The Speed of Love

I want you to have a picture in your mind.

First thing that comes to your mind when I when I ask you to think about the life of Jesus.

What is it that comes to your mind?

And of course, we believe that everything about the cross and the empty tomb is central.

But outside of that, what do you picture when you think about Jesus and how he lived, how he walked?

What comes to your mind?

Is it the way he interacts with children and how he speaks of how our faith needs to be like that of a child?

Is it him being interrupted as he travels to heal a leper?

Is it the way that he taught?

Is it the way that he invested in his disciples?

What's the picture that stands out to you the most?

As we consider that, let's just open our hearts and open our minds.

And let's say, God, would you speak to us?

Come, Holy Spirit.

Would you say that with me?

Come, Holy Spirit.

Because we can we can read, we can study, but if we don't see and receive and experience a move of the Holy Spirit, nothing will change in our lives.

And our heart, I hope, together in unity, is that we would be more like Jesus, that we would become more like Jesus.

Father, we ask that you would work.

Come, Holy Spirit, in Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Amen.

So if you want to, if you want to follow along, we're gonna be primarily in uh Luke chapter 10, and we'll also be in 1 John as we open up this series.

Luke 10 · chapter mention

Um talking with some of our staff and team, and I'm I'm gonna share with you a little bit of vulnerability that when we planted church at the grove, my mindset was let's reach as many people as we can.

Let's reach, reach, reach.

That's that's kind of how I'm wired.

I believe that that uh I have a passion for evangelism.

But as we have planted the church, and as I share with our staff, it's one thing to reach people, it's another thing to determine what to do with those people when you've reached them.

And so the first half of my ministry is investing heavily and reaching, and then and then I'm I had I came to a place, have come to a place, and I am continuing to try to understand that we must make disciples of who God brings.

And so as we celebrated Easter and we got together and we debriefed a little bit on Tuesday, I was just really honest.

I said, I'm not really, I don't know that it's that important that we fill a room like we did at Easter.

Now there's a part of me, there's a part of me that is excited about that.

I I want us to reach, I want us to reach as many people as we can.

But I want you to, you know, if you were here last week, just kind of look around the room and look at the difference and the amount of people, not good, not bad, just reality.

And and what is more, I think, important is that we learn to become like Jesus because if we become like Jesus, we will, we will care about people and reach people with the gospel.

There's a there's a there's a story told by a writer, pastor named John Ortberg, one of my favorite, about his spiritual mentor, Dallas Willard, and in a conversation they had, Ortberg at the time in the 80s, early 80s, was a was on staff at a megachurch called Willow Creek in Chicago.

And um, but he was struggling with being in that in that fast-paced, let's just fill up a room culture, and struggling and wrestling with what do we do with all of these people.

And Dallas Willard had become his mentor.

Dallas Willard was a philosopher at the University of Southern California, but was a was a follower of Jesus.

And so I had to read some of his books in seminary, and they are they are on a level that are where you have to read very slow and reread.

So John Ortberg, I love how what John has done.

John Ortberg has taken what what Willard has said and brought it down to where Russ can understand it.

But they're having this conversation, and you can imagine John in this fast-paced megachurch environment being stretched in all these different directions, and and they're in this phone conversation, and he asked uh Dallas, what do I need to do to become the me that I want to be?

What do I need to do to become the me I want to be?

And there was a long silence on the other end of the line, and then Dallas shared these words.

You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.

And so John writes this down on a piece of paper, and he said, Okay, Dallas, what else?

What else?

He said, John, there is nothing else.

Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day.

You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.

Now that you may you may not agree with this, you may not feel this.

I would think a lot of us, we feel that tension in this culture that we live in.

And if the issue is that we need to become more like Jesus, then we need to learn to live and love at the pace of Jesus.

We started church at the Grove.

We wanted to see people reached eventually to become formed into the image of Christ.

What I've learned is that people are far too busy to become like Jesus.

