Love Each Other More

We're going to be talking about loving each other more.

Because this is what the scriptures really call us to.

When we look at loving the things of God, right?

One of those is to love the church and the people who are not yet a part of the church more.

In fact, Paul is going to pray for the church at Thessalonica to increase and abound in love.

This is what it talks about here in the passage that we read.

But one thing I want us to think about is this.

In God's effort to help communicate to us what his love for his people is like, the most common imagery or portrait that he's used is marriage.

We see it throughout the Old Testament.

We see it really explicitly in the New Testament, that the way that we're supposed to understand and have some semblance of comprehension about God's great love for his people is through the portrait of marriage, a covenant between a man and a woman to love each other no matter what.

And God displays that for us in his covenant with his people, that no matter what, he will never stop loving us.

But as we look at this kind of portrait of marriage, some things that I want us to kind of think through as we set the scene for our sermon this morning.

One of the things I want us to think about is the stages of marriage life.

How many of you guys remember your honeymoon phase?

Or how many of you are still in your honeymoon phase, right?

Maybe you're seven years in.

You're like, I'm still in my honeymoon phase.

No, you're not.

No one believes you.

Anyway, uh, what about the honeymoon phase, right?

The honeymoon phase is simple in a lot of ways.

It comes easy loving each other, serving each other, being selfless, making sure that one another's needs are met.

There's a simplicity about that honeymoon phase, and there's a beauty about that young love.

Maybe some of you who are seasoned veterans in the marriage game look at young love and you just remember, you reflect, and you think about, oh, how cute that time was when we just had a simpler, easy to come by love.

But then there's another side of this portrait that I want to reflect on, and that's seasoned love.

How many of you have ever been out in public and seen like 85-year-old couple just holding hands?

He's still opening the door for her.

They walk, you know, and talk in such a way that you can tell they really genuinely still love each other.

Do you not ooh in awe over that love also?

And in all reality, would we ever take one without the other?

Does anybody only want young love and never have it get to old love?

Does anybody want to only have old love without the excitement and energy that young love creates?

We want both of those things because both of them are beautiful and they help us understand more deeply God's love.

For us, they are beautiful, complementary portraits of love.

But then let's think about another stage: no children versus children.

Oh.

Oh.

If you're a married couple and you have children and you think back to a time when you didn't have children, there's probably some wooing that happens, some reminiscing of those feelings that I can do whatever I want.

I get to just make choices according to how I feel.

We were able to be so flexible and we had so much excitement and so much liberty, right?

We we can remember the days without kids.

The simplicity, the ease of life.

But that doesn't mean that we resent these days now.

When we do have kids, and it's complex and it's chaotic and it's challenging and it's difficult, but oh, the beauty of children, the the glory of a family.

And here's the reality.

I think that there's something happening in our culture that's gonna be devastating in generations to come.

I was in um Disney last week, and uh, and this was the I think that this is literally becoming an anthem of our culture, but these four individuals just wore it on their t-shirt.

I don't know if you've ever experienced the depravity of man in Disney World, but there's this thing where they have to wear match, if you're in a family unit, you have to wear matching shirts.

By God's grace, my wife is not that way.

If you are that way, there's forgiveness, there's transformation, there's healing.

Uh, but uh these four individuals, grown people, uh came at me down Epcot Drive in these black shirts, and here's what they said: the happiest childless millennials on earth.

But that's becoming a common anthem for our culture that children are too much of a burden, that children are something we should reject and push away, that we should embrace this selfish lifestyle that doesn't cause me to sacrifice for another individual.

But let me tell you what's going to happen, and I'll just I'll prophesy this is true.

What they seek and desire to have now, they will regret in years to come.

As they are old in age and alone in stature, and they have no one.

The fun and freedom and liberty that they have now will become a resentment and regret in their last days as they're alone.

We should love to have large families.

We should love children the way that God tells us to love children.

We should not just seek to have these selfish, small expressions of human love, but that our families actually are a portrait, even itself, of the gospel love that God has for his people.

Here's what I think.

I think the church is a lot that way.

I remember when we first planted, people loved the energy behind sacred mission as a new church plant.

And here was some of the language that we heard.

We heard, oh, I left a mega church to come to a small church because I wanted to be in a place where I could know everybody.

Oh, this is so exciting because I have relationships with people and I get to know their names, and we kind of have this freedom and this flexibility, and we we really don't have to follow all the rules that big churches have to follow, and we can kind of be adventurous and a little bit of uh of risk takers, right?

