Love One Another | Pastor Montaega Harrison

11 30.

How are we feeling?

And I gotta say, y'all were singing really loud.

Like it was kind of awesome to hear.

If I haven't had the pleasure of meeting you yet, my name is Montega, and I get to lead our youth ministry here at United City Church.

And they are incredible.

I think we have some of the best students ever at this church.

It is an incredible group, an incredible group of serve team members, and it is a blessing to be a part of this ministry and a part of United City Church as a whole.

I want to introduce not only myself, but I want to introduce my entire family again if I haven't had the pleasure of meeting you yet.

I have a picture that I would love to show you.

I think I have the most beautiful family in the world.

I might be a little bit biased.

But those are my wife and my two kids, or our two kids, not just mine.

That's my wife Insle.

We've been married for 10 years, which has been a great 10 years.

There is my son MJ, who is three.

MJ stands for Montega Jr., not Michael Jordan, despite popular belief.

And then my daughter, Oakland, is six.

And so she is there.

There are two major differences in this picture that do not that either didn't exist when we took it or does exist uh now or doesn't exist now.

One of them, obviously, is the hair.

I don't have the dreads anymore.

Um, and then another one that wasn't there is my wife is actually pregnant with our third.

We're expecting baby number three.

Um, we I prayed really hard for another boy, but the Lord uh knew that would not have been good for me or the household.

So we are having another girl, which we are excited about.

So we will be welcoming Emory Harrison into the family here in about a month and a half.

It's gonna be a great time, and we're so excited and happy to have her.

Um, but I'm excited to be here with you guys this morning.

Thank you for joining us.

Those of you that are streaming online, thank you for streaming with us, and those that are joining us from our correctional facilities across the country, thank you so much for joining us this morning as well.

But I want to kick things off uh with a question.

Or before we go there, make sure you turn your Bibles.

If you have your Bibles, you should, your physical Bibles.

If you got your electronic Bibles, that's okay.

But we're gonna be in John chapter 13, verse 34 and 35 is gonna where we're gonna spend most of our time this morning.

John 13:34

But I want to kick things off with a question for you.

Have you ever been told that you look just like your mom or your dad?

Yes.

A resounding yes, I heard from this side of the room.

Raise your hand if you've ever been told that you look like your mom.

Pretty good bit.

Some of you in the room, I like yes, you look like your mom for sure, or your dad.

Raise your hand if you would say that you look like your dad, or you've been told that you look like your dad.

That's crazy.

Okay.

I think I've been told that I look like my mom the most, out of my mom and my dad.

My mom is sitting right here on the front uh front row.

So if you would, if you want to at the end of service, we could put our faces together and you compare and see who if we really do look a lot alike or not.

But I have a series of pictures that I want to show you of my kids and Inslee and how we can see this the family resemblance uh between the both of us.

But I have my picture first that I want to show you.

It's a picture of me when I was three or four years old.

And again, if you had asked me, I look the exact same.

I mean, I'm just as cute, just as good looking as I was back then.

But what I think is really cool is this is a picture of MJ around the same age.

And hopefully you can see the resemblance as much as I can.

But that is MJ a few months ago, or I guess a little over a year ago, at our uh at our kids' ministry, um, the father and son event that they did a little bit ago.

But you can see the resemblance there for sure, in my opinion.

I think you can see it.

But now there's a picture of Insley, my wife, that I want to show you of when she was a little girl.

That is her, I think honestly, if we're being real, you can probably see the resemblance of Insley and MJ a little bit more than you can me and MJ.

But here's a picture of Oakland that you can see.

Oakland is five or six in this picture, and I think you can probably see the resemblance of me and Oakland more in this picture than you could.

But if you what I think is also really cool and what has been really fun, as we go back and we look at some of these older pictures is looking at a picture of Oakland and MJ side by side and seeing the resemblance of both of them together.

That was Oakland a few months after she was born, and then MJ was about eight or nine months old in this picture.

But I think the crazy thing about family resemblance is that it always gives you a clue on who you belong to.