That's hard.

That's hard.

Now that hits me between the eyes.

And a result, we see people that are burned out, stressed out, overworked, tired.

Souls.

These are people who have been reached, that know Jesus, that are not full of the abundant life that Jesus says that He will bring.

And so Willard is not the only one who recognizes this.

You you may have heard of a lady by the name of Corey Timboom, famous for her family, she and her family who were willing to hide Jewish people from the Nazis during the Holocaust.

And she has written multiple books, but one that you might be familiar with is called The Hiding Place.

But here's what she says: if the devil can't make you bad, he'll make you busy.

And so Carl Jung is a philosopher.

He's the one that's kind of created what had become popular, the personality profiles, and you've heard about them, the Enneagram and the disc profile, the kind of the father of that personality kind of stuff.

He says this hurry is not of the devil, hurry is the devil.

And so at face value, you might push back.

Russ, let's get to scripture, let's get to Jesus.

We are.

But I want you to understand that there's this progression.

Michael Ziggorelli says it this way.

He said, it may be the case that number one, Christians are assimilating to a culture of busyness, hurry, and overload, which leads to, number two, God becomes more marginalized, not in the unbelievers' lives or in the culture that we live in, but in the lives of Christians, which leads to number three, a deteriorating relationship with God, which leads to number four, Christians becoming even more vulnerable to adopting secular assumptions about how we should live, which leads to number five, conformity to a culture or busyness and hurry and overload, and then the cycle just continues over and over again.

And whether we choose to admit it or not, busyness is quickly shriveling up our souls and making us less and less like Jesus.

And so I want you to, as we as we begin this series, it's one thing to talk about like steps.

We're not, it's it's not about steps.

It's about leaning into Jesus.

But but and we're gonna talk about spiritual disciplines.

We're gonna go back to some of the classic disciplines that the modern church has kind of kind of turned away from, that the early church, the early church fathers put into place for believers to lean into to fight against the culture that would pull us away from Jesus.

But before we get to that, we want to talk about the why, before we get to the what.

The why is this we must slow to the speed of love.

We are slow to the speed of love.

Love has a speed, and we must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from our lives.

And let's look at let's look at the text here, Luke 10, verse 25.

Luke 10:25

One day an expert in religious law stood up to test Jesus by asking him this question.

Teacher, what should I do to inherit eternal life?

Jesus replied, What does the law of Moses say?

How do you read it?

The man answered, You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.

Right, Jesus told him.

Do this and you will live.

The man wanted to justify his actions, so he asked Jesus, And who is my neighbor?

Jesus replied with a story.

A Jewish man was traveling from Jerusalem down to Jericho, and he was attacked by bandits.

They stripped him of his clothes, beat him up, left him half dead beside the road.

By chance a priest came along, but when he saw the man lying there, he crossed to the other side of the road and passed him by.

A temple assistant walked over and looked at him lying there, but he also passed by on the other side.

Then a despised Samaritan came along, and when he saw the man, he felt compassion for him.

Going over to him, the Samaritan soothed his wounds with olive oil and wine and bandaged them.

Then he put the man on his donkey, on his own donkey, and took him to an inn where he took care of him.

The next day he handed the innkeeper two silver coins, telling him, Take care of this man.

If his bill runs higher than this, I will I'll pay you the next time I'm here.

Now, which of these three would you say was a neighbor to the man who attacked the bandits?

Jesus asked.

And the man replied, the one who showed him mercy.

Then Jesus said, Yes.

Now go and do the same.

Now, this is a familiar story to us.

It is a familiar story, probably one of the most common stories known inside Christianity and outside Christianity.

People that are outside the faith that don't even follow Jesus will say, look at this story.

This is a story that represents just good morality and being a good person.

But in order to understand the story, we must understand the context, right?

First, we see that a man asks Jesus, what must I do to inherit eternal life?

That is typically the point.

That's where we all want to get to.

