Love Never Fails

We've been in a series we're calling Love Is, and we're taking it from 1 Corinthians 13.

1 Corinthians 13 is probably most known for being a wedding verse.

You know, you read uh 1 Corinthians 13 when people are getting married, but it's noteworthy that 1 Corinthians was written to a church.

It was actually a group of people that were falling apart relationally.

They were about to cancel each other out, they were about to uh fracture their community.

And so Paul very masterfully goes through the first 12 chapters of 1 Corinthians, speaking with tremendous specificity around the issues they were having, and he gets pretty specific who was doing what and what they needed to do about it.

And then he sort of takes the conversation, pulls it really high in 1 Corinthians 13, where he talks about love.

And he says in the first three verses, the first he said, if I could speak with the tongues of men and of angels, in other words, if I knew every human language and I could even speak angel, he's using hyperbole, but basically he's saying, you know, if I if I was really knowledgeable, but I did not love others, if it didn't, if I didn't use that knowledge to love, then it would be pointless.

He goes in the second verse, he says, hey, if I knew all the mysteries of heaven, like, you know, people sit around trying to figure out what does God's word mean?

People sit around trying to figure out what's God's mind, what is, you know, the mysteries of heaven.

He said, if if Yahweh himself was whispering mysteries into my ear and I knew all of it, but it didn't turn into loving the people around me, it wouldn't have any point.

He said, if I was like the ultimate humanitarian, like I sacrificed all my money and all of my energy and all of my body to help people, you know, to do good, to give to the poor, to whatever.

He said, you know, I'd have something to brag about, but if it didn't turn into love, then it would be useless.

So he's raising the stakes of the conversation, which then should force us all to go, well, what does love even mean, right?

We're like, we're trying to figure this out.

He gives a definition, and that's where we're gonna jump in.

I I'm um I'm gonna read it in the NIV, the New International Version, uh today.

He says in verse 4 love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud, it does not dishonor others, it's not self-seeking or selfish, it's not easily agitated, it doesn't have a hot temper, it's not easily angered, it does not keep score, it keeps no record of wrongs.

Love does not delight in evil, but rejoices with the truth.

It always protects, it doesn't attack, it always trusts, it always hopes, it always perseveres.

And then verse eight, love never fails.

Um just the title of my message today is just verse eight.

Love never fails.

I'm gonna talk about what does that mean?

Love never fails.

And that some of you might have bristled a little bit when I said that.

Love never fails, because maybe you're like, no, love does fail.

I uh if love doesn't fail, why do I have failed relationships?

If love doesn't fail, how how come I've got a broken heart?

If love doesn't fail, how come my um my first marriage didn't work out?

If love doesn't fail, how come I don't talk to my brother anymore?

If love doesn't fail, how come I'm not on speaking terms with my kids?

If love doesn't fail, how come my business partner and I fell out and and and it's never, it's irreparable, it's not coming back.

If love fails, like it feels like it feels like 1 Corinthians 13 overpromises and underdelivers, and that this is sort of uh uh you know something that we wish was correct, but it's not.

Love never fails.

That's what we're gonna look at.

Um let's first of all say this, and let's let's do our best.

I'm gonna later in 1 Corinthians 13, Paul says, Hey, when I was a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.

He said, When I became an adult, I put childish ways behind me.

Okay, go ahead and bring up that verse actually.

Uh he says, When I when I became an adult, verse 11, he said, when I was a child, I spoke, thought, reasoned like a child.

I grew up, I put childish ways behind me.

Verse 12, he says, now we see things imperfectly like puzzling reflections in a mirror.

When he's talking about how we see God and how we see ourselves, and he said, Sometimes we're not really clear on what's real, what's true, what how to define stuff, what's true about me, what's true about God.

He said, and it's puzzling, and he says, like reflections in a mirror, which doesn't really resonate with us because our mirrors are very, very clear.

