Love the Church

Well, as we said earlier, we are in the beginning of a five-week sermon series for our vision for 2022, looking at these five loves love, love the church, love the city, love truth, love recklessly.

And so this morning we're looking at love the church.

And this is uh critical in our understanding of how we function in this world in a new identity in Christ who has changed our reality.

Everything about what Christ has done in us through his power and his resurrection by his spirit changes every aspect of our reality as people.

And so what he does is he calls us then to love.

But he calls us to love in a unique way and in amidst a unique context.

And that's what we're going to be diving into this morning.

What does it mean for us to love one another?

C.S.

Lewis, he uh a brilliant philosopher, writer, most known for his uh writings of the Chronicles of Narnia, a children's literature series.

Uh, but he also wrote a lot of philosophical books that helped uh try to bring apologetics to the Christian world to make a defense for the Christian faith that we hold.

And one of the books that he wrote was called The Four Loves.

And in this book, he navigates the difference between these kind of three uh natural loves and then this supernatural love that we have received through the finished work of Christ, and then we're supposed to imitate in our lives as we have been transformed by that love.

And that love is known as agape love.

And it's distinct and unique because it's supernatural.

It comes to us from the Father, it's modeled for us by the Father and the Son, and then it is supposed to be lived out from us as we are being transformed by the power of the Spirit.

And it's distinct from these other natural loves, this erotic love, this affectionate love, and this brotherly love.

So agape love is what we're gonna be focusing on this morning.

But he has this section in his book, The Four Loves, that I want to read.

If you're following along in our app, you can open up the sermon notes for today.

If you haven't downloaded our app, we highly recommend for you to do that.

We have a link to where you can follow along the sermon, take notes, use them for future study as well.

But I put the quote in the notes this morning, as it's a lengthy one, that you could go back and read it.

It says this, C.

S.

Lewis from his book, The Four Loves There is no safe investment.

To love at all is to be vulnerable.

Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.

If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal.

Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries, avoid all entanglements, lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.

But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change.

It will not be broken, it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.

You see, the alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.

The only place outside of heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers of love is hell.

You see, C.S.

Lewis knew that to love meant to not be cautious or careful, to not be calculated in the way that we love, to not try to think on the other side what misery or tragedy might await me.

And so, in the face of that gamble, in the face of that risk, many of us are tempted to keep our hearts safe.

Maybe we've experienced some type of brokenness in our relationships with our family in the past, or maybe we had a loved one who betrayed our trust or really hurt and damaged us.

And so we have learned throughout our experiences in our life to build this fortress and to put place our heart into this solitude of protection so that we don't experience those things anymore.

You see, that's our natural response to tragedy.

That's our natural response to heartache, but that's not the love of God.

Nor is it the love that God calls us to extend and to practice and to live out with one another.

The love of God is in the face of perceived risk and misery and heartache and tragedy.

And so we're gonna dive in to try to understand this agape love and how it fits within the context of our community this morning.

First, let's look at verse 34.

And if we were to summarize verse 34, Jesus saying, A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.

We would see this that Jesus' love for us shapes our love for one another.

Jesus' love for us shapes our love for one another.

That might that might sound really uh elementary.

That might seem really basic and simple, but I hope that we really see the complexity of this statement.

And we look and dive deep into the beauty of God's love for us in his son Jesus.

But let's set the scene of where this statement is coming from.

Jesus is in the midst of the Last Supper, and he has just uh finished washing his disciples' feet.

And so Jesus was mimickering, uh mimicking a servant leadership.

He was getting down on his hands and knees, he had a towel wrapped around him, and he was washing and serving his disciples' feet.

He's washing them to show that it is the least in the kingdom that becomes the greatest.

He was showing us what love looks like in a lot of ways.

But then he was also showing us what love doesn't look like because he tells us right after this foot washing, he informs his disciples that Judas is going to betray him.

So, in one hand, he demonstrates the beauty of what love looks like, and in the other hand, he shows us the heartache and tragedy of what love doesn't look like.

One of his closest disciples who had traveled with him in ministry, who was the keeper of the money bag, right?

All of these trusts that was put into Judas in certain ways was being broken as he was informing his disciples that he was going to betray him.

And so Jesus, as he's making his preparations to go to the cross and to be the sacrifice that we need to be reconciled to God, he stands and turns to his disciples and he says this phrase, his departing words.

