Seeing Jesus: The Lifecycle of Love

Good morning, everybody. Beautiful day we've got. There was a lovely rainbow

over church this morning. That was cool.

We took pictures. Don't worry. Someone did.

How are you guys? Some extra people. Lenore, you said great.

Good. I was so glad. Normally, it's just Bob.

So I was really just asking how Bob was doing, but then I found out how the

rest of you guys are doing. So that's good. So glad to have you guys here this morning.

Yeah, really, really, really great.

We've been working our way through the Sermon on the Mount, which is in the book of Matthew.

So if you want to grab a Bible, there should be a Bible in front of you.

If not, there's some Bibles in the back there.

And you want to turn to Matthew chapter 6, which is kind of the middle part

Matthew 6 · chapter mention

of the Sermon on the Mount, the middle chapter focusing in on Jesus's sermon

here. So go ahead and find it.

Open it up. We're going to be digging in. We've been working our way through,

I think this is week four or five in the Sermon on the Mount.

And what we see is that Jesus, like he's gone up to this mountain,

just like Moses did, right?

And what he's doing is, just like Moses, he's delivering a commentary on God's

law, what it would mean for people to pursue God, to have a relationship with him.

And just like Moses, he's focusing in and concerned on the question of righteousness,

because righteousness seems to be the category of things that it's necessary

for us to have a relationship with God.

God. God is concerned about righteousness. Moses is concerned about righteousness.

And in this sermon, Jesus is very clearly concerned about righteousness.

And not only just righteousness, true righteousness.

Jesus has spent a considerable amount of the sermon elaborating on Mosaic law,

right? So he's in conversation with Moses.

And what he's doing is calling people, the people who are listening,

in this case, Jews and any of his disciples, calling them to a standard of righteousness

that goes even beyond the law.

And Jesus isn't saying the law doesn't matter. He's saying actually the true

righteousness, the righteousness that God wants to bring about in your life

and in my life, in the life of disciples of Jesus Christ, it exceeds the scribes

and the Pharisees, the legal experts of the time.

See, Jesus knew what Paul explained later, that the only viable strategy for

righteousness is love, not law.

Paul talks about that in Romans 13, among other places, and we touched on this

last week, but Romans 13, 8 through 10 says, Do not owe anyone anything except

to love one another, for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.

The commandments, don't commit adultery, don't murder, don't steal,

do not covet, and any other commandment are summed up by this commandment,

love your neighbor as yourself.

Love does no wrong to a neighbor.

Love, therefore, is the fulfillment of the law.

As Jesus calls people to have this genuine, true righteousness,

this righteousness that exceeds the scribes and the Pharisees,

that exceeds the legal obligations, he's calling them to love.

If you want to obey the law, complete the law, fulfill the law,

be truly righteousness, then love is the way.

Because we all know, right, it's not nice to murder people. That's not nice.

It's not nice to commit adultery. It's not nice to covet, to steal,

to do all these things that Moses prohibited.

But when we love, not only do we do none of those things, we also actually treat

each other with dignity and kindness.

And we are understanding and we're demonstrating all those characteristics of

love that you hear about at weddings that Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians

13, patience, kindness, all those things.

When we love people, we serve them at the expense of our own egos.

And we treat them as people whom God treasures as they truly are.

And we desire their good.

And so love, by a principle of its superseding of law, fulfills law.

Because it keeps us from anything that we're prohibited from.

And it leads us into what God really calls us to, this righteousness that comes from love.

And when we have that clarifying and purifying love in us, a love that comes

from God, we end up fulfilling the law in every respect.

Let's think for a moment about these commandments that Moses taught the people.

Because again, Jesus is in dialogue with these 10 commandments, with the law of Moses.

Moses brings down the 10 commandments from the mountain. You can read about

in Exodus 20, and we'll do a quick overview here in a second.

The first four of those commandments were about relationship with God,

and the last six were about relationships with other people.

And in his sermon, right, up to this point in chapter 5,

Jesus has begun by talking about how we fulfill this law concerning other people,

how we love people, how we serve them, how we love our enemies,

how we go the extra mile, how we turn the other cheek.

He's talking about all these things, these expressions, which are obviously

the outflow of love for people.

And as he goes along here, he said, that's how he began chapter five,

focusing on like the relationships with others.

As we go along here, he begins to shift the focus over to our relationship with

God. And here's what he says.