In fact, I was in a hotel this week, I was in there and they had it wasn't, they had a mirror, but then they had another mirror right here, it was like this, and it wasn't like a it was like a mirror/slash magnifying glass with us with like light on it, and I turned it on, I freaked myself out.

I'm like my pores were like that big.

So it like zooms in.

I mean, you can see the dirt in your pores, and and you closer view of yourself than you ever wanted to have.

Okay, and so when we say mirror, that's what we think, but that's not what the Corinthians thought.

In fact, Corinth was well known for their bronze, and they didn't have the technology to have the type of mirrors that we have now.

What they had was actually polished bronze.

When he said mirror, that was what they thought.

In fact, uh you can see some of these uh these are artifacts that are dated around the same time that Paul wrote this, um, that were what they would have considered a mirror.

Here's another like a shiny bronze.

So they would polish bronze and try to kind of see themselves.

You can imagine, you know, trying to catch the light right and look in there and see yourself in that.

And so he says, look, when we go through life as human beings, okay, we are limited by our flesh, which means we don't know it all.

And he said, it's kind of puzzling, even what to believe about God or what to believe about ourselves.

And so so he says, you know, uh, I reason now through my adult mind, but I have enough maturity to know that I I don't see all of this really clearly.

And he said, but but then, and then speaking of the end of days, speaking when um we come into fullness and in seeing God and or even after our life, it says, we'll see everything with perfect clarity.

All that I now know is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.

So when I when I start with like, well, love has failed me, my relationships have been broken, I've had my heart broken, and maybe you've had a bunch of that, how do I make sense of that if love never fails?

Well, the first thing you're gonna want to do is to look at the 1 Corinthians 13 definition, verses 4 through 8 of love, and instead of just saying, Well, I was in love, because what does that even mean?

You want to look at this and go, did my relationship look like this?

Was I giving and receiving this?

So was my relationship patient?

Was it kind?

Were we kind to one another all the time, or did we have issues with that?

Was there envy?

Was there boasting?

Did pride ever get in the way?

Did egos ever well up?

Did we ever dishonor one another?

Did we push each other's buttons because we knew how to?

Uh did was it self-seeking?

Did we ever go selfish and it was me versus you?

And I powered up.

Did I ever, was there anger?

Did that ever spill out?

Did we ever put each other's faults up in each other's faces and keep reminding each other and not let each other lift stuff down?

I could keep going, you get the idea.

Did we run out of trust and hope and perseverance?

Okay.

Well, what we're doing is actually finding out is what we had in that relationship, was it was it love?

Because it doesn't say in verse 8, relationships never fail.

It didn't say people never fail.

It said love never fails.

And I think my hunch and your hunch is probably that if I had a relationship full of patience, kindness, okay, and we treated one another this way, we probably would have a pretty good success rate.

If we look at also trying to make sense of what feels like failure in our relationships, especially if you feel like you've given more to love than you've gotten back.

Let's make sense of that.

Um, okay, let's go to the beginning.

When a person is born in the world, even before the brain is formed well enough to be able to understand something as abstract as love, you start receiving it before you even know what it is, or at least you should.

Somebody held you in their arms, somebody fed you.

Okay, so when you cried, somebody comforted you.

Somebody showed up for you, somebody provided for you, somebody gave you attention and nurture, right?

You start growing, somebody helped you learn.

They helped you learn how to walk, they helped you learn your ABCs.

They sat down and read a book, they read books to you at night.

When you were scared of the boogeyman, they went and scared him off.

When you lost a tooth, they put some money under your pillow and told you it was the tooth fairy.

And they played along.

They taught you how to play catch.

They played with Barbies, you made up stories, okay?

You played house, they played with you.

Now, these are people, these are people bigger than you that could have been doing something other than paying attention to you.

They could have been working, making an extra buck.

They could have been hanging out with somebody else, but they showed you love.

And what they did, if it was done the right way, is they met a need for you, which is this a desire to be loved.