How do we get there?

How do we get into the kingdom?

How do we get into heaven?

What must I do?

And in typical fashion, Jesus does not respond with an answer.

That's what I would do.

I know everything, so I'll give you the answer.

But Jesus responds with a question.

And the man responds with, he said, you know, Jesus says, Who's your neighbor?

Or Jesus rhymes with a question, what do you think about how you should have eternal life?

And so the man says this, and he's he's basically quoting the law Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

And a lot of people would stop there, but the man continues by saying, Love your neighbor as yourself.

And so these are these are two familiar commands or ways for which we live, and now we know them as the great commandment given by Jesus, love God with all your heart and love your neighbor as yourself.

But they come from Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy 6, the Shema, that says, you know, love the God, love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength.

And then there's another scripture in Leviticus that speaks, that says we should love our neighbors as ourselves.

So they are both aware of the law and the scriptures and what it says.

And so Jesus commends the man on the statement.

He doesn't correct him, he confirms what he says to be true.

And he says, Do this and you will live.

Many Christians, listen to this, many Christians, when they talk about eternal life, probably would not answer the same way this man does.

We're good at loving God.

Let me say this again.

Some of us are good at loving God.

But we have forgotten to love our neighbor.

And if you want to be like Jesus, you've got to love like Jesus loved.

So let's take a little break here from this story, and let's flip over to 1 John.

1 John is a great book, a short read, but so rich.

1 John 2.11.

But anyone who hates a fellow believer is still living and walking in darkness, but such a person does not know the way to go, having been blinded by the darkness.

You still got some issues with somebody at your old church?

You still hurt, you still angry?

Anyone who hates a fellow believer is walking in darkness.

1 John 3 14, if we love our brothers and sisters who are believers, it proves that we have passed from death to life.

But a person who has no love is still dead.

Anyone who hates another brother or sister is really a murderer at heart.

Oh my goodness.

Absolutely.

And you know that murderers don't have eternal life within them.

1 John 4, 7 and 8.

Dear friends, let us continue.

Let's say this together.

To love one another.

For love comes from God.

Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God, but anyone who does not love, who does not love, does not know God, for God is love.

We must slow to the speed of love.

We must slow to the speed of love.

Can we say it together?

We must slow to the speed of love.

So we could, we could, we're we're gonna come back to the text, but here's a reality.

Here's a reality.

Spiritual maturity is measured in our love for God.

Amen, brother.

And our love for others.

Where's the amen?

Our love for others.

And so we what do we what do we what are we getting at?

What are we going for?

What do we want?

What's the goal?

It's to become like Jesus.

Jesus says the kingdom of God is here.

So we're we're we're we're so heavenly minded.

We pray people out of heaven more than we pray people into heaven.

Getting a small group?

What's your prayer request?

It's always about somebody that's sick.

Listen, you know, Jesus heals.

Let's pray for sick people.

But the kingdom of God is here.

We are in the kingdom.

Let's join with Jesus.

Your kingdom come.

Thy will be done on earth as it is to heaven.

So part of it is to get the kingdom of heaven into our lives and into this world that we are currently living in.

And then when we step into heaven, eternal life, it will be a natural step.

And so we we want to grow.

We want to spiritually grow.

We don't want to remain spiritual infants.

So back to the story.

So Jesus tells the man he's right, but the man wants to justify his actions.

So he asks Jesus, who's my neighbor?

So Jesus, you know, begins to tell the story.

Let's talk a little bit about this.

They're on this Jericho Road.

Jill and I got to walk on the Jericho Road in Israel, and it is not a road like Highway 81.

It is a path that is from here to about here.

And so this happens all the time on the Jericho Road.

Thieves would hide.

They rob.

They take people, they take their belongings.

They want to hide up in the rocks and jump down upon people.

And so most people tried to travel in groups in order to protect themselves.

It's a narrow road that goes through the desert from Jerusalem to Jericho, back and forth.