He says, be careful not to practice, it's 6.1. Be careful not to practice your

righteousness in front of others to be seen by them.

Otherwise you will have no reward with your father in heaven.

So whenever you give to the poor, don't sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites

do in the synagogues and on the streets to be applauded by people.

Truly, I tell you, they have their reward. But when you give to the poor,

don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing so that your giving

may be in secret and your father who sees in secret will reward you.

Whenever you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites because they love to

pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by people.

Truly, I tell you, they have their reward. But when you pray,

go into your private room, shut the door, and pray to your Father who is in secret.

And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

When you pray, don't be like the Gentiles, since they imagine they'll be heard by their many words.

Don't be like them, because your Father knows the things you need before you ask Him.

And we're just going to skip down to verse 16 for a second, just because these kind of fit together.

Whenever you fast, don't be gloomy like the hypocrites, for they make their

faces unattractive so that their fasting is obvious to people.

Truly, I tell you, they have their reward. But when you fast,

put oil on your head and wash your face so that your fasting isn't obvious to

others, but to your Father who is in secret.

And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

Hey, I just want to pray for a second. I want to just pause.

I feel like we should just pray. Lord, you know, we come to your word.

And we want to hear right. We want to see right. We want to understand.

And Lord, we want to step into what you invite us to.

So God, we just ask for your spirit. We ask for wisdom.

We ask for love. We ask for all the things that we need, Lord,

the things that you so generously supply to us in Jesus Christ.

We ask for those things in abundance as we come in and try to understand right now. Amen.

See Moses gave commandments about how people

should relate to God if we look at the first four commandments laid out

in Exodus 20 they are and I think I have them on a slide here do not have other

gods beside me do not make an idol for yourself and then he goes on explains

what that looks like do not misuse the name of the Lord your God he goes on

to explain what that looks like remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy and

he goes on and explains what that would look like.

And Jesus in no way here is saying, no, no, no, no, no. Moses had it wrong. Those.

What he is doing is what he's been doing throughout the sermon so far.

He's engaging with Moses' commandments, and he's usually saying yes, and even more so.

Yes, these things are true, but let's look behind at the heart.

Let's look at where these actions actually come from.

He's asking us to go deeper and to consider what it would truly look like to

not just have fulfillment of the law on a legal level, but from our hearts and

from our spirits. and as our whole people, what is the even more so righteousness

that we're being called to?

And he calls people not to simple compliance about rules about God,

but he invites them to something more.

And it's what we talk about as Christians. Like it's about relationship.

It's about really loving God.

Jesus was super clear throughout his ministry of how important it was not only

to love people, like we talked about last week, but to love God.

In Matthew 22, 36, there's this famous statement of God, of Jesus talking about

what it would look like to be righteous, right?

And so what happens is scribes and Pharisees, these legal scholars come up to

Jesus and they ask him a bunch of questions and sometimes they're sincere and

sometimes they're trying to trick him.

But this seems like a sincere question. The scribe comes up to him and says,

teacher, which command in the law is the greatest?

And Jesus responds and he says, love the Lord your God with all your mind,

with all your heart, with all your soul.

This is the greatest and most important commandment. And the second is like it.

Love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.

See, Jesus understood and he consistently taught.

He says, love God and love people. That is the sorts of true righteousness.

And by love, love for God, love for people, you will be obeying and fulfilling

the commandments of God spoken to Moses and to the prophets and delivered to the people.

But Jesus gets, he understands the heart, right?

And like, I mean, I only understand this about my heart, that I am a complicated

person with a lot of problems.

I don't know about you, but Jesus actually sees beyond that.

He understands our hearts and he understands the way that we just like play

games with God and the way we keep things on the surface and we never try to get to the heart.

And understanding that he warns us, he says, be careful.

As we're trying to worship God, as we're trying to honor him and love him,

be careful because as you go about loving people, it would be easy to fall into

the trap that is the trap of, as he says in verse one, practicing your righteousness

in front of others to be seen by them.

Look, here's the reality. If you're going to love others,

to serve them, to bless them, to do all the things that Jesus invites us to

in chapter five, and that he calls disciples to, like disciples are people who

practice, who do the things that Jesus did, right?

If you're going to go out and do those things, like it's going to involve an

element of being public about it, right?

Other people are going to be involved.

The reality of love is that it's always directed towards others, right?

Love, just like alone in my heart, not directed towards an object outside of

myself, is actually just self-love. It's not love.