And then that was fun and exciting, much like the honeymoon phase of marriage.

And as we've grown, even in just these last three and a half years, uh, to over 300 people here at Sacred Mission, what we're seeing is language changing and shifting.

I don't know everybody here.

I thought I want to be part of a small church.

Oh, I don't know that I really like all that's happening in having to mature and grow up.

I think that what we're in and what God is calling us to is equally, if not more beautiful than what we were three and a half years ago.

That we have to realize the stages of life is going to create differences, but they are still so beautiful in the way that God wants us to understand his relationship with us and the work that he's done through his son for the people in our city.

The church family is a portrait of the complexity of love.

And what Paul's gonna do for us this morning in his letter to the church at Thessalonica is he's going to begin at chapter 3 praying for their love to increase and abound.

What's really fascinating about this prayer that we have to take into mind is that Paul's not asking for a love to be kindled.

He's not speaking to a fire yet not burning, he's speaking to a flame that already exists within the chest of the church, and he's asking for that to increase and abound so that they might be rooted and established in holiness before God.

You see, the church already loved, but Paul understood that for their maturity, for their good, for their stabilization, that love needed to increase and abound because it wasn't done yet.

It wasn't done in two ways.

It wasn't done increasing in its authenticity of what love should look like.

There's a way where our love has to mature, it has to be authenticated in what it's called to.

We talked about this a few weeks ago, this notion or concept of agape love.

So the Bible has all these different loves, and we typically misunderstand the love that the Bible speaks about for this eros love or this erotic love, where we understand it through feelings, right?

The Bible, when it typically talks about love in the way that we are to love one another and love God, is through this agape love.

And here's the difference where one is rooted on emotions, the other is rooted on the will of man.

God's love is not rooted in emotions.

God's love is rooted in his purposeful will to place his love upon you for your highest possible good.

And that's the love we're called to reflect.

One that circumstance doesn't dictate impact or size of which we love one another.

But we have a will, an intention within us to set it upon another individual so their highest good might be accomplished through our sacrificial service to them.

That's the love that Paul's calling to increase and abound.

But these words of increased amount, let's read it again.

Now may our God and Father Himself, verse 11, and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you, and may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another, the church, and for all, those outside of the church, as we do for you.

So Paul's differentiating two different people groups that this love is supposed to increase and abound toward.

One another, those within the church, but also for all, yet those who are not yet a part of the church, by grace through faith in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus.

And so here's what this language of increase and abound means for us.

I think the simplest way to understand it is through a story that we actually find in the Gospel of John.

John chapter 6, verses 5 through 13.

John 6:5–13

If you're following along in the app sermon notes, you can read the whole story there.

But I'm just gonna paraphrase for us what happens.

There's this group of people, uh the Bible says it was about 5,000 in number, uh, not counting all people, but but giving us a general estimation.

Uh there's about 5,000 in number.

They've been following Jesus all day, listening to his teachings, uh, listening to his speaking, and it becomes late into the evening, and there's this concern brought up that these people need to eat, right?

They've been hanging out all day without food, they need to eat.

And the question is raised well, how could we actually provide food for them?

And one of the disciples chimes in and says, Well, even if we had this amount of money, like this exorbitant amount of money, we still couldn't feed all these people.

And then I feel like this one like jerk disciple comes over and he's like, Well, this kid has five loaves and two fish.

And then Jesus is like, Oh, you want to be that dude?

I'll show you exactly what I'm gonna do with this.

But there's this little boy with a lunch, and he's just got this little packed lunch.

It's not much, it's five loaves and two fish.

And what happens next is Jesus blesses this food, and it says that he fed everyone.

And then he calls his disciples to take baskets and collect the leftovers.

And this is a really beautiful portrait of what Paul's calling us to to increase and abound.

First thing I want us to think about is that that love already existed.

The boy's lunch was already there.

He was working with something.

There is a love within sacred mission that I believe exists.

It needs to grow in its authenticity, it also needs to grow in its capacity and how many people it can envelop with this love.

But there's already something established.

But then the increase comes.

And what happens in the increase?

It is by faith this food, this little lunch, feeds 5,000 people.

What an amazing supernatural increase of something that had already existed but yet was insufficient that we see within this gospel story.

And Paul's asking for that kind of increase to come to the love of which we have within us that is supposed to be lavished on one another and all throughout our world.