A new commandment I give to you.

A new commandment I give to you.

Communicating his final words and instructions to his disciples in the midst of all these emotions, right?

Think about the emotions that Jesus had to be feeling in that supper.

He knew what was coming up.

He knew the pain and the heartache that was awaiting him at the cross.

Imagine the fear that he was feeling.

Imagine the anxiousness.

Imagine the sorrow, the betrayal, the hurt, and the misery in the midst of all of what Jesus is feeling in that moment.

He stands up and he looks at his disciples and he says, I'm gonna give you a new commandment.

Love one another as I have loved you.

Love one another.

His departing instructions is for his followers to live out a dedicated, sacrificial, humble love to one another.

And he frames this commandment as something new.

Now, we have to think about this, right?

To love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

That's in the Old Testament, we found that in Deuteronomy.

We talked about that last week.

And to love our neighbor as ourself, well, that's an old commandment as well.

We find that in the Deuteronomy passage there in the Shema that we talked about last week.

And so is Jesus really giving us something new?

Isn't this something that we've heard already before?

To love our neighbor as ourself.

Well, it is new.

It is new, and let me under let's help us understand this.

This new command, to love one another as I have loved you, does not fulfill love your neighbor as yourself, nor does it eradicate love your neighbor as yourself.

It is a distinct, truly new command to love one another in the ways that you have experienced and known Jesus to love you is what is new.

You see, it's set in a new context and it's set in the new empowerment of God's love.

It is us, the family of God, who Jesus is saying this new commandment pertains to and is lived out amongst.

We are to love one another.

Those who have been purchased by the blood of Christ, who by his spirit have been brought into the family of God, we are to love one another with the exact same love as Jesus has loved us.

This is a truly new commandment.

In a new context, the family of God and in a new empowerment because the Spirit has filled us and enabled us to love one another as Christ has so loved us.

It doesn't eradicate the old commandment, but it does place the understanding and expectations of love in a brand new context.

Family.

The church.

It's those who have been loved by Jesus and brought into the family of God by faith in his finished work.

This is fundamentally an exclusive reality.

So when Jesus is saying, love one another as I have loved you, he is not saying to love the world in this way.

He is not saying to love everyone in this way.

He is exclusively talking about the family of God who has been brought in by the transforming work of Jesus.

It is this exclusive context of family that we are meant to love one another.

This new love is not meant to fulfill the command to love our neighbor.

It sets the command of love in a whole new context.

The new reality of this command is fundamentally the objective identity of its function.

How Jesus has loved them shapes the total reality of how they are to love one another.

But what kind of love is this?

It's agape love.

Agape love is very distinct from emotional love.

Something that we feel or something that doesn't have any rationale to it.

Agape love is an action.

It sits in stark contradiction to any sense of emotional, circumstantial, unreasonable love.

It means to seek the well-being of others at our own expense.

It's a dangerous love.

It's a love that runs the risk of heartache, misery, and trials.

It's a love that doesn't seek protection, safety, or comfort, because those things are enemies of its purpose.

It's to relentlessly love in spite of everything telling you not to.

To help, bless, comfort, burden with, weep for, pray for, visit with, reconcile, restore, contend for every single person in the household of God.

That's agape love.

Agape love is given with the realization that misery, heartache, and pain await it.

Let's look at Matthew chapter 18.

Matthew 18 · chapter mention

So in Matthew 18, Jesus is talking with his disciples, and he's trying to, he's kind of laying out a blueprint for church discipline.

How do we handle unrepentant sin within the church?

What does that look like and its effect of the family of God?

And there's a question raised to him, and we find this question in Matthew 18, spoken from Peter, verses 21 and 22.

It says this, then Peter came up and said to him, Well, Lord, how often will my brother sin against me and I forgive him?

As many as seven times?

Jesus said to him, I do not say to you seven times, but seventy-seven times.

What's Peter fundamentally asking?

How much do I love before I start protecting myself?

How much do I put my heart out there before I start pulling it back in to preserve my own self-interest?

Is it seven times, Lord?

Is that sufficient?

And Jesus says, no, it's not seven, it's seventy-seven times.

What's Jesus saying in response to Peter?

Peter, the love that I'm calling you to is going to invite misery, heartache, pain, and trial, but that love is relentless in pursuit of the good of the other person.