Love is completed as I go and express love to others and love to God.

So what I'm saying is that love happens in a community.

And so when you go out and you obey and you love God and you love others, people will notice.

But what Jesus is not warning us, he's not warning us against the fact that,

I mean, people are going to notice.

I mean, earlier in the sermon, he says, don't let your, like put your light

like a city on a hill, like let your righteousness shine before men.

I mean, obviously it's okay that people notice, but what Jesus is doing is he's

warning us against doing things, loving people, going out and serving and caring

about them for the sake of being seen.

It's inevitable that people are going to notice your love, but we are called

to look at our heart here by Jesus.

And that's hard. Because again, I don't know about you, but I am not nearly as self-aware.

I'm not nearly aware of what goes on in my heart as I'd like to be.

I would not be surprised if at one point, as I stand before the Lord,

that Jesus looks at a lot of my things and he says, there were a lot of mixed motives there.

Now, what do I do with that? Is that a problem? The fact that I have mixed motives?

But look, Jesus, he knows this about us, right? He knows this about us and he actually helps us out.

And he points to three specific things. He says, he talks about giving,

he talks about prayer, and he talks about fasting, right? Right.

He singles these three things out as areas where we ought to be careful.

Right. Knowing that there are other things that we're going to be doing in the world.

Right. But he singles out those three things as areas in which we ought to be

careful. Why those things?

It's not because it's OK to do other things with mixed motives or with a motive of being seen.

But he's calling us to pay attention to those things because I think it's because

those practices are really well suited to serve as emotive detectors.

If you want to know what's going on in your heart, look at how you do those

things, giving prayer and fasting, and they're going to show you what's up. Why is that?

Because there are all things that you can do in near or total secrecy.

Who you give to, like you can give in such a way that only you know about it,

or maybe the person who's receiving something from you would know about it,

but you can totally give in such a way where no one else could know about it.

You're going to pray in such a way, like since it's just between you and God,

where no other human being is going to really know about what you're saying

and what you're talking about and what you're doing.

It is totally possible for you, commendable even, to have a private prayer life with God.

And likewise with fasting. What you eat is pretty much your business most of the time.

Maybe your spouse will know. Say, are you eating enough? Or are you eating too

much? In some people's cases.

With very little effort, we can do these things. We can give,

we can pray, we can fast without people knowing.

And what Jesus says is, we ought to. We ought not to make a show of our devotion.

We ought to just honor God simply with prayer and giving and fasting in such

a way that he only knows what we're doing.

And I think we can all get behind that. But here's the kind of difficult rub

about this passage, right?

On the other side of the prohibition against doing these things in a public

way for the sake of showing off my holiness to people,

on the other side of that prohibition against giving and praying and fasting

to be seen by others is the clear and obvious commandment and expectation that

we actually will be doing these things privately.

All right. That's the other side. If you're a Christian,

if you're a disciple, if you're someone who loves God with your heart,

soul, and your mind, then it is expected that you'll pray, that you'll fast,

that you'll give, that you will express that devotion and love to God in these

very normal kind of ways.

Let me ask you a question. And it is not a question meant to trigger shame.

So anticipate your shame and then cut it off right at the bed.

Okay, so you're going to feel shamed in a second. Do you love God?

Cut that shame right off. Because you're probably like, no, not enough.

I don't do it enough. I should do it more. I'm just going to love more.

Do you love God? I mean, it's important, right?

If Jesus says the greatest commandment is to love him with all your heart,

with all your soul, with all your mind, do you love God? Because it probably matters.

Maybe you find the question frustrating. I find it difficult to ponder myself,

because it can become very abstract within us, right?

Because the way we think about love and what love is.

But here's what I want to argue. Jesus and the apostles give us a ton of insight

about what love really is and how love actually works.

At the heart of the gospel, at the heart of the invitation that we have to be

in a relationship with God by the grace of Jesus Christ,

according to faith, is so much knowledge and understanding and spiritual insight

about the life cycle of love, how it really works.

And it comes up against all these abstract and amorphous ideas we have about

how love works in our culture, in our society.

Because we all love love, but we can't define it and we don't know how to do

it and we can't agree on what it really is, right?

But Jesus had a very clear understanding about love. He had a very clear understanding.

Jesus and the apostles had a very clear understanding and they taught about how we develop love.

And in fact, as we read the New Testament, it is a very clear picture of how

not only do we come to love God,

but how we continue on into that love to the point where we could say honestly

and with integrity that we love

him with all of our heart, with all of our soul, with all of our mind.