It's this process of growth.

And this process of growth has two critical elements in it: faith and obedience.

Faith and obedience.

We have to realize that Jesus was fully God, yet fully man.

And in that that that nature of Christ, we have to realize that there took an element of faith on Christ's behalf, to believe that the Father could do what he said he would do.

And we even see throughout Jesus' life where that that was God's will and purpose was somewhat questioned or somewhat pressed upon.

But here Jesus had to believe and have faith that this lunch could actually be multiplied or increased to feed these 5,000 people.

But then it also took obedience because it wasn't just faith, it was him taking the bread and starting to break it apart and going out to each individual to make sure that they were fed.

You see, obedience is the action that follows belief.

Obedience is the action that follows belief.

Here within our Christian life, we have to work in tandem with these two things.

We have to believe the truth of the word, we have to believe the truth of Scripture and what Christ has done for us through his death, burial, and resurrection, what the Spirit has given us through indwelling us by faith, but we also have to put action on the other side of those things.

Because through obedience, we see that faith come to life, what has been promised to us.

I'll give you a really simple example.

Christ has conquered death, hell, and the grave.

All of sin has been trampled under his feet.

That's a belief that, and we have to have faith in that.

But when we don't put obedience behind that faith, what happens to us?

We see sin reign in our life.

We don't see the victory that is promised to us lived out in our members because we don't apply obedience to what we say we believe.

And it takes both of this tandem working together to see what the promises of God has given us lived out in our life.

So we see the increase.

The boys' lunch feeding 5,000, but then we see abound.

And what happened in that abounding?

There were baskets full collected.

The disciples went out and they collected the remains, and there were baskets.

There was leftovers to be had.

This is faith and obedience producing fruit.

Fruit in the life of a believer should always have an abundance.

And I think that there's this Old Testament principle that really helps us understand this.

You see, God is the God of harvest.

And here's what he commanded his people.

He said, When the harvest takes place, you will collect for yourself from the field and you will fill your storehouses.

But there will still remain fruit on the vine and some that have fallen to the ground.

And what are you supposed to do?

After your storehouse is filled, allow the poor and needy to come and glean from the field.

They were called to feast on what was left over because Israel had more than enough.

Because God was their God and he was God of the harvest.

And when Paul is calling us to increase and abound, it's in that the love of God that is supposed to be increasing within us would be come such a state that the storehouse of soul would be filled with this fruit of the Spirit, and that the poor and needy in our city could come through and feast on the abundance that's left on the vine after we've pitched from the harvest.

This is what Paul is calling us to.

He's praying for us that this love would increase and abound in us.

And as I said before, this isn't just a love for those within the church.

This is a love for all people.

The love that God desires for us to grow in is not just for the people here and now, but for those whom he is bringing into his church also.

Think about the way the gospel was ripping through Asia Minor and North Africa and all these different places throughout the New Testament.

It was saving people by the thousands.

When you look at Pentecost and Peter stood up and preached, you look at other places where the apostolic leaders stood up and they proclaimed the faithful gospel of time.

What happened?

Thousands were saved at once.

Think about the church plants back then.

We're like, we got like six people in a living room praying for the Lord to bring somebody.

These dudes just stood up, proclaimed the gospel, boom, church of 3,000, boom, church of 5,000.

These people didn't even know how to love that size of people, that community of people.

They needed something supernatural beyond themselves to be able to have that love increase and abound so that not only could they love faithfully those who are already a part of the church, but that the mission of God, that we would go out and continue to make disciples throughout the earth, that would be able to expand in capacity to conclude them, include them also.

We are called to a love that grows.

A love that grows.

Not just simply one that grows in its authenticity, but one in its very capacity also.

And we need to walk both of those realities out.

While we are called to mature in the love of God, we're also called to expand its capability to love others more.

When we look at verse 13, we see a love that establishes.

So verses 11 and 12 is a love that grows.

Verse 13 is a love that establishes.

And we see here the basic idea here of this verb established.

Let's read it.

Verse 13, so that he may establish your hearts, blameless in holiness, before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.

We see right in 13, so that.

Everything about the central reality of his being is seated in his heart.

And what's Paul saying?

If you want that heart to be stabilized, so that when Christ returns, you'll be found blameless in holiness, then here's what you gotta do: you gotta increase and abound in the love of God that He has for you.

Paul's praying that we would increase and abound so that we might be stabilized in the center of our being and found blameless at Christ's return.