That's what Jesus is calling us to.

He's not calling us to anything safe.

He's not calling us to anything calculated where we can measure.

Well, how much am I supposed to actually put up with?

You see, our love to the world is still rooted in agape love, but it's for this purpose, for the world to be transformed by it.

Right?

We want the world to experience the agape love of Christ and be transformed by it and be brought into the family of God.

And so fundamentally, our love for the world is missional, not familial.

It is for them to be reached with the hope of the gospel.

It's a love of action.

And it's known through compassion, forbearance, and evangelism.

This love is meant for the introduction to Jesus' agape, sacrificial love.

It is rooted in gospel proclamation.

We are not called to, nor expected to love the world in the same way Jesus calls us to love the church.

Yes, it is for their good.

Yes, it is to bless.

Yes, it is to engage with, but it's so that they might be introduced to that transformative love that you and I have experienced through Jesus' finished work and brought into the family.

So again, the love of neighbor in its very essence is missionally focused.

The love for one another is familial focused.

It is the family of God being realized within us.

Our love for one another is agape known and realized in our relationship with one another.

It's known through the love of 1 Corinthians chapter 13.

1 Corinthians 13 · chapter mention

See, when we typically read 1 Corinthians 13, right, we're at some wedding and it really doesn't, it's like frilly and it's sweet and nice.

Or uh we commonly, though, don't think of 1 Corinthians 13 as an apostle instructing in loving discipline a church body of how they're supposed to live with one another.

We think of it as husband and wife, right?

How am I supposed to love you as my spouse?

Or maybe we might even put it in the context of parents and children.

But that's not Paul's purpose.

Though we've hijacked it and used it for all kinds of different ceremonies and for weddings and so forth, the real context of that passage is an apostle who loves the church and is instructing them and disciplining them on what love should look like lived out in the family of God.

So go back and read 1 Corinthians 13 in that mind.

Think about that person in your mission group who you just you just are like, look, if you say one more word, I swear to the Lord of hosts, something's gonna happen.

Right?

Or that that that person within the church that just gets on your nerves who you can't stand.

Who you know them.

When they walk into the lobby and you're getting your coffee, you beeline to somewhere else, right?

1 Corinthians 13, something about that dude.

But it's more talking about your heart and how you approach them and how you engage with them and how you seek to love them.

Or what about the person that has sinned against you within this church?

What about the person who's betrayed your trust in this church?

What about the person who's hurt you in this church?

Are you gonna build this isolated castle within this building and try to protect yourself in it?

Are you gonna be like Peter and say, hey, I've tried three or four different times and I'm not getting anywhere here?

Or are you gonna be like Jesus calls Peter to, to relentlessly continue the pursuit of loving them no matter what?

Why?

Because that's Jesus' love for you.

This love is meant to be lived out in the church family.

It is not gospel proclaimed, it is gospel realized.

Our love for the church is distinct from our love from the world primarily through its application of gospel family.

And so we as Christians and Christ followers are commanded to love other Christ followers uniquely as Christ has loved us.

Jesus' love is sacrificial, Jesus' love is truthful, Jesus' love is gracious, it's life-giving, it's provisional, it's serving, it's committed.

It's a love that has brought us into an intimate belonging.

We're trying to live out the gospel love in our own home.

And we are, as a parent, you get these moments a thousand times a day to either be like Jesus or be like your jerk self, right?

That that's those are the two choices you get in this world.

And and nine out of ten, uh, it's just uh jerk justin.

And then one out of ten, I nail it because the spirit just really, really did his work in me that, you know.

But uh, but we've been talking about uh we had one of our children just be really rebellious this last week.

And uh we disciplined, and I had the opportunity to look at her and say, hey, honey, no matter how good you have been this week, I do not love you more.

And no matter how bad you were in these last 15 minutes, I do not love you less.

I love you.

It's a committed love.

If my child thinks my love is predicated on their behavior, what kind of home am I creating?

I'm not living out the agape love of Jesus.

The same way in the context of the church family, if our love for one another is predicated on like our actions and behavior, how cool we are and nice we are, or how just mean and grumpy and standoffish we are, or any type of behavior, we're not exercising the love of God or the love of Jesus that we have received and made evident in our lives.