Love is not a mystery in Christ. It's actually revealed.

There's clarity for us as people who want to have love, who want to have this

true righteousness flowing out from us and then flowing out into the world.

We are invited into it, not according to our power, but according to the supply

of grace in Jesus Christ.

There's knowledge about what love looks like. So do you love God?

That question doesn't have to be a discouraging question because there is a

way, there's a path, there's a life cycle that's revealed in Christ.

What Jesus makes clear is that loving God is possible, but the key is to know

that it doesn't come from me.

I am not naturally and in my natural self, a loving person in any way whatsoever.

And we talked about this last week. Actually, our love comes from seeing his love for us.

The gospel is the good news, right? That God loves you.

I've got a little picture here that sort of kind of illustrates the life cycle of love.

But if we think about how love starts to well up within us and work its way

out within us, it starts from outside of ourselves.

When love is given, Romans 5, 8 says, God proves his own love for us in that

while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

So we're here minding our own business.

We're loving ourself with all of our soul and all of our mind and all of our

heart. We're really good at that.

Just chasing our own desires and being sort of oblivious to God.

And God just calls that sin, right? Because we're not doing what we're created for.

And we're not doing something that actually brings us fulfillment or satisfaction.

It's not in keeping with our purpose to just be going on. Like we're just missing the mark every time.

And the gospel begins with this announcement that Jesus Christ is proving and

demonstrating his love for us when we couldn't care about him at all.

And so the gospel begins with love given and demonstrated in Christ.

And then it becomes relevant to me because that's something he's done,

but it comes relevant to me as I receive that love.

1 John 4, 19 says, we love because he first loved us.

If you are asking yourself the question, do you love God?

The answer, if you haven't realized that his love has come down for you and

shown itself in the grace and kindness and mercy of Jesus Christ,

the answer is no, you do not love God.

Until you realize that, and until that becomes the solid foundation for your

love turned back to God, you don't love God.

That's the logic of love in the gospel.

The life cycle begins like a seed begins. A farmer comes along and plants it,

and then it begins to grow.

Nothing grows without a seed. The seed is given in Christ, his love for us,

implanted in our heart, and it grows up within us. Get back to my notes.

So do you love God? Well, if you've never heard that love is a gift from God

like this, can I just tell you, that's the message that Jesus Christ came to proclaim.

He believed it so much that he died to demonstrate it for you.

And that is what's on offer. That's what for 2000 years, the church has been

proclaiming into the world, the love of God.

And so I have it on good authority, not only of the church, but also in the

word of God, that God loves you. He died for you.

He knew your need before you even had any idea that you had a problem.

And he supplied everything to meet that need in Christ.

He wants to pour out his love within you. He wants to invite you into a relationship with him.

Jesus came so that you would know his love and that love will change your life.

It'll actually complete your life. It'll make for your life.

It's what Jesus calls eternal life, which doesn't mean life unending,

but life in heaven. life according to the design, a life of relationship with

God, that is on offer to you if you don't know that.

But maybe you're here and you have done that and you're still wondering, do I love God?

Because you can point to the things in your life that would indicate that you

do love God, or at least you have at one point.

You have had moments where you heard about Jesus and you said,

I want that love. I recognize it.

I wanna receive it. And so you received it by faith and you felt like something

really happened and that seemed real.

But maybe, and I had this experience for a long time, maybe as you've gone on,

you start to think, well, shouldn't, if I love God, if his love's in my heart,

shouldn't it just kind of grip me a little bit more?

Shouldn't it be something that I could say, yes, for sure, I love God.

Like, because when I first received, when I first heard the good news of Jesus

Christ dying for me, it was like really good news.

And it completed me. And it was like, this makes my world make sense finally for once.

And I love God and I love his logic and I love what he's done for me.

Shouldn't love grip me more now? Years have gone by since I believed that thing.

And you start to wonder, man, if you really loved him, if I really loved him,

and if he really loved me, wouldn't things be different than they are now?

Where's the passion that love began with? Because maybe you think about your prayer life.

And if I were to ask you, tell me about your prayer life, you'd be like,

oh, the weather's really nice.

You'd want to change the subject. Or maybe I would want to ask you,

like, are you being generous?

Are you practicing these things as devotion and love expressed to God?

And maybe I would ask you about how's your fasting going? And this,

I'm not good at this. I will say I like to eat. I am not good at fasting.