Before you give love, you have a need that needs to be met inside, which is a desire to be loved.

In the book The Four Loves by C.S.

Lewis, he says what many people call love is not love as much as a desire to be loved.

If you somebody broke up with you and you craved to be with them, and you said, I love you so much, I can't let you go.

I love you so much, you continue to pursue, and they said, No, I'm done.

It's not for me.

I want to move on, I don't want to be with you.

And you can't let them go.

And you've concluded in your mind, because I love them so much, I can't let them go.

But the reality is it may not be that you love them so much, it might be that you crave for them to love you so much.

So it comes back to even a self-serving love.

It's that I I want to be loved by you.

And actually, really pure love is you know, hey, we we break up, and actually, if somebody else is better for you, I love you so much, I'd rather you be with them, even though it breaks my heart.

So it's this true in parenting, right?

I'd love it for my kids to grow up and live next door, and we all have you know shared experiences, but at some point it's not my job to uh be driven by my craving for them to love me.

It's actually to love them, to do what's right for them, which might mean to move somewhere else.

They might move to another state, they might move to another country, and I will support that and I will encourage that, and I'll come alongside that and I'll do anything I can and not try to stifle them because I crave to be loved by them.

So if you grew up in a family where you received the message loud and clear that you were loved, then you operated from a place of fullness when you went into relationships.

If your childhood was less than that, if maybe not only did you not have somebody showing up for you, but you were neglected or maybe worse, abused, you were attacked, you felt in danger all the time.

Okay, maybe uh for you, they gave you the message of un of conditional love.

In other words, I'll pay attention to you if you give me this.

So, what you end up with is a void inside your heart.

You end up with a void inside your soul that is a craving to be loved as you are, and you've got this hole.

So you're operating from a deficit.

So then you get old enough to start picking and choosing your own relationships.

And somewhere in your teenage years, you got your first boyfriend, you got your first girlfriend, and now it feels like in some way you tasted what felt like some kind of unconditional love.

Somebody picked you.

And and you can you can watch it.

I mean, it's like clockwork, the intensity that somebody throws themselves into their first love, especially if they had a void, if they're operating from a void, there was a passionate you threw yourself in with intensity because you say, I'll give everything to this.

I'll give my heart, I'll give my soul, I'll give my body, I'll give my time, I'll give my mind.

And you thought you had found the answer, and you threw yourself into that, and you thought you were loving well by being sacrificial and giving all of yourself, but it was coming from a place of desperation.

You were desperate.

And that desperation usually ends in more pain.

Because at some point it ends up uh being a bad element in relationships, and so now somebody pushed you away and now you went, but I gave all of me to you.

I gave all of me, and maybe you were possessive and you were jealous because you had fear that if they look at somebody else or they were to leave you, now I'm back to the void.

I thought they could fill the void, and if they leave, I I do everything to hang on to them, and they go from person, you you know, you they leave you, and now you've got the void again, and you get a few iterations of that, and this is now a chasm in my soul.

By the way, because you are unsure of your own valuation, you have a tendency to try to select people who have some sort of social proof of value because you think that because the world thinks they're valuable, if they think you're valuable, somehow now I might be able to prove to myself that I have value.

So you start going with people, sometimes with superficial social proof.

I gotta get somebody who's hot, I gotta get somebody who's got swagger, I gotta get somebody who's charming, I gotta get somebody who's got a nice car, I gotta get somebody who's got a great reputation, I gotta get somebody who's tall, I gotta get somebody who's got great hair, I gotta get somebody everybody thinks is cute, I gotta get somebody who's popular, and you didn't take any time to vet them out to find out if they have the equipment to actually be in a reciprocal, loving, sacrificial relationship.

I know this is not an issue at noon.

10:30, they were laid out on the floor.

10:30, I didn't even have to do an altar call.

They were just, I mean, it was revival in here.

Uh, I know it's the you guys are way past that.