Those of you in the room that said, I get told all the time that I look just like my mom or I look just like my dad, there is some feature that you have that lets other people know for sure that you look like your mom.

Maybe you like people tell me all the time that me and Oakland have the same facial expressions.

And so the same facial expressions that I make, she makes, and people see her when she makes faces and vice versa, and that's great.

There's always something that ties back into who you look like and the family resemblance that's there.

You may have been told that you look like your mom or you may look like your dad here on earth, but my question for you this morning that we're gonna dive into is when people look at you, can they see the family resemblance between you and your heavenly father rather than your earthly father?

John chapter 13, Jesus is talking his dis talking to his disciples, and he gives us a picture of what that family resemblance really is and what it really looks like.

John 13 · chapter mention

And so if you have your Bibles, again, John chapter 13, verse 34-35, and it says this it says, A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another just as I have loved you.

John 13:34–35

You also are to love one another.

By this, all people will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.

We're starting this brand new series called One Another, where we're gonna walk through several one another statements that we see in Scripture.

There's about a hundred one another statements that we see in the Bible, and 60 of them have a direct obligation to us as believers of how we should treat other people around us, whether they're a believer or a non-believer.

Love one another is repeated over 15 times in scripture, which is the most single repeated one another, one another in all of scripture.

Out of the 60 that are direct obligations, that means 25% of them are to love one another.

This morning, I'm gonna give you three questions that I want you to ask yourself this morning to help you see hey, am I really loving people the way that Jesus calls me to love people?

Am I loving people the way that he commands us to in John chapter 13, 34 and 35?

John 13 · chapter mention

And so the first question I want to ask you this morning that I want you to ask yourself and take inventory of your life and of your heart is do I know his love?

Do I know his love?

If you pay attention to the word new, we see in in the first part of John 13, the word new there is interesting.

Because we know in in Leviticus, if we're reading our Bibles and we're staying in tune to the word, we know that that the commandment to love one another isn't necessarily new.

Leviticus 19, it tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves.

So the the love one another isn't the new part, but the the the new, the way the word is used in that passage is important.

The word new here is it means a new quality or a different, a completely different kind.

And what I mean by that is Jesus is looking at his disciples and he says, A new commandment that I give to you, that you would love one another just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.

And by this all people will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.

We see Leviticus tells us to love one another, and that's great.

But what Leviticus does wrong is that it is just a rule on a piece of paper that we are to follow.

But what Jesus does in John 13 is he inserts himself into the equation and he makes the commandment to love one another not just new, but he gives it life.

And he gives himself as the example that we must reach to when it talks about loving one another.

When we see love our neighbor as we're as ourselves, that's great, but how exactly do I do that?

Where is the practical application?

But Jesus and John, he not only says love one another, but he says love one another as I have loved you, giving you an exact bar to reach and something to look to and something to live to live for.

Essentially saying, Hey, I am the standard.

I am what you are to live up to, I am the bar that I want you to reach and that I want you to get to.

I'm not just telling you to love other people, but I am giving you the blueprint of what it looks like.

I'm showing you with the way that I have loved you, with my actions of what it looks like to love those around us.

Sometimes we treat love almost like it's an advanced level of Christianity.

And maybe you some maybe some of you have said this before.

I I don't really know if I can do that.

Or I don't know, I don't know if I can get that.

I feel like I'm not spiritual enough, I'm not ready, I'm not prepared, I haven't been reading my Bible enough, I'm not good enough.

But what Jesus says in John 13 is he says that love is foundational.

It is the expectation that we love those around us the same way that he showed us love.

What makes the command different is how we love other people.

It's not just just love, and we're like, oh, we'll just be nice to them.

But Jesus says, Hey, just as I have loved you, you are also to love the people, love everybody else.

What does that mean?

That means unconditionally, selflessly.

Not with not culture being the standard that we look up to, not feelings being the standard, not convenience, but but Jesus being the standard.

Jesus being the example for us when it comes to love.