So just, if you want to feel better than me, which you probably are,

just fast and be like, hey, then you'd have to tell me about it.

Ooh, then you're breaking the rule, right?

All right. You can just ask me and it's probably not very recently,

the last time I fasted, right?

And I say, why do I do these things? Look, here's the thing.

Why don't you do these things? Why aren't these things flowing out?

Why isn't love leading you to do these things? That's how it's supposed to work.

As we read the New Testament, we have to understand this.

We're given love by Jesus Christ. He comes and he makes it known to us.

He proclaims it. He died to make sure that we have it.

We receive that love, but that's not the end of the life cycle of love.

The life of faith, the life of discipleship, the life of life in Christ Jesus, it involves more.

Love's life cycle doesn't end. It just, oh, Jesus died for me. I know he died for me.

Actually, health and maturity and joy and fullness of the Spirit comes as we

hang in there with that love.

How do we do that? Well, we're called over and over and over again in Scripture

to respond once we receive that love.

To respond to that love, and that's called faith.

It's called faith. We're called to faith.

Faith is a simple, humble acceptance of what God says.

And I like, did I put the wrong verse up there?

That's the one. Thank you. Thank you. I like how James, like James describes faith really well.

And he describes it in ways that we kind of need to understand.

Because this is kind of where we messed up. So this is what James says in James 1, 21 through 24.

He says, Humbly receive the implanted word, that's the gospel,

the good news that Jesus loves you, which is able to save your souls.

But be doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving yourself.

Because if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he's like someone

looking at his own face in the mirror.

For he looks at himself and he goes away and he immediately forgets what kind of person he was.

What James is trying to do is he's trying to explain to us something really

important about the nature of faith.

Because we respond to the gospel. We respond to this offer of love.

We receive that as a seed.

But what we're called to do at that point is respond in faith.

And faith looks like this whole self response to what God has done.

Now, that immediately gets a little bit complicated with us.

Because we start to think about, oh, what are all the things that God is asking me to do?

I'm just gonna have to guess, like, is there some comprehensive list somewhere that I could do?

And then what we'll do is we'll do, just like the Pharisees did,

we'll just come up with a bunch of laws and say, well, if I just obey those

laws, then I will be responding in faith. I'll be a doer and not a hearer.

And that's not the way to go. But I think that we also need to understand that

what James is correcting is one of the greatest obstacles for love,

of flourishing in love's life cycle in your life.

What happens is this, is that we receive the love of God, but we end up just

not responding in faith.

Or maybe more often than not, we just forget what faith really is.

We forget what faith really is.

Faith, and we're really bad as Americans at this, faith is not mere belief.

It's not something that just goes on in my head.

Anything you believe, inclusive of what you put your faith in,

you actually, if you really believe it, you'll live it out.

What James is saying is that it's a futile thing to believe something and then

not act as if you think it's true.

He's simply saying to watch our life because faith is going to not just be merely

an intellectual exercise, but it's going to play out in how I treat others,

at least how I intend to treat others.

It's going to play out in how I spend my time and how I pursue God.

It's going to play out because faith is action-oriented. It's not just something

that goes on in my head and makes me feel good. It's something I'm called to.

Do you remember back at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount?

Jesus begins this whole sermon, this teaching on righteousness with the Beatitudes,

the blessed be kind of description. And what I just see that as is it's just

him describing what life is really like.

He says, the kingdom belongs to the poor in spirit, to the meek, to the gentle.

What he's saying is that as he looks at the world and he understands who God

is and what he's like, is that God is always intervening and he's backing up

and encouraging those who are downtrodden, who are discouraged.

He's always at work in people's life. And so like, if that's true,

if God is that sort of God,

then it means that when I'm going through difficulty and when I'm suffering

and when people are being mean to me, that I can trust him and I can keep trying

to put on his character and walk with him and express the love that he's given me to other people.

Even when they treat me badly, even when they take advantage of me,

even when they take advantage of my gentleness and my meekness and all these

things that Jesus calls us to, he says, because what he makes really clear throughout

this thing is that God shows up and defends and cares about those people.

Like if I believe that to be true about God, it's going to change the way I

act in the world if I really believe that things are true.

Faith, if God loves me, if he cares about me, if he's watching over me,

if he says that the most important thing that I can do in my whole life is devote

myself to be a person who loves God and loves other people,

that really prioritizes things in a really uncomfortable kind of way because

how much time and energy do I devote to just managing my life,

staying on top, being number one, tending my own ego,

doing things that I know won't satisfy me, but feel like give me a sense of control.