You never dealt with this stuff.

But but but to some, they they continue to try to fill that void with people who have value, and they did they're you're you're picking the wrong people.

And you keep picking them.

Why?

You're operating from a void.

Trying to fill that void with people.

What in the world do we do about this void, Pastor?

Have you come to the right place today?

Woo! 1 John 4 19 says, We love others because he loved us.

This is the gospel.

Jesus is the one for you because he fills the void.

This is the gospel, the good news.

That God demonstrated his love toward us that while we were sinners, he died for us.

That regardless of whether the tooth fairy showed up for you or not, regardless of whether people neglected you or not, regardless of if you were somebody's little girl or you were somebody's big guy growing up, if they were there or weren't there, regardless of how deep that void is, God can fill it.

Don't underestimate the power of God's ability to fill the void of love in your life.

This is why coming to God through Jesus is such a big deal.

It fills the void.

It shows me my valuation.

You read the gospels, this is in the literal stories, the eyewitness accounts of Jesus' actual life and the made-up stories that he tells.

In the book of John, he goes to a woman at the well who had a huge void.

She kept trying to fill with men.

Six in a row, oh for six.

And he goes to her and he goes, Excuse me, ma'am, you're thirsty.

I said it.

It's what he said.

It still holds water all these years later, right?

He's like, You're you're you're really thirsty.

He said, You have a thirst in your soul that you're trying to quench with men.

You're trying to prove you're lovable.

You're trying to fill it, and the the first guy you freaked him out, and the second guy you put the you pushed you away because you were desperate.

You thought you were given all of yourself.

You thought you you gave him all your body, all your time, all your focus.

And and and by the third one, you're like, but I I I washed his clothes, I cleaned up his house, I helped him with his build, I had his back, I was faithful to him, I did this and this and this and this and this and this and this.

And he's like, Yeah, I know you're thirsty, you're desperate.

You're desperate.

You think you're loving in totality, you think you're loving in fullness, but you're loving from an empty place.

You're loving in desperation, and then that desperation is sabotaging, it's destroying your relationships.

Hey, listen, hear me today.

I hope you hear my heart.

I didn't bring you here to shame you.

Did not bring you here to shame you.

I hope that you hear this, not in a spirit of condemnation.

I'm trying to bust you out of this prison.

We're trying to fill this void with the right stuff.

So I'm not blaming it all on you.

I'm not blaming it all on you.

This isn't like, you know, my whole life's a failure, and now I showed up and now the pastor blamed me one more time.

That's not what this is.

Listen, hear my heart.

You should have been loved better earlier.

You should have been loved better earlier.

Human beings do human things.

People will let you down, even if they mean well.

The reality is you should have been, you should have had the signal early on.

You should have known that you were loved unconditionally, that you you operated from a place of love.

But but but that's not the case.

And so this void now, and by the way, if you get stuck in everybody lets me down and I love well and nobody loves me well, you got to see this for what it is.

And often it's in these moments that God will shine a light in the darkness and to say, look, part of my issue is I'm not operating from a place of fullness.

I'm operating from a place of desperation and I'm trying to fill a need with people.

And Jesus says to the woman at the well, if you drink what I give you, you'll never be thirsty again.

You'll never be thirsty again.

You will now be equipped with enough fullness for you to be able to enter into human relationships with proper expectations.

And you'll now be able to start living, 1 Corinthians 13, essentially.

You'll be able to live in a place where you're not operating out of fear.

Jesus makes up a story, right?

The story of the prodigal of this tremendous failure, this man's son who, you know, disrespects him and goes and blows his business and his money and all this and comes back with all the failure in the world, and the father still loves him.

So this is the message of the gospel.

This is, and this is where, if you're in that spot, okay, this may be new information for you.

If you're honest enough to look and say, I'm operating in my life, functionally, I'm operating from a void.

I have a void, and I'm trying to fill it with colleagues, platonic relationships, romantic relationships, my kids, my family, whatever it is.