So I'm gonna give you the context of John 13.

Jesus is in the upper room preparing for the Last Supper, and he's having a conversation with his disciples, and he gives this, gives him, uh, gives the command, and obviously we we know how the story ends.

Jesus is then betrayed and arrested and all those things.

But just before he gives the disciples this commandment, Jesus does something else that again shows how active his love for his disciples were.

Jesus got up from the table, he took a towel and he wrapped it around his waist, he got down on his knees and he washed the feet of the disciples.

Now let's pause there for a second.

If you are like any normal person, and again, normal, emphasis on normal, you don't like feet.

And if you were living in biblical times, I promise you, you definitely would not like feet.

Close-toe shoes maybe weren't ready available, and so people mainly wore sandals, maybe they walked around barefoot, and so you're walking around in the sand, you're walking around in the dirt, you're walking through the mud.

If you work with animals, then you work, you know, you know where I'm getting at.

You know what you were probably dealing with with and walking through.

And despite that, Jesus gets down on his knees, he humbles himself as the king of kings and the lord of lords, the name above all names, and humbles himself to the lowest status of any household servant and washes the feet of the disciples, but then also washes the feet of the man that he knew would send him to his death.

That Jesus would wash the feet of the man that he knew would send him to his death.

John 13, 11 tells us that Jesus knew exactly who would send him to his death, who would betray him, and yet Jesus still loved Judas enough to wash his feet, even when he didn't deserve it, even maybe when he didn't think he needed it, he still did it.

That should change your definition of love by itself.

Culture tells you to only love people when it when it's self-serving or when it helps you or when it benefits you, but we know that Jesus was countercultural.

Jesus loved people who hurt him, Jesus loved people who failed him, Jesus loved people who abandoned him, Jesus loved people who manipulated him and sent against him every day, or in other words, Jesus loves us because we do all of those things.

If we're honest, we all have people in our lives that are hard to love.

And I'll tell you mine, I'm not ashamed.

Slow drivers, I think are the most frustrating people to love on the face of the planet.

I'm getting a couple of nods.

Y'all, y'all, y'all know what I'm talking about.

There's a couple of you in the room.

I'm not gonna point any name, like point any fingers or say any names.

But it's so frustrating because it can't be that hard to just press the gas pedal and just drive your car.

It's that simple.

Just go.

You all have experienced it.

It's a Saturday afternoon, the sun is shining, which means the weather is nice, which means people are outside and they want to be a part and they want to enjoy the nice weather.

Maybe you're taking your kids to a game, or you're going from practice to practice, or you're running errands, or you're doing grocery shopping, and you decide that you're gonna hop on 1960.

And we all know what traffic is like on 1960.

And you decide as you get on 1960, the car that you get behind happens to choose today of all days to be the slowest driver on the face of the planet and drive 20 miles an hour under the speed limit.

And immediately you're frustrated because you see the cars in the lanes beside you and they are passing you by, traffic is moving and flowing just as fine, except for in your lane, and you're frustrated immediately.

I trust me, I'm there, I'm right there with you.

You're honking your horn, maybe you're you're riding their bumper, maybe you're yelling at yourself in your car, hoping that nobody hears you, maybe hoping that nobody has their window down.

But when the moment comes that you get to pass that car, and we all know how sweet it is, because like let's be honest, we pass the car, we're gonna look, we're gonna look to the left, we're gonna look to the right.

And when we pass and when we get beside that car, we see that it is a brand new driver with a white knuckle grip on the steering wheel, not letting go for anything, because they are terrified to be driving through the traffic that we're dealing with.

And in the in that moment, immediately we get convicted.

Because as we are supposed to love one another, that means in every way, even when we feel like they've done something that annoys us, even when it feels like they've done something to get on our nerves, Jesus commands us, as I have loved you, you're also to love one another.

How many times have you done something that Jesus found annoying?

And yet he says, I mean, I wrote the commandment, so I kind of have to.

I'm gonna love you anyway.