So look, if you are like this thing where you feel like you're on a treadmill,

you feel like, oh, I gave my life to Jesus.

I understood his love for me. I received that love. I felt like it was genuine.

But you're saying to yourself that it just doesn't feel like that love is growing.

It doesn't feel like that love is motivating me to move on and to serve God.

I once had this overwhelming love, like what happens?

May I suggest to you that you have something backwards?

A lot of us are sitting around waiting to feel this greater love for God till

we step out in faith, till we take simple steps of obedience, till we start to pray.

We're saying, I'll pray when I want to pray. And so God has to do this love work in me further.

And I'm just saying like part of the life cycle of faith is just flipping those two things.

It's saying, okay, I've realized God's love for me. I accepted that at one point.

The truth is that I don't always have the amount of love I'd like to have that's

leading me into action, but that's when faith comes in.

And that's when I just take steps towards God in obedience.

That's when I start to just pursue him.

And head to slides there. George McDonald says this, and it just blew my mind.

He says, the whole secret of progress, by which you mean spiritual progress,

is doing the thing we know.

There is no other way to progress in the spiritual life.

No other way to progress in the understanding of that life. Only as we do can we know.

And so again, we get in this paralysis where we think, well,

if I know the love of God further, if I'm more deeply convicted that this is

what I have to do, then I'll go ahead and do.

And what we, what we realize about, about the spiritual life with,

with a life cycle of love looks like is actually that we, God gives us some love.

And then he says, and then you go ahead and work that love out,

express that into action, which we call faith.

And then what we see is that on the, on the tail end of that,

we are met with even greater your love.

Go back a slide there. Slide.

Sky. Slide. I just called you Slide. That's not your name. That would be a good

name, though. I'll call you that from now on.

And what we have is that, what we see is that as we step out in faith,

as we are like, yes, motivated by love, but also motivated by the sense that

actually, you know, what I'm being called to as a Christian is to be like an

integrated person where my love and my action are coming together.

And so I'm going to test that and build up that strength and that muscle.

And that as I do that, that's when the greater love starts to come.

I don't have Romans 5.5 up there. It's one of my favorite verses.

It says, the love of God has been poured out into our hearts by the power of the Spirit.

Is doing as we respond in faith to him is he's giving us greater and greater love.

I mean, Paul talks about that in Galatians 5.22. He says, the fruit of the spirit

is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness,

gentleness, and self-control.

We would oftentimes sit at the beginning of our lives and start to think about

what are we going to do and how are we going to live?

And we would say, well, if I just had more love, joy, peace,

patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control,

then I would go ahead and do the things that I'm called to, I would go ahead

and spend some time praying and I would devote some time in prayer to God.

And then I would feel those things all the more and I would just keep it going.

And what Jesus tells us and what the life cycle of love makes very clear and

what the apostles and Jesus are constantly going at is that we have to be doing

these two things at the same time. We receive love.

We let that little love, the little faith that we have, express itself in action

and that God meets us by a harvest, by fruitfulness on the other side, right?

It must be difficult being a farmer when you have a smartphone in your pocket

and you can get everything instantly.

The fact is that things take time.

Spiritual fruit takes time. The Holy Spirit bringing a harvest of love,

joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness,

and self-control takes time.

But just like the farmer, like we plant the seed, we nurture the soil,

and then the love comes in greater and greater measure.

And that one seed turns into many seeds. And then we replant that in our lives.

And that cycle of tending and caring for what God has done and letting love,

like receiving love all the more and being caught up into this kingdom reality where God just says,

everything that matters in life is just about love, loving God and loving others,

then it starts to reap a greater and a greater harvest.

And so maybe you're wondering, do I love God? Where's the fruit?

Start with faith. Start with prayer, particularly prayer.

Prayer is difficult. If you're like me, you have ADHD, prayer is extra difficult.

Because you can't do anything just by doing it.

So maybe you're waiting and you're wanting to pray. Let's focus on prayer,

okay? What keeps you from prayer?

Is it that you lack the love, you lack the desire?

Can I just say, don't let that be the thing. What Jesus does is he starts talking

about prayer, and we're backing up a little bit here to verse 9, I believe.

He makes prayer super simple. I think a lot of times what keeps us from prayer

is we have this idea of what our prayer life should be.