Unless love prevails, selfish and carnal motives inhibit holy development.

So here's what I'm saying.

Unless love is the motivating reality of our life, unless it's what's driving us in our life, what's going to happen is selfish, carnal desires are going to take over.

And what is going to happen?

It's going to make us be people who seek out our own selfish ambition rather than the good of one another.

And in that, holiness, holy conduct will be inhibited.

The holiness of which God has called us to live out in our life, it has and it can only be driven by that love.

That as we love one another, as we seek to increase and abound in God's love.

And when we think about what that love looks like, we have to work to submit ourselves to the truth of Scripture in the way that God has defined what that love should look like.

Because love is created by God, is of God, and given to us as his people, then we have to go to God to understand what that love looks like.

Now, I've been in, I've been at two weddings in one week this last week, and I've heard a lot of 1 Corinthians 13 read.

Right?

It's the love chapter where they talk about, well, love is this, love is that.

And while, sure, that's great to read at a wedding, and it's it's it's it's moving, it's beautiful, uh, it was not written for a married couple.

Paul wrote it for a church that was very fractured.

And it was fractured because it pursued selfish ambition over the good of others.

They were elevating themselves because of certain spiritual gifts that they had, whether that be tongues or prophecy or word of knowledge, they would elevate themselves above those who did not have those gifts.

And there became classism within the church, and it became fractured, and there was selfish ambition.

People were coming and they were getting drunk and feasting upon the Lord's Supper before other people even were able to have a turn to come and break the bread.

They were uh pursuing uh even sexual desires because they were only wanting to gratify and satisfy the self.

They were not driven by love, they were driven by selfishness.

And what did that selfish pursuit inhibit?

Holy development.

Holy development in their lives.

And so, what does Paul do?

He writes them a letter.

We find in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, Paul says, listen, the answer to this fractured church is loving each other.

1 Corinthians 13 · chapter mention

But you've got to understand what love actually looks like and means, or else you're gonna continually fail in what God has called you to.

And so he pins 1 Corinthians chapter 13, verses 4 through 8, and he says, This, hey church, to heal this fracture, love each other this way.

1 Corinthians 13:4–8

Because love is patient and kind.

Love does not envy or boast, it's not arrogant or rude, it does not insist on its own way, it is not irritable or resentful, it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but it rejoices with the truth.

Love bears all things, it believes all things, it hopes all things, it endures all things.

Love never ends.

As for these prophecies, they'll pass away.

Tongues, they'll they'll cease.

Knowledge, it will pass away.

Everything that you're causing to allow, fractures within the church, it will stop one day.

But love won't.

It never ends.

And think about those the those descriptors of what love should look like.

Paul's saying, this is what you have to mature and grow in, increase and abound in this type of love.

Because if you don't have this, then you're gonna be unable to do all that God has called you to.

Love establishes our hearts that we might be found blameless before God.

Because this love never ends, it establishes us for a life with Jesus in his church that never ends, also.

And so what Paul is fundamentally doing is this he's praying for us that we would be able to love each other more, that will demand a supernatural help and human work.

Loving each other more will demand supernatural help and human work.

The very nature of this passage is a prayer.

Paul's petitioning heaven that this might be true in us.

But he realizes that that's not absent of human effort and work.

Here's what we have to understand: God's sovereignty and man's responsibility are in a divine dance with one another.

They are in mystery perfectly harmonious to one another.

God is totally sovereign.

Man is totally responsible.

And we have to be okay with those two truths, resting and living with one another in this divine dance.

This is actually one of our core values at Sacred Mission.

So we have uh several core values.

One of them is transformation, obedience, and righteousness.

And the subline of that core value is that we work with the Holy Spirit to see the image of God renewed in us.

We work with the Holy Spirit, human effort and supernatural help for one common end, to see the image of God renewed in us.

And so we have to live in this dance.

We have to live in this harmony of God's sovereignty and our responsibility.

And here's what we have to understand.

We get this wrong in the reformed camp, I think, a lot.

And I think it's sad because we have such a huge belief on God's sovereignty and power, but we put so little emphasis on man's responsibility and work and the way that we live our life.

That's one of the things, and I've talked about this before.

I miss about my Pentecostal charismatic roots.

They really believed God could do anything, and then even at foolish times, they did something in their life to try and be obedient to that faith.

And think about the things that we struggle with.

When we believe faith, right, of God's sovereignty.

God has purchased us by the blood of his son.