I'm gonna love you through it, even when it's hard, even when it's difficult, even when you don't deserve it, I'm still going to show you love.

Guys, can I just say that's hard?

It is hard to love people when you feel like they've wronged you.

It's hard to love people when you feel like they've done something that you don't like, but when Jesus says, as I have loved you, that means even when it's hard, even when it's difficult, even when we don't want to, even when they don't deserve it.

Biblical love is not based on whether someone deserves it, because if love dependent on deserving it, none of us would receive the love of God He wants to give us because we don't deserve it.

We all have people in our lives that are hard for us to love.

Maybe it's a friend.

For some of you, maybe it's a co-worker or a family member, and for a few of you in the room, maybe it's somebody sitting right beside you.

Can I tell you something this morning?

What makes the commandment to love one another more than just a rule on a piece of paper is that Jesus didn't issue it from a distance.

Jesus himself was in the middle of his own uh most costly act of love that he was about to go to the cross.

He was about to do something that none of us would even dream of wanting to do.

And he's not asking us to do something that he only talked about, he became it.

He says, the love that I want you to show should be unconditional and sacrificial.

And so if I'm asking you to love sacrificially, I'm gonna become the sacrifice that enables you to do that.

I'm gonna go to the cross so that you don't have to, so love could flow through me, through you, and to other people around you.

Which means if we're going to love the way that Jesus commands us to, we have to ask ourselves a deeper question.

And so the second question I want to ask you, I want you to ask yourself this morning is do I reflect his love?

Do I reflect his love?

Knowing his love and reflecting his love are two completely different things.

You can know his love all you want, but if you never apply it and show it, it's useless.

Because knowledge and information without application is pointless.

Again, Jesus is in the is in the upper room with his disciples on the last night of his arrest.

These are his final hours with his disciples.

These are some of the last conversations that he's gonna have with them.

And the one thing that he wants to make sure that the disciples know and understand that they get right is not their theology, it's not their doctrine, it's not their politics, it is whether or not they have love for one another.

That's because Jesus looks and he says, By this, all people will know that you are my disciples if you have love for one another.

Not by what you post online, not by how many Bible verses you can recite, but people should see Jesus in you by the way that you love them.

When I was in middle school and all throughout high school, I had a lady that that uh worked on staff at the church that we attended, and she uh was awesome, she was incredible.

Her name was Miss Jill Hayes, we called her Miss Jill.

I would never dreamed of just calling her Jill.

We were like we were like we were close, but like that's just like respect thing, right?

I always called her Miss Jill.

And Miss Jill was one of the most joy-filled, happy people that I think I've ever met in my life.

And through her joy and through her happiness and through her love, she shared with me something that I'll never forget.

I was going through a difficult time where I didn't enjoy being around people.

I didn't love some people that I had to work with and had to deal with.

And she looked at me and she said, Montega, I want to tell you something.

It is okay to not enjoy being around people, but it's never okay to not love them.

And that hit that really stuck, that was a quote that she gave that really stuck with me.

And I think I think about it a lot in my marriage, and those of you that are married in the room, you probably have experienced this, and maybe you've done it yourself.

Where you look at your spouse, and me and me and Isley have been married for 10 years, and there have been times in our 10 years that we have said this to each other, where we looked and we said, Hey, I love you, but I don't like you right now.

You're really kind of getting on my nerves.

You're annoying me.

Can we can you stop?

And in those moments, I realized that Miss Jill was completely right that, yeah, like there are gonna be times that we're not gonna enjoy being around certain people or like certain people, but it's never okay to not love them.

That should be something that we should should never do and stay away from.

There wasn't a time that I was around Miss Jill that I didn't feel better about myself and who I was.

She has such a gift of making everybody in the room feel seen and feel loved.

And I used to wonder all the time how could somebody just naturally be like that?

But what I learned was that it wasn't natural for her at all.

The overflow of love that she showed everybody around her was only possible because.

Of the love that she had received.

John tells us why in 1 John chapter 4, verse 7, he says, Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God.