We are operating in a natural worldly love that's based on work.

You see, Jesus' love is a love that has brought us into an intimate belonging to one another.

In verse 35, he says, By this all people will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.

So to summarize verse 35, we say, the church is known by the world through our love for one another.

The church is known by the world through our love for one another.

There is a missional reality to the way we pursue obedience to this command.

The watching world looks in from proximity and affirms by the way we love one another that we are his.

You see this?

The watching world who doesn't know Christ, who doesn't know Jesus, who doesn't know the saving power of his work, is watching us.

And the identity that we proclaim we have as Christians is going to be affirmed how?

By the way that we love one another.

Often we leave the world in confusion or outright disbelief because of the ways that we fail to live this out.

Our love for one another is intended to communicate the way in which we have been loved by Him.

We are love ambassadors, reflective representatives of gospel love.

You see, there's a lot of things that we've actually sought within the church to replace our identity affirmation.

Works of compassion.

Oh, the world will know that you are his if you go and do works.

Of great compassion throughout the world.

No, it's not true.

The world will know that you are his in the ways that you engage with social justice.

No, it's not true.

The world will know that you are his by your separatism.

The way that you remove yourself from the world and become so distinct from it that you could never engage with it with the gospel in the first place.

Right?

Amish style.

But even some of us in this new wave of Christianity try to be separatists.

We try to buy a bunch of land somewhere and build our homestead and not engage with the world because our children and ourselves are going to be tainted by it and we can't go into it because it's so dreadfully fearful.

Are we not light going into the darkness?

The church will not know you.

The world will not know you are his by your separatism.

The world will not know you by how the world will not know you are his by your poverty nor your prosperity.

But Jesus establishes the means and the method of how we will be known by the world that we are his.

It's our love for the church.

Do we love the church?

Do we love the family of God?

The way that we love one another will be the marker, the identity affirmation to the world that we are his.

We cannot say we love Jesus, but not the church.

To not love the church is to be both in direct rebellion of his parting command and to be unidentifiable to an on-looking world.

To make such a statement is to ultimately reject the gospel.

Jesus came to save the church.

He loved the church, he spilled his blood for the church, he purchased the church, and he is coming back for the church.

The gospel is not about you, it is about the glory of God and the glorification of his church.

And if we fail to function in that truth, it is not the gospel that we believe, but it is a selfish, false savior we have created for our own well-being.

1 John 4, 20 through 21 says this if anyone says, I love God and hates his brother, the church, he's a liar.

For he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.

And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother, the church.

We are not able to make the statement we love Jesus but not the church.

We have no freedom in our spiritual life to make such a claim.

Christ has commanded that we would love one another as he has loved us.

And our only proper response is to submit in joyfulness to obedience to that command.

You see, us as the Christians, we are to actually walk out the realities of our new life in Christ.

That's an expectation that we have.

As we were ones who were sinners and unrighteous, have been made righteous by the righteousness of Christ being given to us, and we now have right standing with God.

How are we to walk out?

We are to walk that out with the absence of sin in our lives, with the growing progression of obedience to his commands.

This is a reality that all of us understand.

We are to grow in holiness, we are to grow in righteousness, reflecting the reality of what is true in us by the power of the Spirit.

None of us is going to argue necessarily that fact.

Christ has made you righteous, therefore, walk in that righteousness.

But what about the context of family?

Christ has put you in a family, therefore, walk out the reality of that family.

It's easy for us to compartmentalize and to isolate some of these things, right?

To read my Bible more, to pray more, to not sin in the ways that I used to anymore.

But what about the reality that Christ brought you as an orphan out of your sinfulness and placed you into an eternal family by his benevolent love?

How are we functioning and working and striving to live out that reality in our Christian life?

It is as equally supernatural of a reality as is Christ made you righteous, he has made you brother and sister.

You see, both our righteousness and our family identity are realities for us to live out in our Christian faith.

The church is not known through their service projects, their outreach, their missions, or any other means than through their love for one another.

This is how the world will know that we belong to Jesus.

So our main idea this morning is that we love the church because Jesus loves us.

Again, seems simple, right?

We love the church because Jesus loves us.

Jesus loves us.

His church and has given everything to obtain us and deliver to our most good.

Look at the truth of the gospel to see the relentless ways in which Jesus loves us.

