You don't have the completion of that.

Knowledge and discernment are working hand in hand to both grow our love in a way that it's supposed to abound, but also to mature our love into the complete love that God has called us to.

And what's the purpose of this?

Love abounding more and more with all knowledge and discernment.

Paul goes on to say, so that you may approve what is excellent.

Approve what is excellent.

Approve means to affirm something, or it can also mean to hold fast something.

And excellent speaks about these values that assert a difference.

So we are to hold fast these things that which make us different.

Ultimately, it's the things of God, his will, his law, his truth.

These things of God create this difference in us, and a love that is abounding more and more with knowledge and all discernment allows or permits us to hold fast to the things of God.

Paul uses this language of approve what is excellent in another letter that he writes to the church at Rome.

And in Romans chapter 2, verses 17 through 20, we'll see how this approving what is excellent is rooted in knowledge and understanding.

Romans 2:17–20

He says this, but if you call yourself a Jew and rely on what?

The law and boast in God and know his will and approve what is excellent.

Why?

Because you are instructed from the law.

So how are they able to claim that they can approve what is excellent?

Because their origin of knowledge from God.

And if you are sure that you yourself are a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of children, having in the law the embodiment of what?

Knowledge and truth.

Paul is helping us to understand that our love will both grow and mature so that we might hold fast to the things of God through knowledge and truth and all discernment.

Knowledge and all discernment.

And here at the end of verse 11, we come to the climax of this prayer.

Actually, the end of 10 and through 11, he says this here's the outcome.

And so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the praise of God.

This is the image of completion.

The image of completion is that we would be filled with the fruit of righteousness.

The righteousness that Christ gives us in our salvation, the righteousness that he's working through us and in us in our sanctification will be filled with the fullness of fruit of righteousness at his return.

Paul is praying to this end.

And he's revealing for us a pathway to that image of completion.

And so for us, what I want us to understand this morning is we need to, as a church body, hold fast to the excellencies of God through a growing and matured love.

Hold fast to the excellencies of God through a growing and matured love.

This is the pathway to the image of completion Paul is praying toward.

Completion at the day of Jesus' glorious return.

That we would be filled with the fruit of righteousness.

That he who began a good work in you will complete it in us.

In the epistle of 1 John, the apostle writes about what it will look like for us when Christ returns.

In 1 John chapter 3, verse 2, he says, Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared.

1 John 3:2

But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him because we shall see him as he is.

We shall be like Christ, righteous, the fullness of righteousness.

This is our aim and endeavor, even in this life.

We, until that time, we don't just sit idly by doing nothing, right?

We we work to that end in this process of sanctification.

We have to find this harmony of prayer and dependence and us getting to work and seeing actually cultivated in our lives the truth of what we're putting our faith behind.

We talked about this a little bit.

I think Psalm 127 helps to really understand this kind of divine relationship between prayer or faith and our work.

In the beginning of Psalm 127, King Solomon writes this phrase.

He says, Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.

What's he communicating?

First thing he's communicating is if we don't have complete dependence on God, anything that we would do in this life is vanity.

We have to have a complete and utter dependence upon God.

And I think we talk about this at sacred mission a lot.

I think prayer is one of the simplest ways we can communicate a dependence upon God.

It's really saying, God, we need you to move.

We need you to do something, we need you to work a miracle in our life.

But the second part of that phrase in Psalm 127, he says, those who build it labor in vain.

What the psalmist isn't saying is that unless the Lord builds the house and we just sit on our hands, it's vanity.

What he's saying is if we are going to get to work in the ways that we are supposed to, we have to work from a place of complete dependence upon God.

Prayer and action are not at war with one another.

When we actually act on the things we pray for, we are communicating in our very behavior a deep and relentless trust in the God we just prayed to.

Like he's actually gonna do it.

Or that he's actually gonna see that happen in our life.

We don't just pray and then say, well, God, if you're gonna do something, you're gonna have to force me up and you know, work me like a weekend at Bernie's to do what you want me to do.

No, we put action behind the very things we pray for because that action says yes and amen to the God we just prayed to.

This is the reality of the Christian's life of sanctification.

And in this pathway, Paul reveals to us what this image of completion looks like through this simple prayer.

We can break this prayer down into three simple things.

What do we need as people?

Well, we're praying for our love to abound more and more with knowledge and all discernment.