1 John 4:7

When you love others, church, you become the lens through which an invisible God is made visible.

Your love isn't just a nice quality, it is literally how God makes Himself known in the world.

This means the way that you talk to people matters.

I'll say that again.

That means the way that you talk to people matters.

The way that you exhibit and show patience to those around you, even on the road, matters.

For some of you in the room, and including myself, your resting face matters.

Why does it matter?

Because the way that you show Jesus or the image of Jesus that you reflect by the way that you love others may be the only image of Jesus that people see that week.

And I'm not saying that because I'm not saying that to scare you, I'm not saying that to guilt trip you into it.

But I want you to see that it is easy to sing about love on Sunday mornings when the whole room is full and people are singing as loud as you just were, but it is really hard to live that out on a Monday afternoon.

When that coworker just came in your office and said something that you didn't like, or that family member just sent you a text message that frustrates you.

It's harder when they hurt you.

It's real easy when things are going great, but that is exactly where the love of Jesus shines the brightest through us.

Paul speaks of this in Romans chapter 5.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

He says that we rejoice in our sufferings, and we all know, hey, that sounds backwards.

I don't want to be happy and rejoice when things are not going the way that I want them to.

James 1:2 tells us the same thing.

James 1:2

But who rejoices in suffering?

But Paul explains why.

He says this suffering produces perseverance, which then in turn perseverance produces character, which character produces hope.

And then he says this hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

Here's what Paul is saying.

He's saying the difficult moments aren't interruptions to your faith, the moments that it's hard for you to love other people aren't interruptions to your love, but it's the proving ground of it.

You don't actually know what is in you until someone hurts you, until someone disappoints you, until somebody betrays you, and then you have to choose how you respond and what you do next.

I remember playing sports and playing basketball, and you you go into a game and your coach always says the same thing, and he says, You don't really know how good of a team you are until you get punched in the mouth.

When you get punched in the mouth, how do you respond?

When everything is going great and somebody drops a bomb on you and it puts an it ruins your day, how do you respond?

Do your emotions come out and pour out and bleed out onto those around you, or do you still choose to love people through it even when it's difficult?

Even when it's hard, even when you don't want to, how do you respond?

Think of an orange.

We've all like like, hey, we're about to go to South Africa uh tomorrow, and so if you would be praying for us, got a lot of a long flight in front of us.

One of the uh the things that I'm excited for the most about South Africa is they do fresh squeeze orange juice really well.

Like it is incredible.

And I can imagine when they squeeze that orange juice to make orange juice for us in the morning when we have breakfast, that when we squeeze that orange, what comes out is orange juice.

Not because of the squeeze, the squeeze doesn't produce the orange juice, but the orange juice that comes out only comes out because it was already in there in the first place.

And so the question is isn't where the hard moments are going to come because they will.

Paul tells us that, James tells us that the trials will come.

The question is, what is inside of you when they do?

How do you respond?

What happens?

And Paul's answer is that if you have genuinely received the love of God, or if the Holy Spirit lives in you, then what comes out under pressure isn't just your best effort at being a good person.

It's the love of God Himself poured into you, not overflowing out of you.

That's why the love that Miss Jill showed was so effortless because it wasn't willpower, it wasn't her trying, it was just overflow from the love that had already been poured out onto her.

The love of Jesus shows brightest in the hardest moments, not because we suddenly become stronger or get better, but because those are the moments where what's really in us gets revealed.

But here's the here's the problem with that.

We can know all of that.

Like I said, we can know God's love.

We can try to reflect his love, but that kind of love doesn't start with us.

It's not something that we produce ourselves.

And so that brings us to our third and our last question.

And I want you to ask yourself this morning have I received his love?

Have I received his love?

There are four types of love that we see in scripture.

There's familial love, which is friendship, or brotherly love.

Think about that.

There's storegay love, which is familial love.

And so think of the relationship between a parent and a child, a mom and a dad, uh, or a mom and a son, or a dad and a daughter.

