Sermon: "You Can Love All Day...Every Day"
Do any of you recognize this gentleman? (Picture of a man appears on screen).
He does not look very impressive, and indeed, in many ways he wasn’t. He was born in 1828 and was raised in a very remote area of South Africa. He was educated in Scotland and Holland. At the age of 20 he returned to South Africa as a minister and missionary. Here is what he wrote at that time.
“My prayer is for revival, but I am held back by the increasing sense of my own unfitness for the work. I lament the awful pride and self-complacency that have till now ruled my heart.”
That was a man hungry for God. Twelve years later he became involved in a revival in South Africa. He experienced more conversions in one month in his parish than in the whole course of its previous history.
He went on to write over 240 books and most of them were geared to helping hungry Christians have a deeper spiritual life.
Some of you recognize his name … ANDREW MURRAY.
I have taken the time to introduce him to you this morning because I want to use something he wrote to introduce our lesson for this morning. He wrote …
“We have addressed the great need for believers to be brought together and united in one spirit and one body. We said that one of the great reasons why God cannot bless is the lack of love in the Church. When the body is divided, there cannot be strength.”
Those are some very strong words, but he doesn’t back off. He goes on to say …
“Unity gives strength. Only when believers stand as one body, one before God in the fellowship of love, one toward another in deep affection, one before the world in a love that the world can see – only then will they have power to secure the blessing which they ask from God. If there is one thing we still must pray for it is this: ‘Love melt us together into one by the power of the Holy Spirit; let the Holy Spirit, who at Pentecost made them all one heart and one soul, do His blessed work among us.’ ”
We can be the people and the church God desires us to be when we love all day – every day.
Let’s begin by looking at …
I. THE WELL SPRING OF LOVE … GOD
A. GOD IS LOVE
The Bible says …
I JOHN 4:16 – And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.
All love originates from God. It is God’s nature to delight in communicating himself … to love.
B. GOD’S NATURE IS TO BE ALWAYS GIVING
God is very unselfish. He keeps nothing to himself. You see that truth illustrated in …
- The sun
- The moon and stars
- Flowers
- Birds
- Animals
- Fish
- Mountains
- Oceans
Because God is love he willing shares his creation with us.
C. LOVE IS A GOOD WAY TO VIEW THE TRINITY
Trying to understand how God is one God consisting of three persons is not a concept that is easy for our minds to grasp. One of the early church fathers said that a good way to understand the Trinity was the revelation of love.
- GOD THE FATHER – is the fountain of love, the well-spring of love – the loving one
- JESUS THE SON – is the reservoir of love in whom the love was poured into – the beloved one
- THE HOLY SPIRIT – unites the two and overflows into the world – the living love.
Our scripture verses for this morning say …
ROMANS 5:5 – And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.
I JOHN 4:16 – And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.
God is, indeed, the well-spring of love. He is love. So let’s look at ….
II. THE NECESSITY OF LOVE (GOD) IN OUR LIVES
A. LOVE CONQUERS AND EXPELS OUR SELFISHNESS
When Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden, selfishness experienced a great victory. Adam choose to serve self instead of God. Love to God and love to Eve was pushed down the ladder of importance.
Look what happened. Adam at once begins to accuse Eve. He was more concerned about himself. This same attitude showed up in their children years later when Cain murdered his brother Abel. Does that not convince you that sin robbed the world of real love?
Self is a major part of the great curse upon mankind. It shows its ugliness in our relation to God and toward others. Denying self is more then we can accomplish in our own strength.
The good news is Jesus (love in a human body) came to redeem us and a big part of that redemption is a redemption from selfishness.
Some people think all that victory over self means is that they will no longer have trouble serving God. They fail to understand that deliverance from selfishness means you become a vessel overflowing with love to everybody all day, every day.
Victory over selfishness only comes through love and God is love. You can try to force yourself to love, but the end result will be continual failure.
You must allow God to control you. Listen again to part of our scripture lesson.
ROMANS 5:5 – And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.
God has poured his love into our hearts. Some take that as just God’s love for themselves instead of realizing that God wants to make us like himself so that we willing give of ourselves to help others.
If we yield to God’s Spirit we can’t help but stop being selfish and reach out to others. Think about it … God’s very nature is love.
Why is a lamb always gentle? Because that is it’s nature. It doesn’t have to study to be gentle. It comes easy for a lamb to be gentle because that is it’s very nature.
God’s very nature is love. When we yield control of our lives to the God who is love and who lives in us through his Holy Spirit, we will by nature love God and others instead of self.
Love, God living in us, conquers and expels selfishness.
Next we see …
B. LOVE MAKES IT POSSIBLE FOR US TO SERVE GOD
1. Love moves you to act
Remember what John the Baptist said about Jesus …
MATTHEW 3:11b – He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.