God has conquered the sin that used to reign in our life.

God has gifted us with every supernatural gift.

God has laid up for us an inheritance that is eternal and without fading or without rust or decay.

God has delivered us from the hands of the enemy.

God has given us the righteousness of Christ that we did not deserve, but yet was a free gift to Him.

God has called and elected and chosen those who would know him and come to saving faith.

God has put that saving gospel in our mouth.

God has equipped us to be able to serve his church and see transformation happen in culture.

God has.

We believe all these things, but so many times we put little to no human effort behind any of that faith.

And then we wonder, why does God not move?

Why am I still battling the same sin in my life?

Why am I still not seeing my neighbors come to Christ?

Why am I still not seeing any of the supernatural power of God in my life?

Because you have totally isolated God's sovereignty to a place it was never meant to theologically, in our understanding of who He is and our relationship with Him.

And you've displaced or dismissed your own responsibility to put actions behind the very faith you confess.

We can see God move.

I mean, some of the greatest movements of God throughout the last 2,000 years were by dudes who believed like we did in God's election and sovereignty.

When you look at the Great Awakening, we look at all these movements of God.

It was men who understood that it took obedience, action behind the faith that they confessed.

Not just sit there and keep reading books and not doing anything about the information they're taking in.

And so what do we need to do?

When we look at this balance of supernatural help in human work, we need to saturate our minds in scripture because we're in need of a transformed mind.

Here's the supernatural help of the revelation of God through his scripture.

We talked about this, right?

God's sovereignty in revealing himself to us through his holy word.

That's the supernatural help.

But what does it take?

Human effort.

It takes us opening it, reading it, studying it, memorizing it, meditating on it.

You're not gonna get more mature in the image of God of which He's called you to through a dusty Bible on your nightstand.

That's just not gonna happen.

Or osmosis, putting it under your pillow, right?

Sleeping on a page at a time.

That's not gonna work.

It takes supernatural help has been given through the revelation of God, through his word.

It takes human work to crack it open, to understand it, to study it so that we might have a transformed mind.

What about saturating our hearts in prayer?

We're in need of supernatural help.

It's been given to us by the Spirit.

He is with his people, he indwells us as God's people.

But yet, what are we called to do?

We're called to fall on our faces before him and petition him to move.

I don't know about you, but here's one thing I've learned throughout my Christian life.

God weirdly heals, delivers, saves, works miracles more when I actually pray than when I don't.

Has anybody else experienced that?

Maybe, possibly.

Well, y'all need to get a can you I love y'all.

Here's the reality though.

I almost never, if rarely, if ever, have I seen God move in supernatural ways where I didn't petition him to do so.

The supernatural helps there.

The Spirit indwells us.

He has given us his presence, but he has still called us to petition his help.

What about saturate our hands in obedience?

So saturate our minds in scripture, saturate our hearts in prayer, saturate our hands in obedience.

We're in need of developing holier habits.

Christ has given us everything we need to live righteous lives, to express his righteousness that he has given to us freely by grace through faith in our very life.

But what's it gonna take?

Discipline, obedience, action on our part.

Loving each other more will demand supernatural help and human work.

But here's the reality for us some of us we have a shrinking love for the church.

So Paul is calling us to increase and abound in love for one another and for all.

Um some of us, we have a shrinking love for the church.

And I get it.

There's many of you in this room who have been hurt by the church.

You've been unfairly uh judged, you you've you've gone through pain, you've had men and women who you looked up to and held in high esteem uh fall away from grace and sin or embrace uh the lies of culture and the and the devil's worldview, right?

You've had situations that you've come in uh in contact with in a cross that has caused legitimate hurt and pain.

I understand that.

I can tell you I'm one of those people.

But here's what I understand.

I understand not only am I a person who has experienced that pain and hurt, I'm a person who has caused it also.

And I think that all of us need to come to a reckoning of that reality.

In some way or another, the very pain and hurt that we blame others for, of why our love for the church is shrinking, in some way or fashion we've participated in ourselves.

But here's the beauty of this Jesus never died for a perfect church, Jesus died to perfect the church.

And you might say, well, I don't go to church because it's just full of hypocrites.

Yeah, duh, that's kind of the point.

We all need to mature and grow in our love for God and for one another.

So I hope that we can increase in the way that we love the church.

I hope we can see the way that Jesus gave his life for her, that he is coming back for her in glory and majesty, that he alone, not our own effort, not our own strivings, he alone will present her blameless, without spot or wrinkle, that he is her glory.