If you were here for uh for the song of us and our Song of Solomon series, then you know all about romantic love, which is Eros, the relationship between a husband and a wife specifically.

But there's a fourth love that I think we kind of misunderstand or doesn't really get talked about a lot, which is agape love.

And that is selfless, unconditional love.

It's the highest and great of greatest form of love that we see in scripture, so much so that Paul felt that he needed to distinguish God's love from any other, and he defined what agape love really was in 1 Corinthians 13.

And so if you've been to any wedding, I promise you that you've heard it before.

Love is patient, love is kind, it doesn't envy, it doesn't boast.

You've heard it, you've seen it.

That is what Paul is describing as agape love.

It represents unconditional and sacrificial love, which God demonstrates towards humanity.

Agape love acts regardless of how it feels, and this type of love can only come from one place, and that is God Himself.

You cannot consistently love like Jesus apart from Jesus.

John 15, 5 tells us that I Jesus is talking to his disciples, and he says, I am the vine and you are the branches.

Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me, you can do nothing.

That includes love.

If you are not tapped into the source, if you are not abiding in who Jesus is, you cannot love outside of Jesus.

It's just not possible.

And so our problem is not mainly that we don't love like we should, our problem is that we are sinful beings.

We're selfish people.

You know that you're selfish.

We're hard to love, we're hard for other people to love.

That is just a fact of life because of the sin nature that is built into us, and because of that sin, God's wrath remains on us, and there's only one way that it's removed.

John 15, 13 tells us that Jesus laid down his life for his friends.

Jesus died in our place, he endured the wrath on the wrath of God that we deserve so that God's justice would be satisfied and his love could flow through Christ to us and through us to each other.

The commandment to love each other is new because Jesus is the standard that we get to follow, but the cross is the definition of love.

It's the definition of love because it's not just words on a page, but it is action.

Jesus didn't just tell you that he loved you, he proved it by hanging on a cross and dying for our sins.

By sacrificing himself for you.

Sacrificing himself for me, sacrificing our himself for us.

He was the atonement for our sins, which means that God didn't just turn the other way and look the other way from our sin and ignore it, but instead God dealt with it head on by turning every ounce of wrath that he had for sin, that he had for us, that we so rightfully deserved, and turned it and aimed it at Jesus on the cross and let him experience so that you would be res that you'd be able to receive the gift of eternal life.

John 3 16, we all know it.

That's like one of the first verses that you learn as a kid.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son that whoever would believe in him would not perish but have an everlasting life.

For God so loved the world.

Again, there's agape shows up again.

But then in Romans 5:8, Paul writes again that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5:8

And so what I see between those two verses is I see love that was extended before we deserved it.

Love that was extended before we knew we needed it.

Love that was extended before we were even a thought from our parents.

God loved us enough to send Jesus to die for us on a cross, and Jesus loved us enough to die for us while we were yet in our sin before we even knew who He was, He still sacrificed Himself on a cross for us.

Guys, that is the gospel in his purest form.

That instead of instead of looking away from us, instead of uh uh uh ignoring us, he took our place.

God saw us at our worst, and he moved toward towards us and not away from us.

Some of you need to hear this this morning.

God does not love a future polished version of yourself.

He loves you right now.

He loves you in your struggle, he loves you in your anxiety, he loves you in your addiction and your doubt and your mess and your insecurity.

He loves you.

He doesn't love what you think that you can become.

I asked you three questions this morning that I wanted you to ask yourself to take inventory, to get yourself thinking about how you are loving other people.

Question number one is do I know his love?

And here's what we found.

We found out that his love isn't possible.

It has action to it.

Love got down on his knees.

Love wrapped wrapped a towel around his waist, love washed his dirty feet, and love went to a cross.

God didn't just send a statement, he showed up, and that love has your name on it.

Question number two: do I reflect his love?

The world should be able to look at you and know who you belong to.

They should be able to look at you and see the family resemblance of the Heavenly Father the way that you love other people.

Not by your theology, not by a bumper sticker, not by the Christian playlist you play on your phone at work, but by the way that you treat people on a Tuesday afternoon when nobody's watching.