I'm trying to use people to fill something.

You need to build your whole foundation of your life on the on the love of Jesus.

What did you just sing?

I'm already loved.

This gyra song, did you hear yourself sing it?

I'm already loved, I'm already chosen, I know who I am, I know what you've spoken.

You are enough.

You are enough, you are enough, you are enough, you are enough.

Some of you are like, why do they repeat this stuff over and over again?

You know, because he is enough, and we're trying to get you to believe it.

You've had a lot of signals in your life, maybe you know, overt or covert messages, implicit or explicit, that hit you with that you're not enough and you're operating from a void.

And we sing these things because I go, Lord, you filled this for me.

It's okay for me to want good relationships and to have friends and to have romance, that's fine.

But I'm doing it, I'm not desperate.

I don't have to get it today.

I know who I am without it.

And so I can be patient and not desperate.

So operating from the filling of the void.

God, God's love fills the void.

Um second thing, let's keep going with this.

Love is love doesn't fail.

Love never fails.

Um I want to make another observation.

Is um don't underestimate the impact of your love on you.

Don't underestimate the impact when you love the impact that it has on you.

Obviously, when you love, you want it to have an impact on them and have and to produce a result of some sort, right?

We've been talking about this in this series the law of love.

It says love one another and fulfill the law of Christ, which again in the relational ecosystem, it's circular.

You give and receive love.

If you give Love to me, and I don't give love back to you, then I deplete the resource.

So we love one another, it's circular.

Okay, but often what happens is you give love and you're hoping that that will create some reciprocity, that it will create you know a result from the person, and when they don't give the result you wanted, often you go, Well, love failed.

Well, no, because think about when you are loving, it says in 1 John, when we love, we're putting God's image in the world.

God is love.

So not only are we putting God's image in the world, but something is happening inside of me when my heart and and my mind is growing in love.

It's who I'm becoming as a person, regardless of what you do with it.

Let me give an example.

I I uh read a book a few years ago and I got to meet the author, uh, Dr.

John Perkins.

He's he's still alive, he's 93 years old.

He was born, okay, um 93 years ago in in the deep, deep south.

Um I actually brought him up on the stage and I just asked him questions for like an hour.

Uh he's a civil rights leader, and he talked about um, you know, 70 years ago, he was um he was brutalized um for his race.

And he's a black man living in in the heart of Mississippi, and he's being beaten and he's terrified.

He's being brutalized, he he doesn't know if he's gonna get killed, and so he said as he's in the middle of this attack, and he looks up at his attacker, and he said he looked into his eyes and he sees pure hate.

He said he saw that pure hate and he was he was he was physically brutalized and he's scared.

And he said, with all of that going on in the frenzy and the chaos of the moment, he goes, I felt hate well up in my heart.

And he said, the only way I can explain it is is God.

He said, because in the middle of terror and physical excruciating pain, I had this moment of clarity when I looked in his eyes and I saw hate, I realized as I felt hate welling up inside of me, if I give way to this hate, I will become the same monster he is.

The same hate that has rotted his soul, the same hate that has caused him to become the monster I see, I will be my own version of that.

And so he said, I made a decision there.

And think about this now.

Logically, any of us in that situation, it kind of even makes logical sense to want to hate back.

Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, you hurt me like this, I hurt you like that.

You almost feel like you need to hate to protect yourself.

To hate feels like it would give you enough juice to be able to not just get trampled on.

And yet he somehow he said he believes it's absolutely the power of God that he was able to have the presence of mind in the middle of an attack and with the deep core fear to go, I will not let that happen to me, I will not become that.

Just think about this.

That man could have taken his life in one of two ways.

One, he could have literally killed him.

But the second is if he fed him hate and he chose to eat it and ingest it and let himself become a hateful person, he would live his next 70 years having his life stolen from him.

You've now become hateful.

And so he said, I made a decision that people can do things to the outside.