What will that produce?

Well, that will produce so that we might approve or hold fast what is excellent, the things of God.

So that we might experience what?

So that you might be pure and blameless for the day of Christ Jesus filled with the fruit of righteousness.

The completed image Paul is praying toward is Christ's finished work in us.

He who began a good work, Paul is so fully persuaded that he will complete it, that he even goes as far as to pray out the very image it will look like.

The fullness of the work that Christ began in us by grace.

So our work in the process is to work with God to see our love grow and mature.

And in this, we hold fast to the excellencies of God.

But many of us we struggle with this.

And I think that we struggle with this from two different perspectives.

Some of us we abound in love without knowledge or discernment.

We abound in love without knowledge or discernment.

Uh, some of you in this room are this way, right?

And I'm the complete opposite.

So I'm the other guy that I'm gonna pick on in just a few moments.

But for you who wear your heart on your sleeve, you just love everybody.

You just get hurt and hurt and hurt because you are so reckless with how you love people.

You're generous, you're gracious, you want to see everyone just feel loved and you want to make sure everybody feels accepted and is included.

I just can't understand you people.

But hey, again, I've got my faults, we're coming to them.

Many of us struggle to even understand where knowledge and discernment have a place in loving others.

You might think that as we understand knowledge and discernment, as we gain truth, it actually inhibits our ability to love others in the way that we desire to.

Don't you see that kind of happening in our culture?

There's people who want to love other people so desperately.

And here's what they see: they see the truth, the knowledge of the excellencies of God coming forth and saying, hey, we're not, the Bible never says don't love them.

The Bible says use knowledge and discernment in your relationship with them, how you seek to love them, so that you actually love them rightly in the way that God has called us to.

Yet for us, we actually see that as something that inhibits our ability to love them.

So what do we do?

We cast off knowledge and all discernment in this false pursuit of loving other people.

We actually operate in a love that is very foolish.

Our hearts and our heads are too disconnected.

Some of us, you probably experienced foolish young love.

Did anybody ever date someone that everybody else told you not to?

Right?

You're probably sitting next to them.

Right?

That's true of both Katie and me.

I was an idiot in every sense of the word.

And everybody, Katie's young, foolish love was just placed on me for some reason.

And everybody said, Don't do that.

That's foolishness.

They tried to speak knowledge and discernment into my wife's heart.

Now, God is bigger than young, foolish love, praise God.

Uh, but here is something that happened.

If I think, I think if this didn't happen, if the Lord didn't use my father-in-law, I think I would have ended up tremendously hurting Katie because of how much of an idiot and a fool I was.

My father-in-law spoke knowledge and discernment to me.

He he picked up the phone one day and told me that this love was foolish because of me.

And he told me the ways in which it would look like for me to be a man that would actually have the right to take his daughter's hand in marriage.

He didn't, he, he, he spoke into my life that which would mature me so that this love that we shared would no longer be foolish, but proper, holy, righteous.

You see, we need knowledge and discernment to actually love rightly.

Many of us we lack discernment in our pursuit of love because we don't realize that knowledge is the very thing that fosters discernment in our life.

The more that we know, the more able we are to discern.

Let me tell you something.

Here's what big media banks on every single day.

Big media banks on your absence of knowledge.

Because they know that when you don't have knowledge, they can feed you any headline they want to, and you have no ability to discern truth from air.

That's what their whole industry is built off of.

The lack of knowledge, the inability to discern.

And what do we do?

We think we're actually loving each other better, but somehow there's a lot more anger and rage and hatred fostered in our hearts over this.

The Bible is trying to help us understand.

Paul's prayer is trying to help us understand that the love that we actually desire to grow more and more must be grown through and matured by knowledge and discernment.

We need a love matured in truth.

Some of us, though, we abound in knowledge and discernment without love.

This is me.

Cold, heartless, right?

Knowledge without love is prideful, the Bible says.

You probably know these people, and if um uh if you're one of them, hey, we got a lot of humility to take on here soon.

But you typically probably judge a lot.

You probably think these kind of thoughts.

Well, it if they just made these decisions and if they just took these actions, their life would be a lot better than it is right now.

You're probably more greedy and less generous.

You probably lack a lot of empathy for other people.

You're probably pretty cold when it comes to those who are down and out.