He will go to any expense to obtain us.

He will travel any distance to be with us.

Church, Jesus loves us with a relentless love.

Jesus came in action-filled agape love to seek the well-being of others at his own expense.

It was a costly love that was lavished upon people who what?

Upon people who could never repay him back.

It was lavished upon people who were his enemies.

It was lavished upon people who didn't understand him, people who broke his trust, people who didn't believe in him, people who would have nothing to offer him in return for the love that he would pour out for them.

This is the agape love that we must first be introduced to, then be transformed by, and then seek to live out in the context of the church.

You see, too often we bring the world's understanding of love into the church and operate in it.

And that love is a love that tends to be self-seeking, self-preserving, self-interested, cautious, careful, and calculated.

But we do not begin with our own innate understanding of love because it's intrinsically fallen, it's depraved, and it's marred by sin and its effects.

We must start with Jesus' love for us.

We talked last week about the pitfalls and toxicity of the self-love culture.

There is no reality where the more that you love yourself, the more you will love someone else.

The Bible is against such a thought or philosophical idea.

The Bible communicates to us the more we meditate and ponder and plunge the depths of God's love for us, we'll be able to love one another.

Your problem is not self-esteem.

Your problem is you've only known love outside of Jesus in broken, perverted, and marred ways.

And so you reflect that.

You operate in that.

You try to protect yourself from that.

And you bring that into the church.

It's only in drenching ourselves with gospel love will we be able to love the church as Jesus has commanded us.

We don't love the church because it won't ever disappoint us.

We don't love the church because it will never hurt us.

We don't love the church because it will never cause us pain, or always build us up, or always feed us, or always support us, and so on and so on.

We do not love the church because of anything that it would ever do for us.

We love the church because Jesus does.

We love the church because he loves us.

Do you see how maybe some of us, many of us, or really all of us, come into our relationships with one another?

We come into our marriages, we come into the relationships with our children, and we definitely come into the relationships of our church with self-seeking love.

What will you do for me?

If you fail to do these things, then I will no longer love you.

That's not the love of God.

The love of God loves us in spite of everything good we've ever done or anything bad we've ever done.

There is no action that we have ever communicated that has ever affected God's love for us.

God chose in eternity past to place his steadfast love upon us, his church, and there's nothing that can thwart that love.

Nothing.

Why does God love us?

Because he said he would.

This is the love God is calling us to.

By no means do we love the church for what it can do for us.

We love the church because we have experienced the eternally benevolent love of Jesus.

But some of us, what we do is we love the church.

We love what the church does for us.

Some of us, we love what the church does for us.

We love the church as long as it's benefiting us.

Correct?

As long as it's given us the relationships that we desire, the good feelings that we long for, the platforms that we covet, or the affirmation of self that we convince ourselves we need.

If those things are true and evident, then yes, we will love the church.

But when these are jeopardized, our love for the church wanes.

It wanes because it's predicated on what it's producing for us.

Oh, and we we see this all the time in the church family.

When things stop benefiting us, we stop loving it.

We don't allow the agape love of the gospel to transform our understanding.

We bring into the church a love built upon self-gain rather than one of self-emptying.

You see, to love the church is to fundamentally run the risk of misery.

To love the church is to run the risk of hardship and heartache, trials and troubles.

When you are choosing to obey Christ in his command, to love one another as he has loved you, you are choosing consciously the possibility of calamity.

Sounds great, doesn't it?

But that in and of itself is agape love.

It's a covenantal commitment that declares, no matter what, I'm not gonna stop loving you.

This is the gospel known, experienced, internalized, and realized in the family of God.

A God who proved to us that nothing could stop him from loving us has called us to love one another the same.

And he showed that in his son.

What more could God do than the giving of his son to show us that he loves us?

There is nothing God would do to ever, ever stop him from showing that he loves us.

Nothing.

And he has called us to love one another the same.

Some of us, though, we don't love what the church does for us, we love what we do in the church.

We love what we do in the church.

We don't necessarily love the church in its true essence as the body of Christ, the family, the brothers and sisters, the people of God.

We love it in its organizational form.

You see, we love the work, we love the ministry, we love the tradition and so on, but we never really display a love for God's people.

We love being busy and toiling and working, but we don't really love one another.

You see, we can love the organization without actually loving the people.