I can't control everybody else, but I control inside the man that I want to be, the person that I want to be, and I chose I'm going to live my life provoked and lived and formed and shaped by love.

So when you think about you put love in the world, and you want that love to come back to you in some way, you want that love to impact the people around you in some way, and you don't have any control of that.

These are free will human beings, and you don't always get it back.

But don't underestimate what's happening in you, in your heart, when you choose to operate from a place of love.

Two more thoughts, and then I'll I'll get you out of here.

Um it says in verse 7, love never loses hope, or love always hopes.

It's like, well, what does that mean?

What does love always hope mean?

So does that mean that you know, if somebody breaks up with me and I really want to get back together with them, I never lose hope, which means I stare at my phone and I wait for them to call me and I'm looking for their text and I just don't lose hope.

And part of me is like, should I should I quit or not?

No, I'm gonna, I mean, I read 1 Corinthians 13, 7, it says don't lose hope.

And so then I look at them on social media and I'm like, have they broken up with her yet?

Have they broken up yet?

And I'm hoping that you know their relationship breaks down and that we come back and tell me how wrong he was.

Is that is that what love?

No, that's not what that means.

Uh sometimes relationships have closure, sometimes relationships die, sometimes relationships have a finality and an end, and there's no coming back.

Love always hopes.

I think it has really a lot to do with the fact that when it comes to my thoughts about hope, my beliefs about hope, that I realize that I have hope in the fact that all I see is not all there is.

So the result of your life, maybe you were in an environment where you put love into that environment and it did not produce what you thought, and you come away and you go, you know what, that was such a waste of my life.

I worked that job for 20 years.

I was nights of those people for 20 years, and then they restructured and got rid of my position and got now.

I'm gone, and I look back, I'm like, what was it even for?

Why did I even do that?

You know, I did it love always hopes is like, you know what?

When I put something, when I put the image of God into the world, even if I can't taste the fruit, I believe it's there.

Even if I can't taste, there's people around you, when you have loved this way, when you have loved through the power of God, when you put God's image in the world, there are people that you have impacted that maybe the impact was even subconscious.

Or they may never tell you, they might not even be able to articulate the impact that you had.

But you know that by doing the right thing for the right reason, by putting love into the world, by loving the right way, that there's a hope that it's having more of an impact and more of a result than even you'll ever be able to quantify.

And there's there's a hope in that versus you kind of coming away with this story in your head that I just wasted my life.

I did the right thing and it didn't come back, and then you end up demoralized.

And of course, that impacts how you go into your next season.

Last thought.

Thinking about what it would be like to have had a front row seat to Jesus' life, to be riding with Jesus.

Because when you read the story closely, when you read the story, you find out that it really seemed like Jesus had failed.

At one point in his life, everything looked like a failure.

Probably a lot of us in this room, most of us, believe in Jesus and we believe the story of Jesus.

But even if even if you don't, even if you think the story was made up, it's a great story.

It's a story so good, only God could have written it.

Spielberg couldn't have come up with this.

Tolkien couldn't have come up with this.

Think about this story.

That guy's born in the world.

He came to serve, he came to seek and save that which was lost.

He saw crowds of people and he took compassion.

And he healed people.

They couldn't walk, now they can walk.

They were blind, now they can see.

People were hungry, and he fed them.

He showed up like with the woman at the well, and he helped her work through her emotional issues.

He helped her see stuff she had never seen before.

He gathers a group of people and he invests in them and he pours into them and he brings the best out of them.

And as the story plays out, he fights through temptation, he fights through opposition, and when he gets to the cross, he has been rejected.

Although perfect, although having never sinned, although having been sacrificial, he is rejected in every way this entire room has ever been rejected.

He'd been rejected by the oppressive foreign government, he had been rejected by his own people, he had been rejected by his own tribe.

The people in the crowd, but the people that really should have, he was one of them, pushed him out.

He had a close group of friends, they turned on him.