And we are like stumbling toddlers of destruction on our way to that final place.

And yeah, we're gonna can look, here's what I tell my kids.

I tell my kids all the time, no one loves you like Jesus loves you.

Daddy doesn't even love you the way that Jesus can.

You know why?

Because I, as a father, I'm going to hurt you.

That's hard to look your baby girl in the eyes and say, I'm gonna hurt you, I'm gonna disappoint you, I'm not gonna be there when you need me, I'm gonna let you down.

Do you realize as much as I love you, I'm going to do those things to you.

But Jesus never will.

And I think a lot of our frustrations in the church is that we put man in the place of Christ, not intentionally or consciously, but if we're really honest with ourselves, we have, and we've not been okay with man's failures.

What does love do?

This is this is fascinating.

Love endures all things.

You know what that means?

Love endures the maturing process of a believer.

I'll stop this section with this.

Here's what I think happens a lot of the time.

I think we get really frustrated and disappointed and aggravated with people who are in a maturing phase that we ourselves were in one, two, five years ago.

You see, what happens is we come into this place where all of us are at different maturing levels spiritually.

Some of us are seasoned in the faith, some of us are new Christians, some of us we've learned patience really well, but others of us we still don't understand long suffering.

Some of us have got like this righteousness like nailed and we're just killing it.

And others of us we we keep stumbling every single day with the same old thing.

And here's what happens you might have matured from that one year ago, you might have matured from that five years ago, but this brother or sister right here, they haven't yet.

And where you're really getting frustrated is that they're not in the place you are now, but you weren't there two years ago.

And what's lacking in the church is a willing to endure with such a brother or sister as they stumble along in their maturing process that we might see not ourselves' image renewed in them, but Christ's image renewed in them.

Because a lot of the time our anger, frustration, and uh um bitterness that grows against one another is because we don't see our own image being developed within another individual.

I do that with my kids all the time.

I often act in such a way that I want my image restored in them rather than Christ's.

And when I get frustrated, it's because they've let me down.

And we do that with one another.

Love endures.

Love endures the maturing process, the baby steps, the falling down, the refusing to get up, and all the in-between.

But some of us we don't have a shrinking love for the church.

We have a shrinking love for the world.

Paul said, not just a love for one another, but a love for all.

And here, let me say something real quick.

I think that there's a healthy aspect to this where we have a shrinking love for the world.

There's a healthy aspect to this.

God has called us out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light.

We're called to contend against lies, sin, and idols.

I look back through um the Old Testament, and what we see often is God calling his people to destroy the idols amongst them and to cast them out, to burn them, to destroy them, so that the true worship of God might be re-established among his people.

There's a reality where the New Testament church is called to do the same thing: search out idols, destroy them, get them out from among the people, so that right and true worship centered around Christ might be re-established among his people.

Our idols just don't often look like statues of wood or stone.

Our idols look like things that try to capture our heart, like greed, sexuality, all these different types of things, right?

So we have idols, they just look different.

But let me tell you something.

I believe, and I'm gonna submit this to you, ponder this, you know, pray about this, whatever.

I think we need to do a much better job at differentiating, discerning between the things of this world and the people of this world.

The things of this world and the people of this world.

Because a person is not their worldview.

And that's hard to discern sometimes, am I right?

When you see someone who looks like they're just fully embody a worldview that is contrary to the truth of God, that is contrary to the holiness and righteousness which he's called us to, that's contrary to the worship of which he's called us to him alone.

When a person seems to fully embody this worldview, it's hard for us to differentiate the two, the things of this world, that's the worldview, and the people of this world.

That's the ones of whom Christ died.

And we always convolute them to be this singular thing.

And so we go to war and we go to war against people, and we go to war against them in such a way that is contrary to what the gospel has actually called us to.

And some of you pride yourself in this, right?

You pride yourself in the way that you uh go after the idols of culture, you go after the lies of the enemy that people are holding.

But here's the difference.

When you're going after them in such a way as through through a Facebook chat or through text message or even a face-to-face phone conversation, you may pride yourself that you're acting like Jesus, right?

The guy who called them a pit of vipers, whitewash tombs, the dude who came in and flipped over the money changers' tables in the temple.

You might pride yourself that you're acting like Jesus, but let me just press on you one thing.

Would you die for that person like Jesus did?