Jesus didn't say a new commandment I give to you, get your hands dirty in the work of ministry.

No, he said, get your hands dirty in the lives of people.

Be relationally intimate with the people for whom I have died for, and in return seek to die to yourself.

You see, many of us can discover ourselves involved in the church, in the work of ministry.

We can be doing and doing and doing.

And these are all good and necessary aspects of the church.

The church is an organization, an institution.

That is an actual reflection or reality of what the church is.

But in its essence, it is people.

We don't uh negate the reality of the organization of the church, of identified, qualified leaders, of systems and processes, of the ways that we establish different modes to serve one another and to make sure that we're able to gather as God's people, to practice uh the sacraments or to administer the sacraments, to worship and pray.

All of these things are good.

The organizational side of the church is good, but if we're busy in doing and we're not loving the church, God's people, we've got something wrong.

To serve, tithe, volunteer, lead, attend are all good and necessary aspects of our Christian lives, but they do not, church, replace or substitute the command to love one another.

Too often we get so wrapped up into what we are doing that we forget we're called to be emotionally, physically, and spiritually present with the church.

We're called to be here in the mess of one another's lives.

We tend to believe the lie that we use people to get ministry done rather than we use ministry to get people done.

Gospel love brings us into the church not merely an institutional organization, but primarily a communion of gospel love experiencing people.

And it's the midst of that.

The communion of a gospel family we're called to love.

And so our hope this morning is in this that Jesus loved the church when the church didn't love him.

Jesus loved the church when the church didn't love him.

This is ultimately the agape love of Jesus that we've been commanded to love the church with.

There is nothing predicated on the church to earn, obtain, deserve, or warrant our love.

Every aspect of our love for the church is predicated on how Jesus has loved us.

And we see this gospel truth so beautifully.

Jesus loved the church in this way.

In Romans 5.8, he says this, Paul writing to the church in Rome, but God shows what?

His love for who?

Us.

And that way, while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

We know this passage, but let's think about it in the context of this command, this new command Christ gives us to love one another.

This is the essence of the gospel.

When we had nothing to offer, while we were enemies, when we saw only our own glory and good, Jesus loved us for our well-being by dying for us.

You see, agape love is not driven by self-interest, self-gain, or self-preservation.

It is driven to do whatever it takes for the other's good.

That is what we're being called to.

Agape love is not rested in comfort, caution, or carefulness.

It is rested in the one who was harmed by us to prove to us that we would never be harmed by him.

Agape love is not dependent upon emotions, affections, or feelings.

It is dependent upon a God who has relentlessly loved us.

You see, it's only in the plunging of the depths of the gospel that we will ever be able to love the church in the way that Jesus has commanded us to.

Because our love cannot be contingent on how we love or how others love us, but on how Jesus has proven that He loves us.

The finished work of Jesus shows us that God loved us with the full realization of future misery, heartache, pain, hurt, trials, and trouble.

Think about that.

God in eternity past looked throughout time and said, I know what this is gonna cost me, but I'm gonna love them anyway.

I know the misery that I'm gonna invite into my heart, the heartache that I'm gonna experience, the pain and trouble that I'm going to be put through, but I'm gonna love them anyway.

God did not love you and I with a guarantee that things would be good on the other side in our relationship with Him.

God loved us with a future realization of misery, and we see that in the cross.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Our hope is in the gospel.

Our hope is not in how good we love ourselves or how much we're able in our own strength and might to take our perverted sense of love and try to apply it onto another person.

Our hope is in that Christ loved us when we were unlovable.

And then the command of joyful obedience that we to respond to is to love one another in such a way.

And so, how do we walk this out?

Number one, I want you to hear this, church.

Jesus loves you.

That might seem super silly, right?

That might seem, well, shouldn't this have been a lesson that we do up in Mission Kids classes?

Uh you need to hear this.

Jesus loves you.

Uh, your spouse may have shown disappointment in your behavior and actions this week.

You may have disappointed your spouse.

You may have broken their trust.

Your kids may have shown that they will never live up to fulfill all your greatest dreams and desires as you hoped they would when you first held them in your arms.

Your work might have completely hurt you this week or broken your trust.

You might have had a plethora of relationships this week where your understanding of what love should be was wrecked because it was based on performance.