This is where people will travel.

And who are the characters in the story?

Hero number one is the priest.

Hero number one is the priest, the religious guy.

Thank God the pastor is here.

It's all gonna be okay.

What does he do?

What does it say that he does?

He walks.

He has to step over him.

And if you've ever been there, you understand.

It's not like he walks over into the third lane of the intersection.

He literally has to step over the man.

Hero number two comes.

It's the assistant pastor.

It's the it's the it's the it's the it's the Levite.

What does he do?

Same thing.

He passes him by.

Now, I is it possible we give those guys a bit of a hard time?

I mean, they were they in a hurry?

Were they late to get to the festival activities?

Were they concerned about being close to a dead body or blood that would have made them unclean and unable to fulfill their temple duties and responsibilities?

All of those things are possibilities.

But Jesus is telling this story for a purpose, and we can't get past, we can't ignore, we can't walk around the story because here's what Jesus says.

He said, There is another person, another man that comes.

And Jesus says it is a Samaritan.

Which is so hugely significant because Jewish people hated Samaritans.

They were half-breeds from centuries earlier, where the northern kingdom had been conquered, and as the conquerors came in, they began, the Jewish people began to intermarry.

They had their own temple and they had their own style of worship, and they were hated so much that people would not even travel through Samaria.

And so Jesus says the Samaritan is the one who stops and shows the kindness of God.

He is the one.

Jesus is that when he tells this story, it would have been scandalous.

In the ears of the religious people, in the ears of the one he is talking to.

People would have been shocked and just blown away by this story.

But what is Jesus teaching us?

He feels compassion.

The Samaritan felt compassion enough to stop.

His heart is moved to soothe and to bandage the wounds, to load the man on his donkey, to take him to an end, to even say, listen, if the money I'm giving you now is not enough, I will come back and cover it later.

This is the pace of love.

What does that have to do with us?

Walton County, Georgia.

I mean, we're living out in the country.

I mean, we're just, it's, I mean, we're out here, everything slows down out here, doesn't it?

In a world that is obsessed with productivity and always coming up with creative ways to get more things done, we must look at the life of Jesus and understand that productivity is often contrary to the pace of love that Jesus sets.

Productivity and efficiency are often contrary to love.

Now, confession.

I'm just being honest.

That's my fles, and when my flesh comes together with my task-oriented, people-pleasing kind of nature, and I'm had really hoped that Jill would not be in here for this sermon.

I my calendar gets full because I can't say no to anybody.

This past week I am preparing, thinking, praying about a message, and I have three boards that I'm on that all had meetings this week.

I mean, and so so it's it's just, and then, and then my wife's birthday was Wednesday, my son's birthday was Thursday, and and you see, I'm I see see there there's there's a clash about to happen.

I got my son's birthday right.

She let me defer.

She said we can we'll defer.

It was it so anyway, uh yes.

But you know, do you this is kind of one of those things that we say it's a little bit trivial.

How do you spell love?

T I M E.

But it is absolutely true.

It's true.

And so we've got to be willing to slow down to the pace of love and willing to follow the life of Jesus, willing sometimes to be interrupted for a move of the Holy Spirit.

In his book, Three Mile an Hour God, the late Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama, he puts it this way: He said, God walks slowly because he is love.

If he is not love, he would have gone much faster.

Love has its speed, it is a spiritual speed, it is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed.

It is a slow, it is slow, yet it is Lord over all other speeds, since it is the speed of love.

And if we want to go contrary to the culture, contrary to the world, contrary to a lifestyle that will make you physically and emotionally unhealthy, we must take an inventory.

As we look at the life of Jesus, and I ask you to think of the image.

What is the image of Jesus that you have when you think of him?

And besides the cross, besides the bodily resurrection, what is the image that you have?

I get the idea that when Jesus is living, I never get the impression that he was in a hurry.