When you hear the word fire you think about words such as hot, heat, or consuming. That is a good description of God’s love. It was the fire, the love, of God that consumed the sacrifice on Calvary. God so loved the world that he sent his only son.
When God’s love, and remember we said the Holy Spirit is the living love, when God’s love controls you, your spirit becomes warm toward God and you become on fire for him.
Love moves you into action. Love drives you to do what you know God would have you to do.
Love is a fire that will burn through every difficulty you encounter.
2. Love helps control your tongue
Here is how the Bible describes the tongue.
JAMES 3:6 – The tongue also is a fire, a world of evil among the parts of the body. It corrupts the whole person, sets the whole course of his life on fire, and is itself set on fire by hell.
Think of the freedom many believers give to their tongues. Far too often believers who are banded together in serving God are still full of sharp criticism, sharp judgment, hasty opinions, unloving words, secret contempt and secret condemnation of one another.
Of course, we realize this should not be. Just as a parent’s love protects their children, delights in them and has compassion for them despite their failures, so there should be such a love in the heart of every believer toward other believers.
Remember what Andrew Murray said, “God cannot bless when there is a lack of love. When the body is divided there cannot be strength.”
The tongue is a fire, a fire that is set on fire by hell. However, just as firefighters sometimes use fire to fight forest fires by setting backfires, so we can use the fire of God’s love to defeat our tongues. When we allow ourselves to be controlled by the Holy Spirit who we called “The Living Love,” we will speak as Jesus would speak.
Finally we see that …
3. Love moves you to pray
For many of us who are believers prayer is a discipline that is difficult to develop and maintain. I’m not talking about the prayers of thanksgiving we offer at meal times or the prayer we pray for our families. I’m talking about the work of intercession – praying for our local group of believers, praying for missionaries, praying for our leaders, praying for people who are struggling or hurting.
When we allow “The Living Love,” the Holy Spirit, to have a free rein in our lives, we want to pray for others because we are concerned about them. Love frees us from selfishness and then we are able to think of others instead of just ourselves.
So far we have seen …
- The Well Spring of Love – God
- The Necessity of Love
Love conquers and expels our selfishness
Love makes it possible for us to serve God …
By moving us to act
By helping to control our tongue
and
By moving us to pray for others.
Let’s now try to put this all together in our day-to-day lives. We are calling it …
III. LOVING ALL DAY – EVERY DAY
In order to do this you must first be willing to …
A. EXAMINE YOURSELF
The prophet Jeremiah wrote …
LAMENTATIONS 3:39-40 – 39Why should any living man complain when punished for his sins? 40Let us examine our ways and test them, and let us return to the Lord.
This is not easy for us to do. Examine yourself. Are you a selfish person? Do you sometimes allow self to control your decisions or do you allow your decisions to be controlled by your love for God and your love for others.
When you examine yourself if you come up short, that is if you aren’t loving God and loving others all day every day you must then …
B. PRAY FOR DELIVERANCE FROM SELF
Praying for deliverance from selfishness is part of a process. On July 24th of 1994 our lesson was called “Five Dangerous Prayers”. Those five prayers, when truly prayed, help to deliver us from selfishness. Here they are …
- Search me
- Break me
- Stretch me
- Lead me
- Use me
When we sincerely desire those things and ask God to do those things in our lives, we will become the people God would have us to be.
Then the unity Andrew Murray spoke of will exist among us as a church. That there will be differences of opinion among us does not trouble me. But we cannot allow hate, bitterness, contempt, separation and unlovingness to dwell in our hearts. Sometimes believers use God’s Word to attack one another. Often, because love is absent, God’s Word actually separates believers. If our surrender to God is absolute then our surrender to love must be absolute because God is love.
CONCLUSION
In a few weeks we are going to be celebrating perhaps the greatest example of God’s love – Jesus, the Son of God, indeed God Himself, coming to earth as a baby. This was the first step in our redemption.
I believe the greatest gift we could give to God would be to sincerely desire to love all day – every day.
We opened this lesson with a quote from Andrew Murray and we are going to close with a quote form him.
“God did something wonderful when he sent his Holy Spirit to live in his people. Might we honor him by accepting him as God living in us. Giving us the very nature of God .. and God is love. We can love all day, every day by allowing God to live through us.”
If you know you have been living a selfish life and want to confess it to God, come to the altar while we sing.
If your tongue has been out of control come to the altar and seek God’s help and forgiveness.
If you truly want God’s living love, his Holy Spirit, to rule your life and drive out selfishness, come to the altar and offer yourself to God.
At the end of the song I will close in prayer asking God to grant your request.