You are the closest picture of Jesus that some people will ever see.

In church this morning, that isn't pressure, that's a privilege to be able to be the hands and feet of Jesus, to be able to show Him, show, show people Jesus through the way that you love other people.

And the third one, have I received His love?

This is the one that everything else depends on.

Because you can know about His love and still never let it in.

You can reflect an image of love on the outside and still be running on empty on the inside.

But when you truly receive what God did for you at the cross, when you allow it to move from your head into your heart, you don't have to manufacture love anymore because it just overflows, because that is what you have received.

We all should want the family resemblance.

We should all want to look like our Heavenly Father.

But in order for us to look like the Father, we must have we must act like the Son.

And the Son loves you enough to die on a cross for you even when you didn't deserve it.

The Son loves you unconditionally, and he asks us to do the same thing for one another.

To love selflessly, to love unconditionally.

We all could take a lesson from Jesus and we know that.

That's not a surprise.

We need to love one another better, not selectively or unconditionally, not only when it benefits us, but even when we don't want to, we should truly love others like Jesus.

Some of you came in this morning, and the moment that I started talking about loving difficult people, a face popped up in your head.

Again, maybe it's a coworker, maybe a friend, a family member, or somebody in the room.

Church, can I tell you that?

Can I tell you something this morning?

You've been telling yourself the way that you feel about them is justified.

Maybe it is.

Maybe what they did to you is terrible, and you are totally justified in the way that you feel about them.

But Jesus didn't wash Judas's feet because he deserved it.

He did it because that's what love does.

Because love sacrifices, love is unconditional.

You can't do that alone if you were never supposed to.

That kind of love doesn't come from willpower, it doesn't come from trying harder or striving to do the right thing, it comes from receiving something.

So today, this morning, with every head bow, with every eye closed, before I ask you to love someone better, I have to ask you something else first.

Have you personally received the love of God?

Have you said yes to Jesus?

Because you cannot give away what you have never received.

This morning, Jesus is inviting you into a love that changes everything.

A love that pursues you, a love that transforms you, not by demanding more from you, but by giving everything to you.

You've never experienced it, but you really want to.

The opportunity for you to say yes to Jesus is today.

The same love that was there when Jesus sent his son to die on a cross.

The same love that died for you while you were in your while you were in your sin is available for you today.

All you have to do is say yes.

God loves you the way that you are right now.

He's not waiting on you to get better, he's not waiting on you to improve your life.

He says, Come to me now just the way that you are and let me handle the rest.

Maybe you're in this room this morning and you haven't been loved.

Or maybe you haven't been loving people the way that you should.

We would love to pray with you and help and pray that God would give you the strength to forgive and to love others even when it's difficult, even when they don't deserve it.

Maybe you're in the room this morning and you've been thinking about what comes next.

You've been in United City, you gave your life to the Lord, you started growth track, you started to get plugged into a life, but you feel like you're just missing something.

Here at United City Church, we believe that everybody has a next step, and maybe your next step is baptism.

Yeah, we will have people here at the front that would love to talk with you, would love to pray with you and help you get involved and help you take that next step.

Maybe your next step is becoming a member.

You've been here for a few weeks and you love the community that comes with it, you love what God is doing here, you want to be a part of it, and you wanna you want to join the church, you would love to talk to you about that as well.

Because you have an opportunity to say this.

So whatever your next step is.

Lake today, make this morning, today, today's worship.

Can we thank you for you?

Push them to take their next step.

You gotta give them all this encourage.

You gotta let them lean on you instead of leaning on themselves.

Thank you for what you're doing.

God, we love you in crazy things in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Man, what an amazing time that we had today.

Hey, if you know of someone that needs to hear this message, we'd love for you to share that on socials.

We love for you to actually go and check out our socials so you can stay up to date on everything happening in the life of United City.

And if you need to take the next step, we'd love to help you do that as well.

Love you guys so much, and we'll see you next week.