And he was the most mission-focused person that ever lived.

He embraced distractions to be led by the Holy Spirit.

And he had a capacity to love others.

You've heard this quote, and it's a very common quote, but it comes from Theodore Roosevelt.

People don't care how much you know until they what?

Know how much you care.

And so was I.

I kept coming back to the memories of my brother Eddie.

So my many of you might know my brother Butch.

Butch lives here in Walton County.

He pastored Summit Baptist Church, was a planner pastor, been in ministry, just recently retired, struggling with a debilitating sickness.

But, you know, we had another brother between us, Eddie.

He was the smartest, most intelligent of all of us.

But Eddie lived life at his own pace.

And so when Eddie passed away, and you know what families do when somebody passes away, you get together and you plan a funeral and a memorial, and you talk about the memory of that person, and you eat fried chicken and potato salad.

Eddie, Eddie, nobody talked about Eddie's productive, successful life.

As a matter of fact, by the world's standards, he wasn't that successful.

But they talked about how Eddie did things like this.

There was a young lady in the church where I came to Christ and where Eddie influenced me in a great way.

Eddie would go to this young lady's house.

She was paralyzed from the waist down.

And she lived in a very poor family.

And Eddie would take his old dilapidated van and he would drive it up to her house, and he would roll her out to the van, pick her up, put her in the front seat, and take her to church Sunday after Sunday.

And those are the things that we talked about.

When Eddie passed away, just recently, Nathan was, Pastor Nathan from Social Circle, he was talking about a visitation he went to and a person who had in their obituary.

It says this Joe loved Jesus and his family.

He never met a baby that he didn't want to hold, and everyone he met walked away a friend.

And so what do you want people to say about you and your life when it comes to that time?

Man, they are more like Jesus than anybody I knew.

They love Jesus.

They accepted interruptions.

They were led by the Holy Spirit, how they lived, they served, they walked at a pace, they lived at a pace of love.

And so can we just spend a moment?

Listen to me, church.

Can we spend a moment asking for God to work in our hearts?

Asking for the Holy Spirit to bring revival.

And asking for Him to start with me.

And just a moment in prayer, evaluating what is God saying to you with what we have read in His Word and how I have in the best way I can exegeted some of these scriptures and applied it to your life and my life and the culture in which we live?

What will it take to bring our nation back to Jesus?

It might take an economic collapse, it might take us coming to a place where we are persecuted.

But why don't we go ahead and instead of waiting for God to break us through suffering, let's just go ahead and allow Him to break our hearts through revival.

And so would you join with me?

And I'm going to ask you during this time as we close the service, I would love for us to move out of just our normal seated posture and be willing either to come to the altar or get on our knees.

That's fine.

But let's let's plead with God.

God, let's just pray right now, Father.

My heart is for our church to grow into spiritual maturity.

My heart is for our church to reach people, but to more effectively reach people and to keep people, we must move out of being spiritual infants to grow up, walking with you, understanding the heart of Jesus, falling in love with his word, falling in love with the way of Jesus, allowing that power of forgiveness, the power that came from his death and his resurrection to work in us in every area of our life.

And that God, that we would be willing to walk at the pace that Jesus walked.

And we would be willing to slow down to the pace of love.

Love for our fellow believers and love and compassion for those that are different than us.

So, Father, right now, would you work?

Would you work?

Help us to make room for the work of the Holy Spirit.

Help us to make room for how you want to lead us as we continue down this path of ruthlessly eliminating hurry from our lives.

So would you stand with me?

I'll ask you to stand.

Just go ahead and stand.

And let's be willing.

Just to listen to the Holy Spirit.

Let's not rush out of here.

Let's pray.

Maybe we need to come to the altar.

Maybe there's somebody in this room that needs you to pray.

That needs you to pray for them.

The Holy Spirit would lead you to pray for them.

Speak a word of encouragement.

Let's listen closely to how the Holy Spirit would lead us.