And then Jesus begins to teach his disciples how to pray.

And he just says, all those stupid ideas you have about how powerful your prayer needs to be, right?

And how, oh, when you just pray, everybody's going to be like, what a holy man.

He gives this real, this, Okay, I'm just going to say this.

The Lord's Prayer, it's a lame prayer by the standards of prayer that they had in that day.

Because they would have wanted to have flowery language and complicated declarations

and expressions of love looking like, I'm going to give you half of my money

very publicly, very loudly.

Someone blow a trumpet for me, right?

They're going to have this kind of parading about relationship that looks like

prayer. and what Jesus goes to his disciples, he says, you know,

you're called to prayer. You're called to fasting. You're called to giving.

But when you pray, just pray like this.

And he says this, our father in heaven, your name be honored as holy.

Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread.

Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors and don't bring us

into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. It is such a simple prayer.

It comes from just a simple faith.

You know what, God? I believe you're real to the point where I just want to

train my heart to be expressing faith,

to honor you as holy, to invite your kingdom to come into my life,

to have your will, your will, which is above all, like come down from heaven

and to be working within me,

and to express simple dependence upon God, right?

He doesn't say, Lord, let me earn my daily bread.

Let me work harder to have what I need. This is God, I believe that you're real.

Just give me what I need for today.

Forgive me of my sins. Forgive me of my debts. I'll forgive my debtors.

And don't bring me into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Worship team is going to come up here in a second here.

But I mean, this is not, to my mind, what feels like.

And certainly in the culture, I think it was very, very stark contrast.

It does not seem like a powerful prayer. But power of the fact.

This is a prayer that really depended upon him. It's just asking God to meet our needs.

It's asking God in every way to do what he can do. It's asking God to get us

caught up into what he wants and what he loves and what he desires.

And it's a prayer that can only be spoken genuinely from our sense of need and dependence.

We're not going to ask God to supply for us if we think we can supply for ourselves.

We're not going to ask God to forgive us if we think we can forgive ourselves.

We're not going to ask God for his will if we think we've got the right plan in our lives.

So, that question remains, do we love God?

And if the answer is, well, not really enough, then can I just say,

can I just invite you into the simple work of faith?

You don't know how to pray? It's not that hard.

Honestly, if you take time every day to meet with God and to pray simple things,

asking him to provide you the feelings, asking him to provide you the love,

asking him to supply all the things inclusive of your needs.

I believe that God will meet you in that place.

As we come depending on him, depending on his spirit, to bring about life and

joy and love in our lives, I believe that he's faithful.

We don't have to trade some kind of outward confidence for a deep inner satisfaction.

Of a life with God. And you know what?

The thing is, I could talk about that all day long, but in the end,

you will come to know that as you pray.

You will come to experience God as you pray. The principle of the kingdom is,

draw near to me and I'll draw near to you.

Hunger and thirst for righteousness. Hunger and thirst for him,

for a real relationship.

And so that's it. I mean, this is like I'm leaving you with homework,

right? Isn't that the worst?

Teachers do that sometimes and leave you with homework. So the homework is,

man, you just go out there.

Don't say, if I love God more, then I will pray. Just pray and express your need.

You know, it's a really great prayer. God, I don't love you today.

I do not love you today. He would love that prayer. He would love that prayer.

He would enjoy that prayer because it's honest, right?

It's honest. And it's also just like if we come saying, God, would you put your love?

Love in me? Would you implant it in my life, Lord? Would you grow that love?

Lord, I need more love for you. I need more love for other people.

That kind of simple prayer, a simple prayer of expectation, I believe that God will honor.

So let's pray as we head out, and then we're going to worship together. Lord God.

Holy Spirit, we welcome you into this place. Lord, we welcome you into our lives.

God, you don't just ask us to know certain things. You ask us to experience

your love, your grace, your kindness.

And so God, we want to know those things. We want to have faith.

We want to have faith that leads us to action to pursue you.

Lord, we just, we don't have the things we need. So Lord, we rely upon your

supply of grace and love.

Lord, put love within us, Lord, and teach us to pray.

Lord, teach us to pray. Lord, if we have just ignored you, Lord,

we repent, which is the simple act of saying, oops, my bad.

And we're confident that you will forgive us.

Lord, we're confident that you will supply.

So Lord, give us that confidence and bring a harvest of love.

We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

We just worship the Lord together.