His best friend betrays him.

One of his other 12 friends commits suicide.

What do you mean love never fails?

Been rejected in every way.

We're gonna start talking next week about struggle, and we're gonna look at in the Garden of Gethsemane where it says, Jesus says, My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death.

If you've ever been in that spot where it felt like your emotions and your your mind, your mental health was so overwhelming your body couldn't take it, that's where Jesus was.

At some point, his body breaks down.

So Simon of Cyrene has to carry his burden physically because he's physically unable to perform.

Goes to the cross and has to watch his mom watch him tortured.

So whatever rejection or relational failure you've had, whether it was the crowd or your own people or your best friend, and where it felt like your love failed, have you ever thought about how Jesus could have felt with Judas commit suicide?

If you've ever had somebody in your sphere become so hopeless that they killed themselves, all you think is I failed.

Love failed.

You start thinking, when I thought of them, I should have called, I should have gone over.

They said that thing.

Maybe I didn't, if I'd have listened better, maybe if I'd have loved them earlier, if I'd have been a better mother, if I'd have been a better brother, if I'd have been a better neighbor, if I'd have been a better friend, maybe I could have.

And you have Jesus who is perfect love, who had one of his closest friends, who somehow didn't connect the dot that in failing his friend, Jesus was gonna forgive him and restore him.

And so when Jesus was crucified, none of his disciples were like, hey, there's still hope.

They are all they go into hiding and despair.

Despair.

Like, what in the world?

This isn't how it was supposed to end.

This isn't how it was supposed to happen.

We left our nets for this.

We left our businesses for this.

We left our families for this.

We were despised for this.

We were abused for this, we were beaten for this, we were faithful to this, believing that it was gonna be victory, and now he's just dead and we're afraid, and they're hiding.

Nobody, nobody thought it was victory.

It looked like love failed.

A story so good only God could have written it.

Because in that moment where everybody was conclusive about love failed, the resurrection is where all the life happens.

It's in the resurrection that new opportunities born.

It's in resurrection that God brings new people into your life, it's in the resurrection that things are restored.

And that's the story.

You think love has failed.

You think love has failed.

Love does not fail.

Love does not fail.

There are new opportunities that God will bring.

If you have a conscious mind to hear what I'm saying, you have breath in your lungs and you woke up today, you have resurrection opportunity.

You have new things that God is going to bring.

Now, there are some things that die.

Relationships do fail.

Relationships do have closure, they do stop.

But God brings new things in his grace.

God brings new opportunity.

He opens up new doors, there are new horizons, there are new morning, there's a new day coming for you.

And so it's it's through that that we have a fellowship of suffering with Christ.

If you've been rejected in any way, you're in good company.

Because he's experienced it in the same way, and yet maybe you've put an end on something and think that it has failed, and you've failed to realize the power of the resurrection and the power of the new opportunity.

So, what are we going to do here before we pray?

Let's get our bearings.

Love never fails.

Maybe you need to take a look at your life and look at some of your failed relationships and run them through the grid of 1 Corinthians 13, 4 through 8, and be honest with yourself.

Maybe you need to look and say, Am I operating from a void?

Am I ticked off at all the people that didn't fill the void all the while I was holding them to an expectation of something that they were never designed to do?

I was like the woman at the well, drinking one after another after another and being upset that they didn't do it.

That's not there, that's not what they're supposed to do.

We get that from God.

Operating from fullness, he fills the void.

And then to understand that love never fails, even if they don't reciprocate, there's something good happening inside of your heart.

We don't lose hope.

You don't know the full story, you don't know what all was produced from that.

You only have what you see, and what you see is not all that there is.

And regardless of how much pain you're in or what kind of rejection you've experienced and what feels like failure, glean power from the cross.

Glean power from the resurrection.

Jesus is touched by the feeling of your infirmity.

He's walked through what you've walked through and today offers you hope, new opportunity.

Love never fails.