Because as you're going to war, I want to I want to submit that our efforts is to kill the individual rather than love them in such a way that we would die for them.

And so we have to check our own hearts.

I'm not saying that some of those actions aren't good and right and proper for the church.

I'm saying if they're not driven by such a love that if this brother had the option to lay your life down for him, you would do it.

That's the difference.

Yeah, Jesus called them a pit of vipers, yeah, he called them whitewashed tombs, yeah, he flipped their tables and drove them away with whips.

But man, he died for him.

That's a different kind of love.

For the people Jesus called this, he still died for.

So we may have a shrinking love for the church.

We may have a shrinking love for this world.

But by God's grace and the help of the Spirit, we work toward that love increasing to the place that it abounds for those in our life.

And how do we do that?

Only through Jesus.

Only through Jesus.

You and I, in our own strivings and efforts, will always fail to love people the way that God has called us to.

Without supernatural help, we can't love others the way that God has called us to.

We can't increase and abound in that love.

And we've tried.

We've tried to do it on our own.

But the cross is the proven reality that we would be unable to do it.

You see, if Jesus died for a perfect church, then he really died for no reason.

His sacrifice of his own self would be completely useless, wasted.

He didn't die for a perfect church.

He died for a church that couldn't do what he was calling them to.

But he did.

He accomplished it all.

And then he freely gives it to us by grace through faith so that we can claim it as our own.

Any effort to love in the way that the Bible called us to, through man, human effort, we will fail.

And we've experienced that.

We've been on the receiving end of that failure, and we have been on the giving end of that failure.

But what does Jesus do?

Jesus gives us new life that we might love.

We are born again into the family of God that we might actually love the way that we've experienced his love for us.

John, 1 John 4, 7 through 8 says this, Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God.

And whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.

Anyone who does not love does not know God because God is love.

You see, God is love, and love is from God.

We can only love the way that God has called us to by supernatural help.

That's first and foremost.

But we also have to be obedient to that reality.

And we have to put in human work to be able to have it increase and abound in our life.

My prayer for us is that we would increase and abound in love for one another and for all.

Here's something that I cannot escape as we look at the great commission that Jesus gave his church is that it necessitates multiplying, growing, having more and more people come into the family of God through Jesus.

Let me ask you, who in here would just love to see every single person in Westchester and Mason saved by the gospel of Jesus?

Wouldn't that be amazing?

Well, all right, let's go for it.

Like let's believe.

What I love about Paul, one of the stories of Paul is he's uh, and I'm going off script here, but he's beaten almost to the point of death, and he's kicked out of this city.

He's literally thrown out of a city, and he's laying there bloody and wounded, and God speaks to Paul, and this is what he says.

He says, Paul, get up.

Get up and go back into the city and preach the gospel.

And here was his reasoning for I have many in that city.

What emboldened Paul to get up from the bloody mess that he was, beaten almost to the point of death, to go right back into the very town that did it to him?

Was the confidence and assurance of God's sovereignty and salvation if Paul would just be obedient and open his mouth and preach the gospel.

Man, we won't we won't even share the gospel with our cubicle partner because we're afraid of getting reported HR.

Heck with that.

I wish I could cuss, right?

Um, that's so silly to me.

We've allowed fear to just creep into our lives.

Man, I pray that we would increase and abound because here's what's here's here's what's happened.

If we truly have faith, and if we truly walk in obedience, here's what will come fruit and increase.

This church will grow.

It's a necessity of the Great Commission.

If we're not experiencing people being saved, coming to faith in Christ, growing his church, seeing disciples be made and matured.

If we are not seeing that, believe you this.

The only reason we're not seeing that is because we are fundamentally being disobedient to the great commission of which we have been called to by Christ.

Fundamental.

Jesus promised the harvest is great.

The problem isn't how many, how much fruit is on the vine.

The problem is the workers are few.

It's who will go out there and pluck it off.

We're gonna need supernatural help to increase and abound in love that God has called us to.

Because by God's grace, we won't stay a church of 300 people.

By God's grace, we will continue to grow and grow and plant churches and send out missionaries and see the gospel advance and see his kingdom continue to transform the culture and society around us.

That's what we will see by God's grace.

Because we're not here to bunker down and hide away from culture.

We're light that penetrates the darkness.

We're going in.

And we're going to see a necessity for this love to increase and abound so that not only we can love all of those who are among us, but the poor and needy from our cities can come and glean from its abundance.

Amen.

Let's pray.