And you've convinced yourself that it's going to be the performance of someone else or the performance of self that will elevate the love to what you desire it to be.

And what you need to hear this morning is Jesus loves you.

No matter how much you failed, no matter how many times you've fallen down, no matter how many times you knocked it out of the park, and you just killed it this week at your job or your family.

Maybe you just did devotions all week with your family, right?

You prayed in tongues for six hours, right in the family circle.

One of your children prophesied, you nailed it.

Guess what?

God does not love you more.

And maybe you just this week you made a train wreck of it.

You yelled at your kids, you were short-tempered with your wife.

When you went to bed at night, you rolled over and gave her the cold shoulder.

Maybe you were short and made them uh uh try to respond in obedience and control that you tried to exert over them this week.

God does not love you less.

Jesus loves you, church.

And we are only going to be able to love one another when we continue to realize that truth in us that Jesus loves us.

While we were still sinners, while we had nothing to offer, while we had nothing to bring to the table, he died for us.

That hasn't changed.

Not one bit, not one aspect of that truth has changed for you.

Jesus loves you.

Number two, we should love one another.

Now, can you imagine loving one another with that kind of love?

Can you imagine what this church family would become if we sought to love one another with that love?

A relentless love that chases down and pursues, that calls people to the righteousness of Christ that is real in them, that looks for their well-being, that looks to lay down their life for the good of one another.

What if we loved one another that way?

What would it look like?

How would it transform this community of faith?

What would the world say?

What would the world say?

Look, I get so caught up in these false uh uh uh realities, these these lies that I try to convince myself of, right?

The world will be will know who we are by how great of music we have.

The world will know who we are by how uh cool I dress or uh how much weight I lose.

The world will know who we are by our aesthetic, our appearance, our performance, our whatever.

We get caught up in all of that.

The world's not gonna know us by how cool we are.

The world's gonna know us by how messy we love one another.

By how we don't uh how we how we don't count ourselves as something to preserve or protect.

But we get into the mess of one another's lives.

We are called to love one another.

And one of the best ways that we can do this at Sacred Mission is by being in our mission groups.

In this context, it's super hard to love one another, right?

You you uh you you kind of just hear me jab my jaw for like way too long and then you kind of leave out of here because you got stuff to do or whatever.

It's hard to really love one another in this context, but in our mission groups, when you know that intimacy of one another and you're able to try your hardest to love one another in those contexts, that's where you see what we would call the rubber hit the road.

That's when, hey, uh Johnny and Sally, they're having a hard time in their marriage.

How are we gonna come around that?

How are we gonna uplift them in prayer?

How are you gonna be texting one another?

How are you gonna be uh uh serving one another?

How are you going to be doing this to try and love one another?

Highly encourage you, if you're not in a mission group, get in a mission group so that you can start living out the one-another's of the gospel.

Not that you can't do it without mission groups, I'm not making that claim.

I'm just saying if you want to see it realized in practical, real ways, that is the best context that we're gonna offer for you to do that.

Church, we have to work to love one another.

Lastly, we have to make Jesus known by our love for the church.

Make Jesus known by our love for the church.

This doesn't dismiss evangelism, this doesn't dismiss serving and missions and outreach and all, it doesn't dismiss those things.

But Lord in heaven, if we're inviting people into some dysfunctional family that that just talks bad about one another, doesn't build each other up, we're not friends, we don't love each other.

Do you really want to be inviting people into that junk?

You right, you invite somebody you've been living missionally with, you've been evangelized, hey, come to church, it's so red.

And then they just find out we don't like each other?

That would be lame.

Right?

What should we be inviting them into?

We should be inviting them into the experience of the family of God.

Holy guacamole.

You guys love each other in ways I've never experienced.

My family's so dysfunctional.

The relationships I've had in my life have been so hurtful, have been so full of calamity and chaos.

You guys love one another.

Not that we're perfect, but that we're committed.

Not that we're always gonna get it right, but we're never gonna stop.

That's the love of the church.

And that's what's gonna make Jesus known.

By our love for the church, the world will know that you are mine, Jesus says.

Church, my prayer for us today is that we would work at our hearts' affections being set on a love for the church.

Why?

Because Jesus told us to.

And that's good enough.

As we submit in joy to his commands to foster the affections that he desires for us to have real and evident within us.

Amen.

Amen.

Let's pray.