We lack empathy.

We take a posture that they need to help themselves.

And we probably find some type of history in our life that we believed we had to help ourselves to get to the place we are now.

And so, because you didn't get a handout, because you didn't have grace extended to you, because you didn't have generosity lavished on you to help you get up in life, why should you give it out to someone else?

We're very logical thinkers, and the ways that they could actually improve their circumstance, we are all ahead and very little heart.

You see, we need truth that's saturated in love.

Many of us we struggle with this because fundamentally we forget that we are saved by grace and grace alone.

We forget the truth and beauty of the gospel, and this causes this love to grow cold, chilled by knowledge.

But you are where you are because of grace.

There's no choice that you made, no action that you took that got you to be in such blessed favor with the Father.

It was grace and grace alone.

And when we understand the gospel rightly, when we understand grace in the way that it's supposed to, you who made potentially every right decision in your life to see the success that you are partaking in now are in the same place as the person who are in the gutter of the streets at the lowest valley they've ever imagined.

Grace is what got us here.

Grace and grace alone.

You see, we aren't called to love foolishly or be filled with cold knowledge.

We are called to love in a way that is rooted in the radical love and glorious truth of the gospel.

Because it's the gospel alone that cultivates this agape love that we are called to have for others.

Because we've experienced God's love through radical grace, we love others through the grace we have received.

And the reality is, both of us, whether you're you're a foolish love person or a cold knowledge person, in our pursuit of this love that the Bible calls us to, we're gonna keep messing up.

It's messy, and we're not gonna do it perfect from here on out.

We might strive, but we're gonna fail.

We're gonna hurt people, we're gonna be cold to people, we're gonna, in our attempts to love people, love them wrongly.

But the good news is not in how good we do from here on out.

The good news is in this that Jesus completes the good work he started.

Jesus completes the good work he started.

This image of completion, filled with the fruit of righteousness, is not completely dependent on you.

It's dependent on him.

Paul's confidence was completely in Christ.

Now that confidence was assured, that confidence had evidence that gave some type of weight to it in the fruit that he was seeing in that church, but his confidence was in Christ alone, that he who began a good work would see it to completion.

Philippians 1, 6.

And I am sure of this.

I am fully persuaded that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

This is our hope.

We are saved by grace.

We are partakers and benefactors of grace and grace alone.

And it is that grace, it is that truth of the gospel, that should cause us to love better.

Love in a way that is grown and matured by knowledge and discernment.

So my hope for us, Sacred Mission, is that our love would grow and mature with knowledge and discernment.

Think about this.

Foolish love people, right?

You you you've loved people in efforts to try and love them the way that you understand love?

That actually created harm.

Have you have you you don't have to raise your hand, but have you ever experienced that in your life where you tried to love someone in this way and it actually hurt instead of helped?

Isn't the knowledge of the truth of the gospel the best way we could actually love any person in this world?

But how many times in foolish love have we concealed or dismissed the knowledge of the truth of the gospel in an effort to love them?

That's foolish love.

That's love that actually doesn't love the other individual.

And how many of us have also dismissed the gospel or placed, rejected it outright for a works-based message that has no real hope on the other side of it because we're filled with cold knowledge.

Well, if you just do this, if you just pick yourself up, if you just work harder, if you just try more, man, where is grace?

Where's the gospel?

Where is hope?

Because you're just fueling them with cold knowledge to put hope in themselves, and that is utterly hopeless.

That is not loving that person whatsoever.

I pray that our love would grow, that our love would mature with knowledge and discernment.

I pray that the more that we seek to understand God's word, the more that we pour ourselves into understanding the truth of the gospel, the bigger that Jesus becomes in our hearts and minds.

Man, the more our ability to love others grows also.

The more we're able to discern truth from air, the more that we're able to discern the ways in which God has called us to love people rightly.

I don't want us to be a church of foolish love that rejects the knowledge of the excellencies of God for this self-proclaimed, self-defined thing we're calling love.

But I also don't want us to be so like theologically driven that we become cold knowledge and the downcast and broken and misplaced and beaten up of our cities, find no grace, warm affection.

But I pray that we grow and that we mature in all that Christ has called us to, with our hope being in this alone.

This messy pursuit of becoming what He's called us to has a confident end that He alone will complete it in us.

Amen.

Amen.

Let's pray.